The mid-20th century saw a significant intellectual shift in geography, marked by a growing critique of "spatial science" and the subsequent emergence of "humanistic perspectives." This represented a move away from the objective, quantitative, and law-seeking approaches that dominated the quantitative revolution, towards a greater emphasis on human experience, meaning, values, and subjective understandings of place.
Critique of Spatial Science: Spatial science, born from positivism, aimed to establish geography as a rigorous, nomothetic discipline by applying mathematical models and statistical analysis to uncover universal spatial laws. However, it faced several significant critiques:
- Reductionism and Dehumanization: Critics argued that spatial science reduced complex human behaviors to abstract variables, overlooking individual experiences, feelings, and intentions. This led to a "dehumanization" of geography, treating people as data points rather than unique individuals.
- Lack of Real-World Relevance: Its abstract models were seen as detached from everyday realities, failing to adequately address pressing social issues like poverty, inequality, and environmental degradation, often prioritizing efficiency over social consequences.
- Value-Neutrality Illusion: Despite claims of objectivity, critics pointed out that research choices and interpretations are inherently influenced by societal values and researcher biases.
- Assumptions of Rationality: Models often assumed perfectly rational human behavior, which was seen as an unrealistic simplification of human decision-making, ignoring emotions, culture, and imperfect information.
- Neglect of Place and Meaning: By treating space as a neutral container, spatial science failed to account for the qualitative, subjective, and culturally constructed dimensions of "place"—how people imbue locations with meaning and identity.
Rise of Humanistic Perspectives: In response, humanistic geography emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s, seeking to re-center human experience, consciousness, and meaning. It drew from phenomenology, existentialism, and hermeneutics, which emphasize lived experience.
Core Principles of Humanistic Geography:
- Emphasis on Human Experience and Subjectivity: Understanding geographical phenomena requires exploring how individuals and groups perceive, experience, and create meaning in their environments, focusing on the "lifeworld."
- Focus on "Place" over "Space": "Place" is seen as space endowed with meaning, identity, and emotional attachment through human experience, contrasting with abstract "space."
- Qualitative Methodologies: To capture subjective richness, humanistic geographers employ qualitative methods like in-depth interviews, personal narratives, participant observation, and analysis of art and literature.
- Rejection of Value-Neutrality: It openly acknowledges that research is not value-free and embraces empathy and ethics.
- Understanding Human Agency: It aims to understand how individuals actively shape and interpret their environments, rather than being passively determined.
- Exploration of Existential Themes: It delves into identity, belonging, alienation, and memory as connected to geographical settings.
- Key Figures: Yi-Fu Tuan, known for concepts like "topophilia" (love of place), and Edward Relph, for his work on "placelessness."
Humanistic geography brought a vital qualitative and interpretive dimension back to the discipline, broadening methodologies and enriching the understanding of human connections to places. It fundamentally reshaped geographical thought and laid groundwork for later critical and postmodern approaches.
Subscribe on YouTube - NotesWorld
For PDF copy of Solved Assignment
Any University Assignment Solution
.webp)
