Nature - autonomous learning

78 the ‘nature’ of geographyAs noted, behavioural geography resonated with earlier work bygeographers – such as White’s perception studies. But in its desire toquantify and measure the links between people’s thoughts and theirbehaviour, and in its preoccupation with applying psychological theories,it was an altogether more systematic and ambitious exercise. It was, ifyou like, spatial science with a human face. It aimed for precise, realisticknowledge of spatial decision-making that was objective and value-free– only more precise and realistic than that offered by 1960s human geographers.But this kind of human geography was not to everyone’s taste.A cohort of ‘humanistic geographers’ writing from the early 1970sonwards, wanted to take things a step further. Echoing Dilthey’s argumentsmore strenuously than the behavioural geographers,Yi-Fu Tuan, David Ley,Edward Relph and several other young researchers of the time argued thatthe assumptions and procedures of science were simply not appropriatefor the study of people. Humans, they argued, are not just rational beingsbut also moral ones, not just thinking beings, but also emotional ones whopossess feelings and desires. As one of their early advocates argued:‘Humanistic geographers [believe] . . . their approach deserves the appellation“humanistic” in that they study the aspects [of people] which aremost distinctively “human”: meaning, value, goals and purposes’ (Entrikin1976: 616).This approach was a hermeneutic one. It involved an attempt to gainempathetic understandings of different people’s ‘life-worlds’: that is, theframeworks of understanding, belief and value particular to them. Thiskind of life-world research was often focused on how individuals or smallgroups of people gained attachments to particular places and specificlocal environments. It emphasised the subjective dimensions of humanexistence over the brute objectivity of built and natural landscapes. Keypublications included Tuan’s (1974) Topophilia:A Study of Environmental Perception,Attitudes and Values, Relph’s (1976) Place and Placelessness and Graham Rowles’s(1978) The Prisoners of Space? Methodologically, humanistic geographypioneered the use of interviews, focus groups and ethnography in humangeography. In philosophical terms, it drew inspiration from the antimaterialistthinking of the European fin-de-siècle ‘romantics’ (Husserl andKierkegaard), from Martin Heidegger’s philosophy and from Jean PaulSartre’s ‘existentialism’.These methodological and philosophical innovations were not withoutconsequence for human geography as a whole.The legitimation of quali-