Review: Humanist geography: An individual's search for meaning by Yi‐Fu Tuan

• Main Author: TSE, Justin K. H.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2014
• Subjects: Human Geography; Religion
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/3139; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/soss_research/article/4396/viewcontent/Review_Humanist_Geography_sv.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Yi‐Fu Tuan's latest book is a defence of individualism aimed at a wide lay readership, “a book on education that could benefit children everywhere” (p. ix). It is also a fascinating illustration of the relevance of geographies of religion to ongoing interests in humanistic geography. Indeed, one of Tuan's central arguments is that “religious thinking both undergoes and completes humanist thinking” and is therefore not “a relic that humanism has to outgrow,” for that would be a “regrettable” narrowing of the “scope of inquiry” in humanistic geography that “offends the spirit of humanism” (p. 5). It is this latter interest in religion that I want to critically interrogate in this review, highlighting a trend that has been explicit throughout humanistic geography, but has tended to be ideologically sidelined by geographers for far too long.