Overview

In a volume that represents the culmination of his life’s work in considering the relationship between culture and landscape, eminent scholar Yi-Fu Tuan argues that “cosmos” and “hearth” are two scales that anchor what it means to be fully and happily human. Illustrating this contention with examples from both his native China and his home of the past forty years, the United States, Tuan proposes a revised conception of culture, one thoroughly grounded in one’s own society but also embracing curiosity about the world. Optimistic and deeply human, this important volume lays out a path to being “at home in the cosmos.” Hardcover: In this moving meditation on the difficult choices facing humanity in the next millennium, celebrated scholar Yi-Fu Tuan reaffirms his faith in the value of a cosmopolitan worldview. In a volume that represents the culmination of his life's work in considering the relationship between culture and landscape, Tuan argues that “cosmos” and “hearth” are two scales that anchor what it means to be fully and happily human. Hearth is our house and neighborhood, family and kinfolk, habit and custom. Cosmos, by contrast, is the larger reality-world, civilization, and humankind. Tuan addresses the extraordinary revival of interest in the hearth in recent decades, examining both the positive and negative effects of this renewed concern. Among the beneficent outcomes has been a revival of ethnic culture and sense of place. Negative repercussions abound, however, manifested as an upsurge in superstition, excessive pride in ancestry and custom, and a constricted worldview that when taken together can inflame local passions, leading at times to violent conflict-from riots in American cities to wars in the Balkans. In Cosmos and Hearth, Tuan takes the position that we need to embrace both the sublime and the humble, drawing what is valuable from each. Illustrating the importance of both cosmos and hearth with examples from his country of birth, China, and from his home of the past forty years, the United States, Tuan proposes a revised conception of culture, the “cosmopolitan hearth,” that has the coziness but not the narrowness and bigotry of the traditional hearth. Tuan encourages not only being thoroughly grounded in one’s own culture but also the embracing of curiosity about the world. Optimistic and deeply human, Cosmos and Hearth lays out a path to being “at home in the cosmos.” Born in China and educated in Australia, the Philippines, England, and the United States, Yi-Fu Tuan is professor of geography at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the author of Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minnesota, 1977), Landscapes of Fear (Minnesota, 1982), The Good Life (1986), and Passing Strange and Wonderful: Aesthetics, Nature, and Culture (1993). Excerpt: “Thinking yields a twofold gain: although it isolates us from our immediate group it can link us both seriously and playfully to the cosmos-to strangers in other places and times; and it enables us to accept a human condition that we have always been tempted by fear and anxiety to deny, namely, the impermanence of our state wherever we are, our ultimate homelessness. A cosmopolite is one who considers the gain greater than the loss. Having seen something of the splendid spaces, he or she will not want to return, permanently, to the ambiguous safeness of the hearth.”

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9780816627301

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Reviews

Can humans meld the desire for a cozy, immediate surrounding with the broadening aspects of cosmopolitanism? This is Tuan's (Passing Strange and Wonderful: Aesthetics, Nature, and Culture, 1993, etc.) central question in a ranging, very personal study. Up front, Tuan stakes claim to his cosmopolitan leanings; for him they represent optimism, playfulness, inquisitiveness, opposition to dogma. Yet he also appreciates home and hearth and their gifts of nurturance and renewal, though he is troubled by the current trend toward particularism and the drumbeat of ethnic heritage - does not the typical movement of life tend from hearth to cosmos? The product of both a Chinese and American (and Australian and English) upbringing, Tuan penetrates both cultures to see how they have dealt with the attractions of home and horizon. In China Tuan finds strong pullings in both directions: cosmic harmony and Confucian humanity, an authoritarian heavenly order versus a chaotic heterogeneity on earth. In the US he samples both our worldly role as economic and military power, and the rise of ethnic and cultural aspirations that have a very close-quarters vision. From these deliberations, Tuan proposes his own version of high modernism (optimistic, playful, etc.) couched in front of a cosmopolitan hearth: Know your own place, but know other places as well, the differences contributing to self-awareness. Those many hearths, that self-awareness, yield the ultimate peace: the acceptance of our impermanence. Go forth, read widely, laugh, be open to life's mysterious workings, think, think, think - Tuan's credos are laudable and engagingly presented, but hardly earthshaking. Readers may wish a bit more spontaneity from Tuan, a man forever on the lookout to improve and elevate. Regarding sex, for instance, he wants to convert the raw throbs of the body into grand human passions, via literature. So what's wrong with a little unreconstructed raw throbbing? (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

Yi-Fu Tuan is professor emeritus of geography at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the author of Space and Place (Minnesota, 1977), Landscapes of Fear (Minnesota, 1982), and Escapism (1998).

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