Abstract
Commentary 1: To know thy place
Can human beings understand and change the world without understanding and changing themselves? This is not a new question, of course, and it is one with which all recorded human cultures have engaged. Most recently in western culture – and increasingly around the world – it seems as though we have answered ‘yes’ to this question. By elevating scientific, technological, engineering and medical (STEM) disciplines over humanistic ones we are trying to do just this: creating a ‘brave new world’ out of ‘hideous strength’. Knowledge of the material world has become detached from knowledge about ourselves.
The grand Enlightenment project set in train by 17th-century western rationalism, and claiming spectacular successes along the way, has brought us an understanding of the cosmos unimaginable 350 years ago. With reality segmented into bits – both metaphorical and digital – new technologies of microscopic manipulation have allowed us to redesign molecules, engineer our bodies and those of other species and, perhaps soon, even to manipulate the climate to respond to our wishes. Despite critical scrutiny in recent years of the practice of science, the pace of technological innovation remains breathtaking.
The academic discipline of geography has observed many of these developments from a semi-detached and, at times, uncritical position. As the study of the relationships between place, space and time on human scales, geography has oscillated between offering deterministic, positivist, structuralist, humanistic and, more recently, affective accounts of human encounters with nature. At the beginning of a new century, those who declare themselves geographers are in a better position than most to mediate between ‘the sciences’ and ‘the humanities’ – C.P. Snow’s in/famous ‘two cultures’, yet categories which are themselves unfortunate constructions of the western project of knowledge-making.
The separation of subject from object, of knower from known, has brought huge benefits for humanity, but it has come at an awful cost. We know how the world works, but we no longer know what it means. We know the cosmos, but we do not know ourselves. So westerners now struggle to rediscover the being-knowing world that has been sundered. As one of the contributors to these two volumes under review, Karen Kemp, observes: ‘Hawaiian epistemology and cultural traditions are holistic and systematic. They encompass what Westerners label variously humanities, arts, social and natural sciences’ (Kemp et al., 2011: 287). In contrast, those of us brought up in western academies and saturated in Enlightenment cultures are all ‘recovering disciplinarians’. We bravely attach the prefixes multi-, cross-, inter- and trans- to convert our disciplines into restorative therapies; but we remain internally torn and confused.
For this restorative task – assuming it is one we wish to embark upon – I believe the humanities are essential, perhaps particularly so for those of us in the West who have lost so much. As Stephen Schwartz, Vice-Chancellor of Melbourne University, has argued: ‘Specific and narrow skills are simply not enough to enable us to understand and solve the problems we face’ (Schwartz, 2011). Philosophy, religion, literature, art and history offer to each of us reflective traditions and practices which can heal these tears and rediscover a holistic being-knowing world. They are older than the Pyramids and yet as imminent as our breath. To be truly human is ‘to know thyself’ and through knowing thyself to know the material world. To mediate between these knowings, geography offers the additional enlightenment to ‘know thy place’.
The two new volumes under discussion here offer some shape and substance to this constructive healing role that geographers can fulfil; and it involves embracing the humanities on their own terms, not as a secondary form of knowledge which is instrumentally subservient to the geosciences. The terms of encounter are changing, as Stanley Fish, humanities professor at Florida International University, observed recently: ‘while we have been anguishing over the fate of the humanities, the humanities have been busily moving into, and even colonizing, the fields that were supposedly displacing them’ (Fish, 2011).
Appearing nearly simultaneously, the two edited collections share a common pedigree traceable to the Geography and Humanities Symposium held at the Association of American Geographers’ 2007 Conference at the University of Virginia. Envisioning Landscapes, Making Worlds, edited by Stephen Daniels and colleagues, contains 25 contributions organized around four modes of examination: mapping, reflecting, representing and performing. The disciplines of cartography, history, literature, philosophy and visual culture serve the study of much richer geohuman practices and attributes, such as place-naming, travelling, landscape-making, memorizing, moralizing, beautifying, and so on. These practices only make sense in worlds where embodied imaginations are immersed in material locations.
GeoHumanities, edited by Michael Dear and colleagues, explores similar issues through 30 contributions organized around four spatial themes: creative places, spatial literacies, visual geographies and spatial histories. Disciplinary traditions are again recognizable – literature, architecture, history, geospatial technologies – but here too they are subsumed into a bigger task, that of revealing the power of the human imagination to create meaning from material location. The contributors in this volume are drawn rather more widely, so that practitioners – architects, artists and activists – mingle with academic geographers.
Both these books speak to the roles of humanistic knowledge in geographical investigations of the world: how self-knowledge and scientific knowledge can be brought into active relationship with each other through knowledge of place. The idea of ‘place’ is fruitfully ambiguous and elliptically dependent upon notions of movement and travel, as well as well-rehearsed geographical themes and practices. Several contributions in these volumes explore this fruitfulness, with Anthony Pagden’s contribution ‘Travel and domination of space in the European imagination’ (Pagden, 2011) in particular standing out. The connection between travel and wisdom is an ancient one, captured by Robert Louis Stevenson: ‘I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.’ Movement itself can be seen as a form of knowledge.
As countless travellers well know, travel changes perspective – it alters one’s position in relation to the external world. And travelling is a metaphor for the impossibility of reaching the Archimedean point, the view from nowhere where everything is unambiguously revealed and known. Such universal ‘place-less’ knowledge is unachievable, and geographers are, ironically, ‘well placed’ to draw out the implications of this insight for the enterprise of science. The idea of movement, too, is a fruitful metaphor through which to understand knowledge. One has to move to know – whether this movement be metaphorical or literal. Movement is integral also to narrative – narratives are structured around development and change – and narrative is, arguably, the most powerful form of ordering and communicating knowledge which human beings have developed.
Consider my own life. It is never-ending movement. In Cartesian space at least, this is literally obvious. Nightly up and down the stairs of my house; daily to my place of work; weekly to my place of worship; and always, now it seems, to this or that place as a cosmopolitan world traveller: Vancouver, Sydney, Oslo, Antwerp, Leipzig, Bath, Birmingham. This movement is always for a purpose. But I also move through time – or time moves through me – from birth to death, from youth to middle age. Though I can do little to arrest or alter this movement of time through me, I have to work harder to ensure that this movement is purposeful.
Narrative is a device that helps in this task. As I experience these movements in space and through time, crucially I move too in my perceptions of reality. My networks of relationships change and thus the world moves and looks different, like viewing it through a kaleidoscope. Where and when I stand, and for how long, changes what I think and hence changes the world I see. Exposure, positionality and perspective are therefore critical for establishing what I know about the world and for how I assimilate this knowledge into my own life-story.
How might this appreciation of movement, borne out of self-reflection encouraged by the humanities, be applied in my own study of climate change? I have written informally (Hulme, 2011) about my own professional journey in studying climate change and the material, intellectual and emotional influences that have guided that journey. My conception of the object of study – climate – has changed as a result of this movement. Much of my earlier research career was oriented around the question: ‘Is climate changing and what does this mean for ecology and society?’ But for me now a different and more important driving question has become: ‘What does it mean to be human in a world of changing climates?’
Yet the study of environmental change is not usually framed this way. For example, The International Human Dimensions Programme – the primary international research programme investigating the human dimensions of global change – states that responses to environmental shifts require major inputs from the social sciences, but says very little about the role for arts and humanities (a reflection of the valorization of STEM disciplines). In ‘human dimensions’ research, people are generally seen only as causal agents or as social victims. Little attention is paid to their inner worlds or to what Edward Ayers here calls ‘the traditional strengths of the humanities – the focus on the ineffable, the irreducible, the singular’ (Ayers, 2011: 223).
The humanities offer multiple ways to study and understand the imagination, and the imagination – our capacity for reflection and creating meaning and value – is increasingly understood as essential to understanding the rich range of relations between people and place, landscape and livelihood and, therefore, to comprehending and managing environmental change. The two volumes reviewed here focus attention on three attributes of human experience that can usefully inform understanding of environmental change, as well as human actions to cope with it: locality, ambiguity and plurality.
Locality is association with place and the construction of human identity – an important human attribute that is often lost in studies of large-scale environmental change, such as rising seas and Pacific islands, or aridification and livelihood in the Horn of Africa. Alongside synoptic scientific analysis of such changes, the powerful imaginative resources of local people – such as personal histories, traditional story-telling and cultural memories – are essential for understanding how and why people respond to such changes. Many of the contributions to these two volumes illustrate the importance of working and walking in specific places – to connect knowledge with identity. This also suggests a role for local enthusiasts and their data in constructing adequate descriptions of environmental change – for example, amateur meteorologists in accounts of climate change.
Ambiguity is an enduring attribute of human experience – ‘we are never quite sure what everything means’ – and sits in creative tension with the scientific drive for clarity – ‘this is how things work’. As human beings, we live between knowing and not knowing, somewhere between certainty and doubt; as described by Philip Govedare ‘with a blend of celebration, anxiety and doubt about our place in the natural world’ (Govedare, 2011: 207). Or, put differently, scientific knowledge alone can never tell us ‘how things really are’. Science needs metaphor to make sense of reality, and yet metaphors are always ambiguous to some degree, as ecologist Brendon Larson shows in his recent book Metaphors for Environmental Sustainability (Larson, 2011).
A corollary of ambiguity is the existence of a plurality of values. Recognizing and respecting such plurality is essential when negotiating environmental management or policy interventions, as also argued recently, for example, in the UK National Ecosystem Assessment (Church et al., 2011) in their pioneering consideration of the cultural services of ecosystems. But it is not just value-pluralism that contemporary politics and decision-making have to live with; it is also ontological and epistemological pluralism. This is emphasized in Michael Dear’s concluding essay in the GeoHumanities volume. For Dear, the challenges to modernist scientific knowledge lead inevitably to transdisciplinarity and to ‘a collection of voices [that] will deliver a closer approximation of knowing’ (Dear, 2011: 314).
Yet Dear’s analysis suggests to me two tensions that will be encountered as geographers further develop this geohumanities project and take it ‘out on the road’. First, it will be claimed that STEM disciplines are pre-eminent for delivering economic wealth creation in a crowded, connected and competitive world; but how stable is such wealth when the being-knowing world each of us experiences daily is thereby elided? Second, with the emergence of a hyperpluralism invigorated by new communication technologies, it will be asked: ‘Can large-scale collective projects of social and cultural transformation and renewal ever be delivered?’
I do not know the answers to these questions, but my conviction is that knowledge that is relational and embodied – and therefore always on the move just as we humans are always on the move – will prove more fit for purpose than knowledge which is static and disembodied, and therefore in danger of becoming dogma. So geography is well placed to help the sciences and the humanities learn and speak each other’s languages, and only this movement offers possibilities for negotiating policy and enacting cultural change in ways which are more resonant with people’s inner lived experiences and beliefs about the material worlds they inhabit.