A Geography of the Lifeworld (Routledge Revivals)

Movement, Rest and Encounter

David Seamon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317504764
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Within the modern Western lifestyle increasing conflict is becoming apparent between that patchwork of isolated points such as the home or the office, which are linked by a mechanical system of transportation and communication devices, and a growing sense of homelessness and isolation.

This work, first published in 1979, adopts a phenomenological perspective illustrating that this malaise may have partial roots in the deepening rupture between people and place. Whereas the problems of terrestrial space may have been overcome technologically and economically, it has been less successful regarding people. Experience indicates that people become bound to locality, and the quality of their life is thus reduced if these bonds are disrupted or broken in any way. The relationship between community and place is investigated, as is the opportunity for improving the environment, both from a human and an ecological perspective.

This book will be of interest to students of human geography.

Part One

SEEING ANEW

What is the hardest thing of all?

That which seems easiest: to use

your eyes to see what lies in

front of them – Goethe (cited

in Roszak, 1973, p.310).

1 A GEOGRAPHY OF EVERYDAY LIFE

I love to sit in the sun. We have the sun so often here, a regular visitor, a friend one can expect to see often and trust. I like to make tea for my husband and me. At midday we take our tea outside and sit on our bench, our backs against the wall of the house. Neither of us wants pillows, I tell my daughters and sons that they are soft – those beach chairs of theirs. Imagine beach chairs here in New Mexico, so far from any ocean! The bench feels strong to us, not uncomfortable. The tea warms us inside, the sun on the outside. I joke with my husband; I say we are part of the house: the adobe gets baked and we do too. For the most part we say nothing, though. It is enough to sit and be part of God’s world. We hear the birds talking to each other, and are grateful they come as close to us as they do, all the more reason to keep our tongues still and hold ourselves in one place – Robert Coles (1973, p.6).

Why might a geographer be interested in a frail elderly woman describing her daily life in a small isolated village in the mountains north of Santa Fe? Geography is the study of the earth as the dwellingplace of man. It seeks to understand a person’s life in relation to the places, spaces and environments which in sum comprise his or her geographical world. The friendly sun, the supportive bench, the warm clay bricks, the singing birds – each is an aspect of the geographical world in which the woman finds herself. Wherever we are, be it small as an apartment or expansive as a desert, strange as a distant country or taken-for-granted as a small adobe home, we are always housed in a geographical world whose specifics we can change but whose surrounds in some form we can in no way avoid.

This book explores the human being’s inescapable immersion in the geographical world. The focus is people’s day-to-day experiences and behaviours associated with places, spaces and environments in which they live and move. The search is for certain basic patterns which epitomise human behavioural and experiential relationships with the everyday geographical world. Why, for example, do people like the old woman express profound attachment for their home place? What is the nature of everyday movement in space? In what ways do people notice and encounter their geographical world?

The topic of concern is everyday environmental experience – the sum total of a person’s first-hand involvements with the geographical world in which he or she typically lives. What is the underlying experiential structure of everyday environmental experience? Does it encompass certain basic characteristics which extend beyond particular person, place and time? Clearly, the geographical world is intimately joined with other dimensions of living – the person’s socio-economic world, his interpersonal and spiritual worlds, the temporal context which places him in a personal and societal history. As a geographer, I recognise these many linkages but limit discussion to the world of geographical experience and behaviour. What is the nature of human existence as it happens in a geographical world? What in most essential form is man as a geographical being?

The geographer’s interest in environmental behaviour and experience is not new. Along with psychologists, sociologists, planners and other researchers, geographers in the last few decades have helped establish an interdisciplinary field which has variously been called environmental psychology, psychogeography, human ethology, environmental sociology, research in environmental perception, or behavioural geography, as I call it here.¹ Behavioural geography has explored such themes as spatial behaviour, territoriality, place preferences, attitudes towards nature and the physical environment. Its development reflects a strong need felt in both the social sciences and design professions to understand the inner psychological structures and processes which underlie a person and group’s environmental behaviours. Behavioural geography attempts to clarify how human behaviour affects and is affected by the physical environment. This work may provide help in improving existing environments and designing future ones, be they bathrooms, homes, streets, parks, shopping malls – even entire towns and cities.² Also, behavioural geography may help the student become more sensitive to the roles that place, space and environment have in his or her own daily life.

This book is different from most work in behavioural geography because it makes use of phenomenology, a way of study which works to uncover and describe things and experiences – i.e. phenomena – as they are in their own terms. ‘Phenomenology’, writes Giorgi (1971, p.9), ‘is the study of phenomena as experienced by man. The primary emphasis is on the phenomenon itself exactly as it reveals itself to the experiencing subject in all its concreteness and particularity.’ Phenomenology explores the things and events of daily experience. Keen explains:

Its task is less to give us new ideas than to make explicit those ideas, assumptions, and implicit presuppositions upon which we already behave and experience life. Its task is to reveal to us exactly what we already know and that we know it, so that we can be less puzzled about ourselves (1975, p. 18).

Phenomenology has recently been heralded as a significantly new perspective in behavioural geography, which conventionally begins with a particular theoretical perspective (e.g. territoriality, spatial cognition) and set of definitions and assumptions (e.g. home ground, territory as a function of aggression, cognitive map, spatial behaviour as a function of cognitive image).⁴ Phenomenology, in contrast, strives to categorise and structure its theme of study as little as possible. It seeks to understand and describe the phenomenon as it is in itself before any prejudices or a priori theories have identified, labelled or explained it. Phenomenology, says Spiegelberg (1971, p.658), ‘bids us to turn toward phenomena which had been blocked from sight by the theoretical pattern in front of them’.

In addition, phenomenology strives for a holistic view of the phenomenon it studies. ‘Always a relatively full analysis of any phenomenon must include its relation to neighboring phenomena,’ writes Fischer (1971, p.158), succinctly expressing the need for phenomenology to place its topic of study in a wider context of meaning. Most conventional work in behavioural geography brings its attention to one limited aspect of environmental behaviour and experience – getting around in a new city, residents’ definitions of neighbourhood, wilderness users’ images of wilderness. Phenomenology, in contrast, seeks to understand the interrelatedness among the various portions of environmental experience and behaviour. It works to uncover the parts of everyday environmental experience as at the same time it insists that these parts must reveal a larger whole. In good phenomenology, parts reciprocate parts, and parts reciprocate whole: each gives insight into all the others.⁵

Movement, rest and encounter are the three primary themes used to reveal the whole here. Chapters on movement explore the role of body, habit, and routine in our day-to-day environmental dealings, while chapters on rest examine human attachment to place. Chapters on encounter consider the ways in which people observe and notice the world in which they live. I argue that these three themes portray in one possible fashion the essential core of people’s behavioural and experiential involvement with their everyday geographical world. In addition, I suggest that these three themes give valuable insight into environmental education and design.

The empirical data for this inquiry are a collection of descriptive reports very much in nature like the elderly woman’s account above. These reports were gathered in the context of four groups of people who were interested enough in their personal relationship with the geographical world to meet weekly for several months and probe different aspects of their own everyday environmental experience. These participants were asked to explore, for example, their day-to-day movements in space, the meanings that various places in their lives had for them, the ways in which they made attentive contact with the everyday environment in which they lived. Each of these groups, including myself as leader, is called an environmental experience group. Participants in the groups are called group members.⁶

This book works to demonstrate that many of the theories and concepts which have found favour in contemporary behavioural research may not be in accurate contact with the phenomena for which they claim to speak. This does not mean that phenomenology seeks to negate or destroy research in behavioural geography but rather asks its practitioners to re-examine the theoretical groundings on which they make their claims. Is spatial behaviour really a function of cognition? Is attachment to place really bound up in territoriality? Do people really prefer the places and environments they say they prefer? By asking questions like these, phenomenology helps the behavioural geographer, environmental psychologist and other such researchers to clarify the starting-points from which their work arises and thereby to establish a more perfect correspondence between behavioural theories and the actual fabric of human environmental experience and behaviour.

Notes

1. For overviews of this interdisciplinary field – by a psychologist, anthropologist and two geographers respectively – see Craik, 1970; Rapoport, 1977;Saarinen, 1976; Porteous, 1977. Also see Moore and Golledge (eds.), 1976; Wapner, Cohen and Kaplan (eds.), 1976; Leff, 1977; Kaplan and Kaplan (eds.), 1978.

2. See, for example, Ittelson et al., 1974; Rapoport, 1977; Porteous, 1977.

3. One of the best introductions to the history and methods of phenomenology is Spiegelberg, 1971, especially vol.II, pp.659-99. Also good are Giorgi, 1970; Ihde, 1973; Keen, 1975. Some of the best examples of empirical phenomenology are found in Giorgi et al. (eds.), 1971, 1975. For discussions of the relationship between phenomenology and social science see MacLeod, 1969; Zeitlin, 1973.

4. Statements emphasising the value of phenomenology to behavioural geography include Redph, 1970; Wisner, 1970; Tuan, 1971a; Buttimer, 1974. 1976. Practical application of phenomenology to geographic themes include Dardel, 1952;Eliade, 1957; Bachelard, 1958; Lowenthal, 1961; Heidegger, 1962, 1971; Buckley, 1971; Fischer, 1971; Tuan, 1974a, 1974b, 1975a, 1975b, 1977; Jager, 1975; Moncrief, 1975;Graber, 1976;Relph, 1976a, 1976b; Seamon, 1976a, 1976b; Rowles, 1978. Note that except for Dardel (1952) and Lowenthal (1961), all work until 1970 was written by non-geographers. Critiques of the relevance of phenomenology to geograpy include Entrikin, 1976, 1977; Ley, 1976; Cosgrove, 1978; Gregory, 1978.

5. Edward Relph’s Place and Placelessness (1976b) is so far the best phenomenological presentation of a geographical whole – in this case, the experience of place (and its experiential opposite, placelessness). Especially valuable is Relph’s inside-outsideness continuum on which can be located different modes of place experience.

6. Observations from these groups, arranged by topic, are included in Appendix A.

2 PHENOMENOLOGY AND THE ENVIRONMENTAL EXPERIENCE GROUPS

Phenomenology begins in silence. Only he who has experienced genuine perplexity and frustration in the face of the phenomena when trying to find the proper description for them knows what phenomenological seeing really means – Herbert Spiegelberg (1971, p.672).

In normal daily existence people are caught up in a state of affairs that the phenomenologist calls the natural attitude – the unquestioned acceptance of the things and experiences of daily living (Giorgi, 1970, pp.146-52; Natanson, 1962). The world of the natural attitude is generally called by the phenomenologist lifeworld – the taken-for-granted pattern and context of everyday life through which the person routinely conducts his day-to-day existence without having to make it an object of conscious attention (Buttimer, 1976, pp.277, 281). Immersed in the natural attitude, people do not normally examine the lifeworld; it is concealed as a phenomenon:

In the natural attitude we are too much absorbed by our mundane pursuits, both practical and theoretical; we are too much absorbed by our goals, purposes, and designs, to pay attention...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Part One: Seeing Anew
• Part Two: Movement in the Geographical World
• Part Three: Rest in the Geographical World
• Part Four: Encounter with the Geographical World
• Part Five: Searching Out a Whole
• Appendix A: Selected Observations from Clark Environmental Experience Groups (September 1974-May 1975)
• Appendix B: Commentaries on the Clark Environmental Experience Groups
• Appendix C: Organising an Environmental Experience Group
• References
• Index