A pioneer of interdisciplinary scholarship

Retired geographer explores many realms

Isn’t the study of morals odd terrain for a geographer? Not for Yi-Fu Tuan, the UW–Madison Vilas and John Kirtland Wright professor of geography who recently retired.

A pioneer in interdisciplinary scholarship, Tuan’s work enters and often transforms seemingly unrelated academic realms of philosophy, psychology, urban planning, landscape architecture and anthropology.

Tuan’s dozen books range from the cultural role of pets to the moral implications of urban design. He has devoted his 40-plus years of scholarship to investigating how we fashion personal and cultural realities, and how that process reflects our collective and personal scenarios of a good life.

“I think the expression ‘I am a camera’ fits me, because I am always looking,” Tuan said shortly after his arrival on campus in 1983. He also served on the faculty of universities in Minnesota, New Mexico, Indiana and Canada.

“You start thinking about the meaning of your life when you reach your teens. I guess I never outgrew the subject,” he says.

Here is an excerpt from a recent address by Yi Fu Tuan on one possible explanation for what he believes is a decline of the humanities: “I suggest that one answer lies in the growth of postmodern critical theory, which says that the larger world is a hegemonic social construction, not worth bothering about. Even science falls under that category. Why bother with these overblown constructions when your own little construction — the unhegemonic, caring folkways of your own people — is just as good and at hand? “When scientists deconstruct, they gain prestige. When humanists deconstruct, they lose prestige. Why the difference? I believe the answer lies again in the notion of challenge — the idea that prestige goes with difficulty overcome. “Biological scientists have recently recognized botany and zoology as essentially social constructions, categories that arose out of the needs of a particular time. So they deconstructed them. In their place, major research universities have created an umbrella entity called the Biological Sciences, under which are organized such new subfields as molecular biology, genetic engineering, and so on. By deconstructing the older categories, biologists have come up with new areas of study that make even greater intellectual demands. Hence the gain in prestige.”

Indeed, Tuan began his retirement by starting to write his autobiography. Born into a diplomatic family in Tientsin, China, Tuan was educated in China, Australia and the Philippines. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Oxford; he earned his Ph.D. from the University of California-Berkeley.

One conclusion Tuan has reached in his scholarly pursuits is that our moral code has the potential to help unify the culture. Incorporating moral studies into the college curriculum might provide similar cohesion for higher education, he says.

“There have been enormous changes in it since I was in graduate school in the 1940s and 50s,” he says. “Then, the heroes of academia included people like T.S. Eliot, C.S. Lewis and American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, all outspoken Christians who shared that moral and spiritual orientation. Today, the measure of an intellectual is atheism, which carries conflicting and ambiguous moral imperatives, and which shows no interest in divinity at all.”

Embedded in America is a particular moral charge, he adds: “The United States is seen by both its own people and the rest of the world as setting an example of a better, more moral way to live.”

Even with this view, he adds, “I’m always amazed at the kindness of strangers.”

For example, “When I was teaching at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, I got my car stuck in a snow storm. A man on foot helped me get out, and I drove him home.

“He told me he had gone out in his car early that morning, and he too had gotten stuck. The storm forced him to leave his car where it was and continue on foot.

“While he was walking he encountered car after car — including mine — stuck in the snow, and helped the drivers free their vehicles.

“Two things impressed me: That he was able to help others, even though he couldn’t help himself, and that he told me this without any sense that he had done anything remarkable.”

Tuan says he’ll never forget that incident. It filled him, he says, with a sense of wonder he has tried to pass along to his students.

“I wanted to provide them with a framework so they could explore the world and its people. In the last analysis, the specific landscape they chose to consider was entirely up to them. But to their explorations I hope I was able to add a note of exaltation and of mystery.”