Environmental & Architectural
Phenomenology Newsletter
Selected Reviews
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Yi-Fu Tuan, 1996. Cosmos and Hearth: A Cosmopolite's Viewpoint. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Wendell Berry, 1995. Another Turn of the Crank. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint. |
Reviewed by Herb Childress
When I was an undergraduate at Berkeley, I met a man from North Carolina who was finishing his Master's degree and preparing to go into professional practice. He often said that he felt compelled to return to North Carolina after graduation, to go back home and do his work in a community that needed his skills. But he graduated, and Berkeley offered him a teaching position, and he's still there, ten years later.
His story and the questions it raised for me came to mind while I read these two books, both of them about the nature of home place and our positions in the world. What allegiance do we owe to the places from which we came? What is the nature of the local within the global economy? Do we have a duty to place? These two writers, Yi-Fu Tuan and Wendell Berry, could not disagree more sharply.
In Cosmos and Hearth, Tuan — well known for his 1977 classic of geography, Space and Place — has reached the logical endpoint of the attitudes of his earlier work. In Space and Place, Tuan tells us that places are specific and imbued with meaning, whereas space is abstract and interchangeable. In the preparation for exploring the things that give places their identities and meanings, however, he posited an unsettling dualism: "Place is security, space is freedom." (1977, p. 4) In Cosmos and Hearth, he pursues that dualism to its end. His four central ideas here are that "Cosmos," which he aligns with a desire for movement, advancement and progress, is fundamentally opposed to "Hearth," which he aligns with a desire for stability and security; that this opposition is possibly the central division in our collective lived experience of the world; that we are moving away from place toward space; and that this movement is a good thing.
It is important to differentiate this division of Cosmos and Hearth from the more common phenomenological distinction of "home" and "away," which implies a stable center from which we move to encounter the busy, uncertain world and to which we return for rest and love. The division of Cosmos and Hearth is, according to Tuan, a temporal rather than geographic opposition. The hearth is the realm of the peasant and the domestic, closed-minded and illiterate. Through the dual projects of education and modernization — both dependent on "the belief, fairly widespread among the educated, that time has direction" (p. 136) — we move inexorably toward the cosmos, which Tuan paints as progressive, tolerant and materially enriched.
Tuan argues that it is inherently human, that it is inevitable, to leave the weary village behind and move into the "sun and air," the "cultural and intellectual riches of the larger world" (p. 13). In order to make this argument, he explores the cultural histories of Confucian China and Enlightenment America. In both societies, he claims, a collective drive toward reason, abstraction, linearity, organization and standardization have led to power over the forces of the natural world, the victory of space over place. This power frees us from toil and poverty, and allows the material plenty that affords leisure, contemplation and artistic expression, the identifying marks of high civilization.
What of real places within this universalizing cosmos? Tuan writes that they are reduced to local color; a pleasantry, an accent or style or fashion carefully constrained within the master narrative. "It hardly needs saying that the differences are minor and never transgress the tacitly agreed upon rules and customs of propriety…" (p. 36) The power so desired by the cosmopolitan mind can only come through the illusion that complex places can be reduced to such trivial differences. We often think that the global entrepreneurs' primary goal is the saturation of local markets; a more fundamental, and chilling, goal may be the elimination of the concept of local.
Tuan celebrates the placelessness of the modern cosmopolitan view by praising the loss of barbaric local customs:
A common criticism leveled against places that try to reinvent their individualized selves is that the results are rather bland and tend not to be sharply differentiated from one another. This criticism reminds me of Anna Karenina's famous opening sentence, "All happy families are like one another; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." A lax paraphrase might be to say that ways of showing common decency are limited, whereas ways of showing perversity are not only many but highly colorful, the stuff of popular ethnographies: infanticide, child bride, scarification, bloody rites of animal and human sacrifice, foot binding, self-immolation of widows, demon possession, witch burning, and so on. No doubt the world's cultural diversity suffers as a result of the demise of these practices, but this particular loss can be borne by anyone touched by the spirit of enlightenment. (p. 186)
This shocking conceptual reduction of the local to a litany of pathologies is partly drawn from what Tuan admits is his Confucian and Enlightenment view of the world, dividing "civilized" from "barbarian" (p. 16) and "primitive" from "cultured" (p. 119). It also, however, is drawn from a somewhat lazy series of premises, a flaw repeated throughout the book. His brief, flitting histories of China and the United States are especially insufficient to support the essential arguments he draws from them. For instance, he writes that the United States'
sense of self is threatened…in two major changes during the second half of the twentieth century. One is global modernization — the establishment of a global culture such that no part of it stands out: New York's skyline, at one time the nation's unique signature, is now replicated in many other metropolises. The second change, which no one had predicted before its sudden arrival, is cultural particularism or ethnicity…that can weaken America's sense of a larger self, with a common past, shared values, and goal. (pp. 73-74)
Well, yes, these two things have changed, but so have a number of other conceptual structures that may have equal or greater impact on our sense of who we are. Information has changed from local and personal to global and mediated; nature has changed from a strong, everyday relationship to an occasional getaway vacation; progress has changed from the welcome reduction of labor to the looming end of employment; the frontier has changed from a place, singular and distant, to a time, shifting and immanent. Any of these cultural shifts likely will have more ill effects on our American consciousness than the knowledge that other people now have skyscrapers and fax machines. Unfortunately, this is only one example of the somewhat vague and artificial underpinnings that Tuan uses to support his larger intellectual structures.
Wendell Berry also uses some cultural history to make his points, but his cultural history is deeply rooted in the soil and families and economics of one particular place. As such, it is less abstract, more passionate, and not surprisingly leads to different conclusions. Another Turn of the Crank is a series of brief essays on the nature of community, especially agrarian community. The basic thesis, first presented in the Foreword but repeated throughout, is that "…I am a member, by choice, of a local community. I believe that healthy communities are indispensable, and I know that our communities are disintegrating under the influence of economic assumptions that are accepted without question by both our parties — despite their lip service to various economic 'values.'" (p. x)
Berry's aim through these essays is to show us the dangers of what he calls the "large, exploitive, absentee economy" (p. 9) The dangers include the loss of family farming and the communities that support it, and that is his biggest concern. However, he speaks compellingly of other values at risk:
But as we now begin to see, you cannot have a postagricultural world that is not also postdemocratic, postreligious, postnatural — in other words, it will be posthuman, contrary to the best that we have meant by 'humanity'… These people see nothing odd or difficult about unlimited economic growth or unlimited consumption in a limited world. They believe that knowledge is power, and that it ought to be. They believe that education is job training. They think that the summit of human achievement is a high-paying job that involves no work. Their public boast is that they are making a society in which everybody will be a 'winner' — but their private aim is to reduce radically the number of people who, by the measure of our historical ideals, might be thought successful: the independent, the self-employed, the owners of small businesses or small usable properties, those who work at home. (p. 13-14)
The placelessness that Tuan sees as the ideal of the cosmopolitan life is noted by Berry as well, in much less kind terms: "The ideal of the modern corporation is to be (in terms of its own advantage) anywhere and (in terms of local accountability) nowhere. The message to country people, in other words, is this: Don't expect favors from your enemies." (p. 12)
Berry is thoroughly quotable, an acclaimed poet and fine essayist at the top of his form. This slim book — a mere 109 pages — could be opened and cited at random, and its wisdom immediately felt. But his best rebuttal of Tuan's pursuit of abstraction comes near the end, in his description of his brother's heart attack and subsequent recover, in which he speaks of the power and centrality of real, substantial relationships: "…each of us is made by — or, one might better say, made as — a set of unique associations with unique persons, places and things. The world of love does not admit the principle of the interchangeability of parts." (p. 105)
The basic positions of these two authors are reflected in their life paths. Yi-Fu Tuan was born in China, moved to Australia at ten, to England at fifteen, and then to America in his early twenties, during which time he has studied at Berkeley, taught at the Universities of Indiana, Chicago, New Mexico, Toronto, Minnesota and Wisconsin, and taken sabbatical or fellowship years in Hawaii, Australia and California. Wendell Berry was born in Henry County, Kentucky, studied in Kentucky, taught two years at Stanford and two more in New York City, and then, in 1964, returned to Henry County to stay.
It can be no surprise that either of them takes the stance he does. The mobile, linear thinker, Tuan urges us to slip gently into that good future in which everything is understood and under control, in which inexorable progress toward freedom from place allows the cosmos to replace the hearth. The more grounded, cyclical Berry, however, insists upon honoring "local knowledge, memory, and tradition," and will not let his hearth go without a hell of a fight.
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