The Dictionary of Human Geography

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can undermine the application and monitoring

of basic human rights provisions. jh

Suggested reading

Bosco (2006); Kobayashi and Proctor (2003);

Koffman (2003).

humanism A philosophical tradition that

places human faculties (reason, consciousness

and the like) at the centre of human action in

order to account for and inform conduct.

Humanism has a long history in European

philosophy, where it is usually traced back

to the Renaissance, but it played a pivotal

role in much later reformulations of modern

human geography. The architects of an ex-

plicitlyhumanistic geographyused a broadly

based humanism as a crucial foundation for

their critique ofspatial science. To Tuan

(1976b, p. 266), humanism in its various

forms provided ‘an expansive view of what

the human person is and can do’. ‘More com-

prehensive than science’, he continued, hu-

manism accords a central place to those

uniquely human capacities that lie at the core

of the humanities: consciousness, critical re-

flection and creativity that in turn inculcate a

sense of historicity. While he did not see hu-

manism as an alternative to ‘scientific geog-

raphy’, Entrikin (1976, pp. 616, 632) argued

that such an approach ‘helps to counter the

objective and abstractive tendencies of some

scientific geographers’ and reviewed the twin

philosophies ofexistentialismandphenom-

enologyto reaffirm ‘the importance of the

study of meaning and value in human geog-

raphy’. Others insisted on the political and

ethical significance of humanism. A stream of

work onhuman agencyand human geog-

raphy challenged the narrowly conceived and

often deterministic assumptions about human

action that had been incorporated into both

spatial science andbehavioural geography

(Ley, 1981) and reworked one of Marx’s

iconic statements thus: ‘People make geog-

raphy, but not just as they please and not

under conditions of their own choosing’

(Gregory, 1981). Others treated humanism

as a well-spring for ethical reflection: ‘The

recovery of the human subject’, Buttimer

(1990, p. 28) concluded, allowed for what

would now be called acosmopolitanismand

a heightened sensitivity to what she identified

as ‘the ‘‘barbarism’’ of our times’ (see also

ethics).

Even as these claims were being registered,

however, Cosgrove provided a series of

compelling reconstructions of the historical

trajectory of humanism that suggested a less

celebratory interpretation. Focusing on the

concept of landscape, Cosgrove (1984)

showed that Renaissance humanism was

about certainty rather than individual subject-

ivity, and that it was deeply implicated not

only in the geometric obsessions that the

critics of spatial science sought so strenuously

to repudiate, but also in a visualideologythat

underwrote a constellation of distinctively

bourgeoispowerand privilege. Others took

different routes to arrive at parallel conclu-

sions. Approaches through feminist geog-

raphy andpost-colonialismrevealed that

the supposedly universal ‘human subject’ at

the centre of conventional humanism was not

only asubjectwhose class position was art-

fully unmarked, as Cosgrove had shown, but

also a subject whose heterosexuality, mascu-

linity andwhitenesswere concealed too. Seen

thus, humanism was exposed as a normative

political–ideological project. Many of these

subsequent critiques were informed bypost-

structuralism, which licensed what came to

be categorized as ananti-humanism: an ap-

proach that, far from being uninterested in or

dismissive of human subjects and human ac-

tions, seeks to analyse the multiple ways in

which different human subjects are consti-

tuted. This project has been radicalized by

aposthumanismthat, critical of theanthropo-

centrism shared by humanism and anti-

humanism, admits non-human actors to the

production of nominally ‘human’ but in fact

constitutively ‘hybrid’ geographies.

Similar critiques have been mobilized to

question and contest the rise of what Douzinas

(2003) calls a ‘military humanism’ that pro-

motesmilitaryinterventionandwarin the

name of supposedly universalhuman rights,

or ‘Humanity’ more generally. These projects

often promote, on their dark side, the co-

production of spaces of exception (see

exception, spaces of), whose denizens are

constructed as sub-human and hence un-

worthy of protection. Here, humanism func-

tions as a sort of anthropological machine,

conferring and withdrawing the status of

‘human’ from its objects (cf.bare life). dg

Suggested reading

Cloke, Philo and Sadler (1991, ch. 3); Douzinas

(2003).

humanistic geography An approach that

seeks to put humans at the centre ofgeog-

raphy. Accounts of disciplinary history have

created for humanistic geography a sense of

Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_H Final Proof page 356 1.4.2009 3:18pm

HUMANISM