The Dictionary of Human Geography

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In the twentieth century, the German phil-

osopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) took

Dilthey’s epistemological rendering of her-

meneutics and transformed it into an onto-

logical one, making its focus ‘being’ rather

than ‘knowledge’ (cf.epistemology;ontol-

ogy). The details are complex, but the gist is

that problems of understanding unfold from

our ‘being in the world’. Just as the hermen-

eutic circle for Dilthey involved tacking be-

tween parts of a text and its whole, for

Heidegger it involves a movement between

an anticipatory pre-understanding, which

comes from our ‘being-ness’’, and our role as

knowing subjects. Hans-Georg Gadamer

(1900–2002) subsequently took Heidegger’s

notion of pre-understanding and showed its

relation to notions of prejudice, authority and

tradition. Since theenlightenment, Gadamer

argued, there has been prejudice against preju-

dice. For him, however, ‘pre-judgement’, or

pre-judice, is what makes understanding pos-

sible. In particular, the prejudices of historical

‘traditions’ are vital; without immersion in tra-

ditions, there is no understanding. It is not

that traditions are frozen and immutable:

Gadamer’s point is that we can never escape

traditions and the historical perspective that

they bring. Historical understanding proceeds

by a movement from our prejudices (tradi-

tions) to the historical totality and back, mak-

ing understanding ‘an open and continuously

renewed ‘‘fusion’’ of ‘‘historical horizons’’’

(Thompson, 1996, p. 381).

Gadamer’s work, in turn, provoked two

other formulations. First, the German critical

theorist Ju ̈rgen Habermas (b. 1929) thought

that Gadamer made humans too much the

dupes of historical tradition. Consequently,

he developed acritical theoryofsociety

by setting hermeneutics against quasi-

transcendental forms of ‘communicative rea-

son’ that in conjunction produce the possibil-

ity of emancipation and liberation. Second,

American philosophers Richard Rorty (1931–

2007) and Richard Bernstein, writing under

the sign of neo-pragmatism, were sceptical of

Gadamer’s claim that hermeneutics wasthe

method of the human sciences, but acknow-

ledged its importance for the critique ofgrand

theoryand other forms offoundationalism

(thus connecting hermeneutics to post-

structuralism). Both Rorty and Bernstein

upheld the pragmatist ideal of ‘conversation’,

which they believed was another version of the

hermeneutic circle, in this case, juxtaposing

new evidence and ideas with existing and pos-

sibly incommensurate ones.

Hermeneutics was introduced tohuman

geographyto contest the empiricism and

positivismfound inspatial science. Butti-

mer’s (1974) ‘dialogical approach’, which in-

volved bringing together inside and outside

views, was an important early contribution,

as were Tuan’s (1971) reflexive approach to

topophilia(‘to know the world is to know

oneself’) and Harrison and Livingstone’s

(1980) ‘presuppositional approach’. These

early forays were codified underhumanistic

geography, which made human meaning and

intentionality the very core of its concern.

Since then, the explicit working out of the

hermeneutical approach has become less im-

portant, although there have been some ex-

ceptions, such as Barnes’ (2001) invocation

in his work on thecultural turnwithineco-

nomic geographyand Livingstone’s (2002c)

writings on a distinctly ‘tropical hermeneutics’

(seetropicality). In addition, hermeneutics

has been implicitly present in the burgeoning

discussions aboutontology, especially those

drawing upon Heidegger, and which in turn

have seeped into debates aroundspatiality.

More generally, the spirit of hermeneutical

enquiry – that is, the recognition of the im-

portance of interpretation, open-mindedness

and a judicious, reflexive sensibility – is

as great as it has ever been, and is certainly

evident in critical human geography,

including those versions informed bypost-

structuralism. tb

Suggested reading

Bernstein (1983).

heteronormativity A social regulatory

framework that produces binarysexdivision,

normalizes desire between men and women,

and marginalizes othersexualitiesas different

and deviant. Much likewhiteness, heteronor-

mativity is naturalized so as to be invisible to

the heterosexual population, but is a compul-

sory norm that itself produces nature;

namely, bodies sexed as male or female.

Reversing the assumed relations between sex

andgender, Butler (1990) has argued that

heteronormativity is the foundation on which

sexual difference is built. Predicated on the

paternal law of kinship, heteronormativity

‘requires conformity to its own notions of

‘‘nature’’ and gains its legitimacy through

the binary and asymmetrical naturalization

of bodies’ (Butler, 1990, p. 106: seeperfor-

mativity). Bodies outside this binary are un-

intelligible or monstrous. Berlant has argued

that in the USA in the past 20 years, the

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HETERONORMATIVITY