Geography and the Human Spirit

What does it mean to dwell? Every time has a story to tell, according to Anne Buttimer, and exploring those stories brings fresh light to modern ideas about the relationship between humanity and its environment. In this book, Buttimer ranges from Plato to Barry Lopez, from the "Upanishads" to Goethe, taking an interdisciplinary look at the ways in which human beings have turned to natural science, theology and myth to form visions of the earth as a human habitat. Buttimer begins by placing her study in the context of Western intellectual and cultural history, identifying various patterns of Western thought, particularly in the context of humanism. She then interprets these patterns using the three mythopoetical characters of the Phoenix, Faust and Narcissus. Buttimer shows how the cry for freedom, symbolized by the Phoenix, often illuminates a forgotten aspect of life or thought pushed into the background by the structuring force symbolized by Faust or by the critical voice symbolized by Narcissus.
Buttimer uses these symbols to identify four ways in which the world has been perceived both in the Western cultural tradition and in other traditions throughout history: the world as mosaic of forms, as a mechanical system, as an organic whole, or as an arena of spontaneous events. Although postmodern thinkers have seen the struggle between Faust the builder and Narcissus the evaluator as insoluble, Buttimer argues that the impulse of the Phoenix can bridge the gaps between disciplines and world views in order to bring the goals and methods of geography and humanism together.