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| THE SIGNIFICANCE OF HUMANISTIC GEOGRAPHY IN THE CHANGING HUMANISTIC TRADITION OF GEOGRAPHY |
| SUN Jun1, PAN Yu-jun1,2, HE Wei-ren1, LUO Hua-song1, WU You-de3 |
1. College of Tourism and Geographical Sciences, Yunnan Normal University, Kunming 650500, China;
2. Key Laboratory of Educational Information for Nationalities, Ministry of Education, Yunnan Normal University, Kunming 650500, China;
3. Yunnan Chinese Language and Culture College, Yunnan Normal University, Kunming 650500, China |
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Abstract As one of the most influential or leading schools in the past half of century, humanistic geography has brought human beings to the centre-stage of human geography. According to humanistic geography, human being is always human-being-in-place, a ‘locality of being’ marks a radical change in geographical thinking, because it presupposes that indicating anything is impossible unless you putting them in their "places". Some of our disciplinary leaders, examples include Alexander von Humboldt, Paul Vidal de la Blache genres de vie, Carl O. Sauer, Halford J. Mackinder, Richard Hartshorne, J. K. Wright, David Lowenthal etc. thinkers have sought ways to comprehend historical, cultural, economical forces how constructed or influenced different geographical phenomena in transformational areas. "Area" is one of the aspects of "place", according to Yi-fu Tuan, but "area" does not reveal the spirit of a person and his/her experience in a unique place. Critical change did not happen until 1970s, when some leading humanistic geographers. Drawing partly on this special conceptualization of "place", this article insists the significance of humanistic geography to our discipline is not only critical previous methods, i.e. positivism geography, but, more critical, also re/placing our positivism traditions in geographical research.
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Received: 19 February 2014
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2015, Vol. 30 
