.

hmrnal ~t/" Environmental Psychology (1987) 7, 307-319

A S O C I A L T O P O G R A P H Y OF H O M E A N D H O R I Z O N :
The Misfit, The Dutiful, and Longing for Home

ANNE BUTTIMER
Department ~0c Social and Economic Geography, University of Lund, Sweden

Abstract
The environmental perception wave at Clark University was already in full swing
when Anne Buttimer arrived in Fall 1970 with curiosities about social space, 'insiders'
and ~outsidcrs', 'home' and ~reach', from a project on residential area design in
Glasgow, Scotland. Lessons learned from the intense interaction between geogra-
phers and psychologists were enormously valuable for subsequent work with geo-
graphy students at Clark during the 1970s. Since then she has worked on temporality
and environmental experience, migration and identity, with colleagues in Sweden,
and has pursued autobiographically-based approaches to questions of creativity and
context and the history of geographic thought and practice. In retrospect, she claims,
one of the most valuable results of the perception wave was to provoke awareness
of the lenses through which reality is experienced by people in different cultures,
and that includes the disciplinary cultures into which researchers themselves are
socialized.
'What's a nice Irish girl like you doing hob-nobbing with those New York intellec-
tuals?' and ' Y o u say you're a n u n - - i t ' s hard to tell!' Such were the explicit and
implicit queries of the 'Irish' and 'Catholic' folk I met in Worcester when l landed in
1970. 'When are you coming home to us?' my family in Ireland would ask, 'you'll
wear yourself out with all that travelling and brain work . . . and you know your
mother is sick'. Home: I had already been part of many homes, bitter-sweet the
comings and the goings--a misfit at first in each, and then so attached that it has
been painful to leave. It was Environmental Perception I was hobnobbing with
Clarkies about in 1970 and believed I had something to contribute. At any rate I
would dutifully set about proving myself, if only to feel accepted. These three
patterns--'complexes', I suppose a psychologist might call t h e m - - h a v e characterized
my own environmental experiences ever since I went to school at the age of four:
the misfit, the dutiful daughter, and the longing for home. They have no doubt
coloured my perceptions, heightened my curiosity and hopefully empathy, for
migrants and minorities, 'strangers' and 'homecomers' (Schfitz, 1944, 1945) in my
research and teaching. And maybe they help explain those puzzling inconsistencies
between my own self-image and the ways in which others have perceived me on
occasion.
Clark 1970 72: little did I ever imagine that 12 years later this period would be
perceived by my G e r m a n colleagues as a 'take-off' m o m e n t for environmental per-
ception (Buttimer, 1984b). N o w we are asked to tell what we've been up to s i n c ~
'substantive issues in theory, methodology and research topics', mind you, 'not per-
sonal histories'. Having invested some years in studying the autobiographies of
scholars, it is not easy for me to separate knowledge and lived experience; in the
careers of my senior colleagues as well as in my own there has been loneliness and
longing, tears and triumphs, jealousy and resentment, and, of course, the joy of
discovery. As Stevan Dedijer, my 'misfit' colleague here in Lund told me, quoting
0272 4944/87/040307 + [3 $03.00/0 © 1987 Academic Press Limited
308 A. Buttimer

Childers, you simply cannot 'give a bald exposition of the facts, stripped of their
warm human envelope' (Childers, 1903). As for those 'substantive issues e t c . . . ' I'm
not sure the story can be told without reference to that other kind of envelope, not
always warm or human, of ego-trips, opportunism, interdepartmental rivalries, and
grantsmanship in the naming and claiming of research territories.

Background
What was there to be intelligent about in my childhood in rural Ireland? It was an
oral culture, great store set on recitations and songs, solving practical problems 'in
one's head', and long conversations around the dinner table, Grown-ups talked o f
land reclamation, new machinery, and farmers' organizations; they told good stories
and admired the Foreign Missions. School was for the most part fun, but during
high-school years I was made to feel keenly aware of being two years too young for
the class. Still I remember enjoying Moli6re and La Fontaine, Horace and Virgil,
Yeats and the Shelleys; I did well in maths and piano, the school play and dance, I
preferred poetry to prose, and literally devoured anything 1 could find on classical
history and myth. Even more I enjoyed getting home from there, participating in
debates and social events organized by M a c r a na Feirme (an Irish-style 4H Club o f
which Dad was a founder member). That seemed to be a more 'real' world, being a
farmer's daughter was no longer something to feel apologetic about, as it sometimes
was among the posh city girls and the world of Classics and Culture into which my
boarding school would socialize me.
Maths and classics, however, were to be my major concerns in college (the weather
that year permitting a good enough harvest to afford such a luxury), geography a
fun sideline at first. One could be an intellectual misfit with these subjects, feeling at
home with authors and ideas far-flung in time and space. Not until I had completed
an M.A. degree and taught in a secondary school for a year was my mind made up
about a career: it was to become a Religious. At first I dreamed of working with
Mother Teresa in Calcutta, but later decided to join my older sister on America's
West Coast.
What a strange and exciting new world that was! Now on average three years
older than other novices in Tacoma, I was in many ways the exception--in tastes,
accent, ideas--but the atmosphere was welcoming and supportive. I discovered what
psychology was, or at least so I believed, in education courses required for bona
fi'de certification as a teacher in the state of Washington. Within a year came the
challenge to become qualified with a doctorate in geography so I could represent
my community on a Seattle University Faculty team of (nun) professors who were
to implement an integrated curriculum for the training of (nun) teachers. My special
responsibility was to be 'social geography', my course the integrating capstone on
their previous exposure to the social sciences.
Seventeen years I spent in the Dominican Order, years of emotional intensity,
energy and challenge. The spirit cultivated for over 750 years in this order is
contemplata aliis tradere (sharing with others the fruits of one's own contemplation),
and this provided motivation and direction for all my professional work. It remains
a fundamental inspiration for me today, long after my dispensation from vows.
What I miss today is community--the sense of belonging to an international family,
which supported me through years of involuntary peregrination. Fortunately there
 A Social Topography of Home and Horizon 309

is a Dominican cloister nearby (at R6gle, Sweden), an oasis to which I frequently

turn for spiritual and emotional revitalization.
Graduate years at the University of Washington in Seattle opened up fresh
horizons, particularly in the social sciences. One seemed eager about making a
quantitative revolution and regional science. As for what social geography was, or
could be, one professor paternally advised: 'We got all that stuff out of our systems
long a g o . . , with Ellen Churcbill Semple'. Much as I admired this powerful person,
I admired Semple even more, her Mediterranean work having built bridges for me
between Classical history and physical geography (Semple, 1931). Teilhard de
Chardin was one of my other heroes at the time, another marvellous misfit, and so I
set about discovering, or creating, a social geography. With midnight oil I read
(largely in translation) the work of ~social geographers' in Germany, Holland and
Sweden, and eventually, with support from my advisor, Morgan Thomas, and from
colleagues such as Marvin Mikesell and David Lowenthal, concentrated on la
~Oographie humaine.
Why should such a body of literature, mostly untranslated, have appealed? The
notion of genre de vie (pattern of living) was enticing from the start: the challenge of
showing how patterns of everyday life could be explicated (even partially explained)
through a comprehensive analytical approach. It suggested a scrutiny of (a)tra-
ditional beliefs, images and habits; (b) socially taken-for-granted rules in the func-
tional organization of activities, space and time; and (c) the bio-ecological base of
physical milieu, resources and geographical location as fundamental stage for the
drama in different parts of the globe . . . The theses and treatises I read from the
French school pointed toward a credible horizon for a human geography which
could provide the integrative function I was supposed to perform at Seattle University
(Buttimer, 1971). In restrospect, too, they seemed to resonate to the lived realities of
agrarian Europe, my own background. Quite a contrast it was to this new geography
developing at University o f Washington, wherein humans were regarded as cost-
minimizing, profit-maximizing, Promethean individuals, and the geographer's task
was to write the score for a rational organization of space to stage that drama.
~Watch out ~, Marvin Mikesell once warned me, ~they will call you Sister Social
Geography' (Buttimer, 1968).
It was at Columbus, Ohio (1965) that I first dared to present a French-style social
geography to the Association of American Geographers, making a special point
about objective and subjective social space as a way of elucidating the contrast (and
possible conflict) of 'insider' and 'outsider' perspectives on reality. That was the
same meeting where the now-famous panel on Environmental Perception and
Behavior staged its d6but (Lowenthal, 1967). Gratifying indeed it was to see evidence
that environmental perception was now clearly recognized as a legitimate interest in
geography.
Summer 1965, thanks to the Belgian-American Foundation, I was on my way to
Louvain, to get some better foundations in philosophy and to complete my research
on the French classical tradition (Buttimer, 1971). Seattle University threw in $1,500
so I could glean anything relevant for the setting up of a Geography Department
there upon my return. Enrolled in the Institut des pays en voie de dbveloppement, 1
found a diverse company of Africans, Asians, and South Americans, Maoists,
Marxists, Existentialists and Structuralists, repatriated missionaries and I960s-type
Revolutionaries who on occasion would accost me about American imperialism.
310 A. Buttimer

The most thrilling aspect of that year was the virtual groundswell of enthusiasm
and hope about religious renewal, institutional change, and social engagement which
I found among religious congregations there, and the prospect of having something
to bring home to Tacoma-Seattle. It was a time for dialogue among visiting students,
if not, alas, for Flemish and Walloon. Existentialism and phenomenology were in
the air, as it were: it felt as though many previous 'certainties" had all had a sauna.
Among visits to France that year most memorable was the welcome afforded by
Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe and the opportunity to gain a better grasp of what
~social space' could mean in practical terms. Aware of the emerging trends in
proxemics, mental maps, and perception in America, I felt quite confident about the
fi'esh insights which could be gained from empirical research conducted within this
framework (Buttimer, 1969).
The prospect of developing a geography department at Seattle University was
soon to fade, as was the programme in teacher training for which I had dutifully
trained myself. Still the community self-study and renewal movement provided
plenty challenge. Until my superiors decided that I should continue with academic
life, wherever that was to l e a d . . . It led first to Glasgow where for two years, 1968-
70, I was part of an interdisciplinary team whose mandate was to evaluate critically
the planning standards then in vogue in England and Wales (Forbes et al., 1973).
Here came the opportunity to test out empirically some of those ideas which had
emerged during my sbjour in France. Together with Jean Forbes (Geography) and
Sheila MacDonald (Town Planning) I designed a rather ambitious enquiry into the
social space of relocated working class families from slum clearance districts to
municipally-built housing estates. The aim was to see whether the presence or
absence of official planning standards made much difference for the residents, or
whether the distance between previous home environment and the new was signifi-
cant. I documented patterns of territorial identification, activity networks, and
environmental images, all of which I assumed would vary not only among individual
families, but also between groups, at least between the two most salient social
reference groups of working-class Glasgow, Celtics and Rangers. The philosophical
tone of this project was no doubt influenced by the existentialist and phenomeno-
logical ideas imbibed in Belgium and France, but the analytical design was still
influenced by the norms and strictures of that positivist training I had received at
Washington (Buttimer, 1972).
There was still much to finish on the social space project when the invitation to
Clark came in 1969-70. Bob Kates had given me a hint previously but I gave it little
thought. Nor had I anything else in mind except a return to Seattle; my sojourn in
Glasgow was to be simply a temporary exile, after which there would surely be a
place for me with my community. The prospect of yet another exile was certainly
not welcome. Meanwhile, however, I had grown quite fond of Glasgow--life-long
friendships had developed there. Eventually it was decided that I should accept the
Clark offer, and of the three options they graciously outlined for me I took the least
demanding, viz., a post-doctoral year, all the time anticipating a return to Seattle.
 A Social Topography of Home and Horizon 311

The Clark Years

Warm and enthusiastic was the welcome which Clark colleagues and students offered.
Objectively speaking I could scarcely have found a better environment for precisely
the kinds of academic interest in which I was then engaged. Subjectively, however, I
used to blame Worcester for being neither Glasgow nor Seattle, and like my Glasgow
~wifees', had difficulty adapting to a new social space. I was promptly surrounded
by an eager bunch of 18 graduate students in an optional seminar on social space
which Graham Rowles and I organized. They played with the Glasgow data in
countless ways, discussed territoriality, images, and activity networks, and explored
all kinds of methodological turns. A whole array of new challenges---emotional as
well as intellectual--filled my horizons. A radically new social space was a-forming,
one which was harder to leave, a decade later, than virtually any other.
1970 71 I became a student again, in courses and seminars offered by Kenneth
Craik, David Stea and Robert Beck, keen to learn more about environmental per-
ception and to discuss methodological problems. Discussions were lively and lasted
long into the evening. With Dan Amaral and Ben Wisner, the pioneer spirits of
Antipode, one could air philosophical questions of existentialism and phenomenology;
with Roger Kasperson and Bob Kates issues of values and advocacy planning; the
Place Perception Project led by Jim Blaut and David Stea was intriguing; Roger Hart,
Gary Moore and David Seamon organized luncheon meetings where geography
and psychology graduate students could share their work. Bob Kates invited me to
participate in a symposium on values during the Spring term. Then there was that
famous Faculty Seminar with a most impressive assembly of psychologists and
geographers to which I was also invited. My first impression was one of culture
shock: the style of discourse which to the other participants was 'stimulating' struck
me as abrasive and pugnacious. When it was my turn to present my Glasgow study
l left the meeting in shreds. What contrasts there are among cultures in taken-for-
granted ways of academic discourse!
The seminar did, however, provide an ideal forum to air several of those queries
which had been bothering me since the Columbus (1965) session. 'Perception'
obviously meant different things for different people, but the Clark group tended to
define it in terms of cognition. Now this cerebral orientation struck me as being too
narrow, especially for the kinds of curiosities that were raised in my Glasgow study.
There were emotional, moral, aesthetic and habitual aspects to their taken-for-granted
images o f home which could not be adequately described in the language of 'mental
maps'. I argued for a focus on environmental experience rather than environmental
perception. Then there were issues of methodological individualism and reduc-
tionism: analytical instruments commonly used in assessing perceptions involved
samples of individuals; theories borrowed from psychology were for the most part
theories concerning individual personality, cognitive development, or motivation. It
was not at all obvious that they would yield good insight on the human experience
of space, place and making a home on the earth. What seemed missing was cogni-
zance of social norms and structures, historically-sedimented habits and cultural
prejudices, power relations of authorities (at various scales), which exercise such
discretion over people's attitudes and behaviour in space. Thirdly, I sensed a certain
North American bias in the interpretations of behaviour (my own included), a
tendency to conduct piecemeal empirical case studies with pragmatist leanings in the
312 A. Buttimer

way conclusions were drawn. Was there some whole picture which could emerge
from all these forays into terrae incognitae? In raising such issues with this group I
began to be more aware of the limitations of my own framework, the ways in which
I may have imposed my own values on the Glasgow study, and how much I still had
to learn about methodology.
By far the most consistent, and eventually influential experience of the 1970-71
period at Clark for me was my interaction with Graham Rowles, David Stea and
Gerry Karaska (Mr Urban Geography at Clark). We four would meet regularly,
tossing over all kinds of ideas about social space. We actually worked on a grant
proposal to NSF for a follow-up comparative study of relocated families at Worcester
and Glasgow. Graham and David were gifted in graphic expression--visual think-
ing--and this was a tremendous facilitator for clarifying conceptual questions. Gerry
had skill in framing hypotheses, suggesting consistent methodological procedures,
and could be a strict disciplinarian in getting a job done. Graham was enthusiastic
about George Kelly's theory of personal constructs, David about Piaget, I was re-
reading Merleau-Ponty, and Gerry would cite Explanation in Geography (Harvey,
1968) chapter and verse, in order to keep us on sound positivist lines. The proposal
was fortunately not funded, but the year-long speculations were enormously fruitful.
In retrospect the 1970-72 period at Clark was both emotionally stormy and
intellectually challenging. After two years abroad, it was a different America I found,
quite a contrast in many ways to the one I had known in Seattle during the Sixties.
Vietnam veterans and anti-war missionaries, MASS-PIRG enthusiasts, and folk
inspired by Bunge's Detroit Expedition; the walls between academia and society
were certainly being stormed. Internally, too, there were wars and rumours of wars
over tenure decisions, psycho-geography, and Antipode, as well as the emerging
patterns of proxemics in the newly organized Geography School.
What I valued most was the openness and critical attitudes of colleagues and
students: exhilarating it was, once the style and lingo were understood. After all, I
was a kind of 'late-comer' to the scene--I suspect that the halcyon days of environ-
mental perception, and the meeting ground for geographers and psychologists, had
actually preceeded 1970. At any rate, there was a break in 1972, and it was only
during the subsequent years at Clark that the fruits of this period of intensive inter-
action came to harvest for me.

Clark P o s t - 1 9 7 2

There have been two mainstream intellectual curiosities running through that period
since I began academic life: (1) genres de vie, and (2) intellectual history and philos-
ophy. The first has sought empirical exposure, practical problem-solving, and inter-
action with 'real' people in concrete situations; the second was pursuable more or
less in the cloister, and it demanded reflection, reading and theoretical imagination.
These two have been like yin and yang for my thought and practice, and during the
Clark years both found some playspace. Each had always been able to enrich the
other, and la g~ographie humaine had whetted my appetite for conceptual frame-
works which could accommodate them both, and help me share them with my
students.
It has never been possible for me to combine teaching with formal research pro-
jects. Beginning in the Fall of 1971 1 had responsibility for courses in urban and
 A Social Topography of Home and Horizon 313

social geography, as well as in the History of Geographic Thought, and for the next
several years my major 'scholarly' interests were those which I shared with my
graduate students (Buttimer and Seamon, 1980). A dedicated lot they were, and we
had full support from the school's director, Saul Cohen. With Graham Rowles
there were issues of the elderly, with Bobby Wilson and Gerry Hyland the experience
of migrants; with Henry Aay, philosophical questions surrounding the history of
geographic thought; with David Seamon, phenomenology. There were questions of
environmentally-related stress with Michael Godkin, anarchist communes in Civil
War Spain with Myrna Breitbart, a quest for geography's 'new paradigm' with Curt
Rose, and eventually the lifeworlds of Northwest Indians and those of Bureau of
Indian Affairs men with Paul Kariya. These, and many others, offered intellectual
challenge to me, each offered the others a stimulating challenge in this mix of per-
sonalities and ideologies. By the mid-1970s it was clear that 'social geography' had
become an acceptable term in North America, even if the content was different from
what I had imagined in 1965.
in 1972 I was asked to write a paper on values by the Commission on College
Geography. Having completed what I regarded as a decent preliminary draft I shared
it with some students and colleagues at Clark. 'Schizophrenic', one student rapped,
'here you claim that existentialism and phenomenology invite us all to become aware
of our own taken-for-granted values, and then produce this heap of words without
acknowledging one bit of awareness about your own values'. Once recovered from
the shock, I started all over in a St-Exupdry vein, raising questions--sometimes
impertinent, sometimes rhetorical--about values implicit in the practice of geo-
g r a p h y . . , beginning with myself. I took a workshop with Dr Ira Progoff at Dover,
Massachusetts (oasis of my Clark days) and began keeping a personal journal which
forced me to reflect critically on issues in my own life journey. Through many tough
decisions and emotional upheavals between 1973 and 1979, this journal became a
good companion. The values paper (Buttimer, 1974) became an emancipatory
turning point; many contradictions and inconsistencies which I had unmasked in
my own life and thought became challenges to confront. Integrity demanded, among
other things, transcending those comfortable '-isms', '-ologies' and a priori biases,
seeking the spirit rather than the letter, the ethos rather than the structure in what-
ever life situation.
The paper itself probed the disciplinary heritage of models, theories and practices,
noting the affinity of certain Classical schools of thought with imperialism and
earth conquest, the models of mankind which were embedded in conventional theory,
and the sometimes absurd transposition of models from one context to another. It
also poked at certain contradictions in the sociology of the profession from the
socialization of the young, through the rank-and-tenure criteria of academic insti-
tutions, to the dynamics of power elites in publication and grantsmanship. Finally,
it raised questions about values implied in programmatic statements about the
future--a favoured sport in the 1970s--highlighting, of course, the tensions between
existential meaning and planned order in the organization of space. Four colleagues
added "Commentaries': three from North America (Jim Blaut, Ed Gibson and Yi-fu
Tuan) and one from Sweden (Torsten H/igerstrand). The final draft of values was
actually completed in Lund, during spring 1973, and the dialogue begun then with
Torsten H/igerstrand and his colleagues was to open a whole new phase.
314 A. Buttimer

Genres de Vie and Temporality

Genres de vie was immediately recognized as potential common denominator in my
conversations with Torsten H/igerstrand, renowned leader in quantitative and applied
geography, when I first met him in 1971. He expressed interest in our planning
standards project in Glasgow and shared some of his own emerging ideas on time
geography (Hfigerstrand, 1970). Recognizing how valuable it would be to integrate
a temporal dimension to my analytical categories for social space, I eagerly accepted
an invitation to Lund for the Spring of 1973.
Ulf Erlandson from Lund taught courses in social geography at Clark. On
temporality and genres de vie there were discussions at Lund, but far more fascinating
for Torsten was the values paper, which he considered ~a revolutionary document',
and promptly set about translating it and writing his well-considered response. Far
from resenting those rhetorical remarks about benign technocracy which were con-
tained in that paper, he was eager to hear more about the ~humanistic" tradition,
and plans were laid for my return as Fulbright Visitor in the spring of 1976.
Still eager to learn more about temporality, however, I suggested that next time
one should arrange not simply an exchange of personnel between Clark and Lund,
but rather that both could be together and work out a joint empirical project to be
conducted partially in Worcester and partially at Lund. It was possible to arrange
for a shared salary which allowed Solveig Mfirtensson to spend the first semester at
Clark where we could initiate an empirical project together, with the intention of
completing the analysis while at Lund during the second semester. In preparation
for this opportunity, between 1973 and 1976, I immersed myself in the literature on
temporality--Minkowski, Eliade, Dubos, Bachelard, Merleau-Ponty, Colquhoun
and others. The Lund model, it seemed to me, was only touching on one level
of spatio-temporal experience, viz., the functional level; its metric was clock-calendar
time, and its aim was evidently to elucidate mainly patterns of overt behaviour and
ways in which institutional forces were caging the individual into paths and trajec-
tories. What if one wished to understand environmental experience as a whole,
l wondered; should one not examine images and perceptions of time, the ebb and
flow of emotional time, memory, beliefs and myths? And what of biological
rhythms--the cyclical flows of neurophysiological and ecological processes which
envelop daily existence? Foremost in my agenda was a conceptual and analytical
framework for dealing with genres de vie, and a method which could elucidate
problems of stress in everyday life. These were the kinds of problems which also
interested my doctoral students at the time. I even coralled undergraduate students
into various exercises designed to demonstrate the clash (or non-synchronicity) of
'routine' vs 'rhythm' in the everyday environments around us in Worcester, and felt
as though I had done my homework for a good dialogue with colleagues at Lund.
Solveig and I shared many a marvellous exchange about temporality and we even
collected a pile of data, together with students, on 24-hour time-space use in
Worcester's Main Street S o u t h . . .
Once at Lund, however, in Spring 1976, empirical and methodological questions
were to take second place to the more philosophical and practical questions raised in
our dialogue over values. A seminar on 'Knowledge and Experience' was announced
and 60 80 people, professors and doctoral students from 15 different disciplines
participated. A n ideal setting it was to share reflections about values, the sociology
 A Social Topography of Home and Horizon 315

of disciplinary practice, the dream and reality of applied science; people seemed
eager to move back and forth across disciplinary boundaries without timidity.
2976 stands out as a kind of midsummer year in my life. Phenomenology had
somehow come to harvest with the 'lifeworld' article (Buttimer, 1976), my students'
dissertations were well under way toward completion, and new challenges were on
the horizon with hermeneutics and structuralism. I was graciously invited to lecture
in 20 different European departments that year, and found great joy in establishing
contacts among researchers of altogether different language and cultural back-
grounds. My mother died in 1976, having blessed my decision to relinquish my
vows to the Dominican Order, and thereby perhaps unchaining the 'dutiful daughter'.
It seemed as though from the ashes a new vocation was being born, viz., to building
an international community of scholars, where self- and mutual understanding could
be springboards for better communication between the scholarly and the lived worlds
of humanity.

Invitation to Dialogue
It was certainly on the strength of the Lund 1976 Seminar, and the generous support
and encouragement of Torsten H/igerstrand, that I ventured a proposal to the
Leningrad Congress o f the I G U Commission on the History of Geographic Thought
for an alternative strategy on our agenda: to invite autobiographical reflections
from senior and retired colleagues as (a) catalysts for dialogue on values in the
thought and practice of the discipline; and (b) potential data for an oral history of
the field to complement the archival record. If the experientially-grounded approach
to dialogue had worked so well in our 1976 multidisciplinary seminar, why not try
the same approach within our own field? In 1977, Torsten Hfigerstrand and I did
launch an ambitious project, An Invitation to Dialogue (Buttimer and Hfigerstrand,
1980), and this has absorbed the bulk of my energies since then. It has afforded
many a lesson about symbolic interaction, about language and power, about vested
interests in maintaining barriers to communication and mutual understanding
between human beings. Only some of the activities involved may be pertinent to the
environmental psychologist, e.g., a seminar on creativity and context, and the overall
interpretive framework which has emerged from a scrutiny of autobiographical texts.
In June 1978 we arranged a seminar/workshop at Sigtuna (Sweden) and invited a
number of senior and retired scholars and professionals to share insights from their
own career experiences on the subject of creativity and environment. With David
Seamon's help we designed a working journal for each participant, so that during
the meeting they could record significant events, places, people and projects, and
also reflect on experiences which facilitated or hindered their own work. As they left
the meeting they were given a short set of specific questions on creativity, place and
horizon. It was from response to these questions, as well as from further readings
on the subject, that I proposed a five-phase schema of the creative process, each
phase of which was apparently associated with certain conditions of (a)context
(milieu) and (b) communication (Buttimer et al, 1983).
The dialogue process continues and now over 300 people from 35 different
countries have actually contributed (Buttimer, 1986). Colleagues in medicine, bus-
iness administration, law, architecture, sociology and literature have used these re-
cordings as catalysts for dialogue within their own teaching and research settings. I
316 A. Buttimer

have been examining the texts--autobiographical reflections as well as published

works--for some years now, and the framework of interpretation which has emerged
is one which perhaps has something to offer to environmental psychology: meaning-
metaphor-milieu (Buttimer, 1983b~ 1984c). By meaning I refer to vocational choice--
work, the meanings derived from expressing one's talents, the social status and role
of a particular professional activity. By metaphor I point toward cognitive style, and
have toyed with Steven Pepper's idea of 'root metaphor' as key to certain funda-
mental differences in world image and epistemological orientation (Buttimer, 1982).
Milieu has two sub-themes: on the one hand there are all those environmental
features of an author's own childhood and formative years and the problems he/she
later chooses or agrees to study; on the other hand, there are those public interests
which are mediated via research-funding policies and ministries of education. Each
individual may ultimately reach a unique style of negotiating meaning, metaphor,
and milieu, but on all three grounds, I feel, there is scope for communication and
mutual understanding. They are themes which face both ways, as it were: to the
'subjective' experiences of scholars and professionals on the one hand, and to the
'objective' circumstances of culture, economics and power relationships within the
changing contexts of their work on the other. These are themes which can point to
'zones of common reach' (Schfitz, 1973) beyond those which now seem vested in
maintaining rhetorics and technics of negotiation among conflicting parties.
So I rejoice with my trilogy of meaning-metaphor-milieu. It has provided a con-
ceptual frame for a number of empirical and theoretically-oriented projects since
1982. Under this umbrella ! developed a perspective on applied geography for an
IGU symposium in Rio de Janeiro (1982), some pointers toward understanding the
'whole picture' on water symbolism for hydrologists and theologians at Lund in
1982 (Buttimer, 1984a) and the Opening Address on Environmental Perception for
the national gathering of German geographers in Mfinster in 1983 (Buttimer, 1984b).
Meanin~metaphor-milieu has also provided an organizational frame for courses
on Theory of Science which I've offered here at Lund (1982-86), at University
College, Cork (1982-86), and for shorter-term workshops in Poland, France, Spain,
and Clark during those years. Most exciting of all has been the attempt to apply this
framework to the elucidation of problems related to migration and identity for a
symposium on population policy at Dunedin, New Zealand (1983), and this would
be my own first choice for future empirical work (Buttimer, 1985). For the key to
understanding environmental experiences of people in cultures other than one's own,
I'm now convinced, demands more than a study of environmental perception, or
even of social space. One has to learn the language of symbols and metaphor, myth
and artefact, around which a sense of group identity is created and maintained.
When folk migrate from one setting to another, it is often those latent, taken-for-
granted aspects of meaning, metaphor and milieu, which assume enormous sig-
nificance in their journey toward a new identity.

Horizon From 1984

And the horizon from 1984? Dutifulness to myriad and often scarcely reconcilable
task allows little time for reflection. Right now I feel like one of Koestler's 'Call
Girls' flitting about to workshops and symposia at far-flung sites on topics as diverse
as Ecological Design, Central City Problems, Philosophy of Science, Population
 A Social Topography of Home and Horizon 317

Policy and the History of Geographic Thought. Twice a year since 1981 I have
taught a course on Theory of Science here at Lund, taught one month each year at
Clark, and given a two-week workshop each year at University College, Cork. In
Spring 1985 I was Visiting Professor at the Sorbonne, and have accepted a Visiting
Position at Austin (Texas) for Spring 1987. Unfinished agenda on my desk include
(a) a volume of autobiographical essays and interviews with Scandinavian geogra-
phers; (b) transcripts of video-recorded interviews which need editing and printing;
and (c) most important of all, on-going research and reflection on meaning-meta-
pho~milieu which could lead to a book containing the harvest from all these years
of 'Dialogue'.
How to relate the mid-1980s situation with what happened at Clark between 1970-
72? Much has transpired since then, but it is still to my Clark colleagues such as
Martyn Bowden, Bill Koelsch and Bob Kates that I turn when I need critique and
counsel. How to evaluate the Dialogue effort? I asked Bob in 1981 and, after con-
siderable reflection, he suggested that 'if dialogue works, then some change should
be evident in the attitudes and conceptions of the participants'. I cannot speak for
other participants, but acknowledge how many of my own preconceptions have
been shattered and revised. Change? Yes, in the ways I now understand the dynamics
of academic institutions, the frames of reference within each specialization has
become virtually imperative, and the all-pervasive influence of culture in the conduct
of science. I've also sought some theatrical distance from the drama via mytho-
poetic and abstract ways of interpreting the story. What has not changed is that,
like Matthew Arnold's Scholar Gypsy, I'm still nursing the unconquerable hope of
orchestrating my own efforts as a geographer in the contemporary world with those
of colleagues in other fields, and to promote better self- and mutual understanding
among us.
Boundary lines between 'research' and 'teaching' have become blurred as I dis-
cover the value of oral communication, in seminars or lectures, or whatever setting
can allow a va-et-vient of different perspectives. Boundary lines between what con-
stitutes 'the real work' and the 'distractions' also blur as I discover how deeply
inspiring it has been to be among colleagues of other cultures and ideological
persuasions. Being a 'misfit' is something I'm no longer apologetic a b o u t ~ u i t e the
reverse, I enjoy it--and being a 'dutiful' whatever (daughter, nun, geographer, wife)
is a built-in habit I can channel towards goals far wider than those of country,
discipline, or residential address. It's a privilege to teach, guest-lecture, or host
international encounters; to facilitate communication between people of different
generations and professional background. So while potential chef d'oeuvres of elegant
prose lie unharvested in my files, they have certainly taken second place, these past
few years, to the face-to-face interactions with colleagues around the world, or in
my present 'home', in Dalby.
And whither environmental perception? No doubt architects and psychologists
will continue to push forward the theoretical as well as practical frontiers in even
more specialized settings (Magnusson and Allen, 1983; Stokols, 1983). As far as
geography is concerned, the message has now been widely accepted, even if other
priorities have certainly superceded it among research sponsors. Philosophically
speaking, the 'perception' wave has greatly enriched our field, prodding an awareness
of 'insiders' and 'outsiders', managerial vs lived values, and the tricky step from
descriptive to normative statements. Few fields of scholarly concern could compete
318 A. Buttimer

with environmental perception as potential catalyst o f awareness a m o n g ourselves

as well as a m o n g those people with w h o m our research is conducted. I envision a
vast potential enrichment which can come from a hermeneutic approach: for the
major transformation in twentieth-century thought has surely been the m o v e m e n t
away from knowledge by observation to one based in an acknowledgement o f par-
ticipation in reality. Research is a social process in which the researcher is one
variable. Self-understanding, therefore such as could c o m e from a reflective exercise
like the one invited in the J E P issue, could be, in fact, a first step toward a better
understanding o f o u r world.

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