Escapism / Yi-Fu Tuan.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Tuan, Yi-fu, 1930-2022.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Escape (Psychology).

Nature.

Culture.

Physical Description:

xvii, 245 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Baltimore, Md. : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.

Summary:

In prehistoric times, our ancestors began building shelters and planting crops in order to escape from nature's harsh realities. Today, we flee urban dangers for the safer, reconfigured world of suburban lawns and parks. According to cultural geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, people have always sought to escape in one way or another, sometimes foolishly, often creatively and ingeniously. Glass-tower cities, suburbs, shopping malls, Disneyland -- all are among the most recent monuments in our efforts to escape the constraints and uncertainties of life -- ultimately, those imposed by nature. "What cultural product", Tuan asks, "is not escape?" In his new book, the capstone of a celebrated career, Tuan shows that escapism is an inescapable component of human thought and culture.

Tuan opens Escapism with a discussion of the history of human efforts to transform nature, a topic familiar to any student of cultural geography. But he soon broadens the scope of his investigation to find escapism in a wide range of social mechanisms and cultural artifacts. We escape from the loneliness and alienation that accompany our individually unique consciousness be seeking to establish warm human interaction, and the author shows how the built environment fosters that process. Efforts to distance ourselves from the raw animality of eating have brought us taboos, table manners, and the creations of haute cuisine. The notions of love and romantic passion transcend the biological imperative of sex; religion and consoling philosophical systems shield us from death. Like culture itself, escapism is a product of imagination and abstract thought, and Tuan devotes the last chapters of his book to examining humanimagination's potential to create on earth the extremes of heaven and hell.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [205]-231) and index.

ISBN:

0801859263

OCLC:

38353921