CityReads | Yi-Fu Tuan on the Coronavirus Pandemic

ChristopherSmith 城读 2022-07-13

301

Yi-Fu Tuan on the Coronavirus Pandemic

Three books by Yi-Fu Tuan help you understand how the social-spatial continuum has been disrupted during the coronavirus pandemic.

Christopher Smith, A Conversation with Prof. Yi-Fu Tuan on the Coronavirus Pandemic: A Geographer’s Perspective on Nature and Culture in a Landscape of Fear, May 30, 2020

Source:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/conversation-prof-yi-fu-tuan-coronavirus-pandemic-nature-smith/

As of this moment, the pandemic spawned by the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, has 1,911 million confirmed cases and killed 715,163 people. This catastrophe has unfolded with unprecedented velocity, forcing all of us to grapple with the sort of profound crisis of knowledge that always precedes normative reformulation. In this way, the pandemic seems to herald the arrival of an apocalyptic moment wherein we have the vertiginous sensation of being on the hinge of history.

Christopher Smith, a Clinical Professor in the School of Communication at USC's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, recommends works by the renowned cultural geographer, Prof. Yi-Fu Tuan, for the pandemic-themed reading list for quarantine on his LinkedIn website. Prof. Tuan has dedicated his life to the study of how human societies encounter and inhabit physical spaces, and how they ascribe culturally specific meanings to the surrounding environment.

Prof. Smith reached out to Prof. Tuan by email in this May with an invitation to have a digital conversation with him about the pandemic's impact on the “geographies of our minds,” Prof. Tuan graciously accepted.

Yi-Fu Tuan was born in China in 1930. He attended University College, London and graduated from the University of Oxford with a B.A. and M.A. in 1951 and 1955 respectively. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1957. He is currently the J. K. Wright and Vilas Professor Emeritus of Geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he has served as a faculty member since 1985.

In this conversation, Prof. Tuan and Prof. Smith focus on observations made in several of the books from his expansive and celebrated scholarly output—Landscapes of Fear (Pantheon, 1979), Escapism (Johns Hopkins, 2000), and Dominance and Affection: The Making of Pets (Yale, 2004)—all of which have particular pertinence to how the social-spatial continuum has been disrupted during the coronavirus pandemic. I hope that you consider adding one of his books that they discussed to your own "pandemic lit" reading list.

Q: Prof. Tuan, you have argued that the need to escape from reality is a uniquely human trait that drives all forms of cultural production. It’s interesting to consider how the pandemic has problematized your theory. Indeed, the pandemic’s almost supernatural combination of ubiquitous spread and invisibility challenges our imaginative capacity to find experiential and cognitive respite. Has the pandemic transformed culture’s escapist function, both for the present, and perhaps well into the future?

A: With any threat, we need shelter and the most basic shelter is our home. Our home—our house—is how we escape, whether it is to get out of the rain or to get out of harm’s way of a deadly virus. Once inside the house, we are safe and sigh with relief. But there is no such assurance of safety when the threat comes from the invisible virus. All precautions notwithstanding, it may still enter. We are anxious and seek to escape from anxiety by religiously washing our hands and wiping all touched surfaces—that is, by confronting the enemy—and, at the other extreme, we escape from anxiety by watching videos of romance. All three—house, CDC instructions, and fantasy videos —allow us to manage, if not escape from, threat. Even the Garden of Eden was not safe. Outside it were even greater dangers. Even so, we—the Houdinis of creation—have not only survived but we flourish.

Q:The pandemic’s “desolation of abandonment”—rendered by photographs of empty cities and empty supermarket shelves—will clearly have iconic resonance in the histories of the Covid-19 outbreak written in the years to come. What do these photographs tell us about how psychologies of fear become manifest in our lived environment?

The Place de la Concorde, a public square in Paris, part of the photography project “The Great Empty.” Credit: Andrea Mantovani for The New York Times

A: I live on the eighth floor in Madison. I often look down on the cityscape below me. On public holidays, I am struck by its emptiness, which makes it seem a stage set, waiting for the performance to begin. On workdays, traffic packs the streets, but it is only when I throw open the window and hear the roar that Madison truly comes to life and I with it. The lockdown means that the city below me remains an empty stage week after week, month after month, devoid of life. I wonder, what if my view is not of Madison but of the Champs-Elysees, with the Arc of Triumph in the distance, would I still see it as devoid of life-a scene of dread? Probably not, and this is because urban architecture can be a work of art, and a work of art has its own beauty and life.

Q: The pandemic has exposed and exacerbated social and economic fault lines in American life. There have been numerous media reports that spotlight the ability of high-net worth individuals to “escape to nature,” leaving the fetid urban “hot zones” of New York, Seattle, and Los Angeles for the sparsely populated hinterlands of the Catskills, East Long Island, Wyoming, and the Pueblo towns of Arizona and New Mexico, while their less well-to-do compatriots remain stuck in place. In a similar vein, the ability to “escape from nature” and work from home with powerful broadband connectivity is a luxury that not everyone can afford. As a cultural geographer, how do you make sense of the spatial disparities endemic to lockdown and social distancing?

A: The well-to-do have always sought to distance themselves from the poor. A striking exception used to be where Fifth Avenue butted against Harlem. A symbiosis existed between the rich who lived in tall buildings and the poor who found employment with the rich as doormen and maids. In the wealthiest part of Paris, the Cité, rich Parisians made sure that picturesque workmen riding their bicycles with baguettes tied to the handlebars be retained as an amenity, like squirrels and other forms of charming wild life, provided, of course, there weren't too many of them. In the current pandemic, the ring of skyscrapers circling Central Park is dark in moonless nights. Where are their residents? They have fled in their private planes to their villas in the Catskills, Sedona, and remote Pacific islands. What's new?

Q: The pandemic has triggered a great debate in public discourse, over the personal behaviors that are best suited for navigating lockdown: escapist habits that enable stress-management (i.e., video stream binge viewing; restocking the home liquor cabinet, surfing and going to the beach and local park, etc.); or firmly determined approaches that grapple directly with big questions of a theological, philosophical, and materialist sort. How do you navigate this intellectual and behavioral divide? Where might we find a balance between them?

A: There is of course a big difference between whether a family or an individual is subjected to prolonged lockdown. The family has the advantage of being a community, and humans need others to function and, indeed, to be sane. On the other hand, too much togetherness, even with the glue of love, leads to friction and this is because, at the most basic level, a family is a community of very dissimilar members—man, woman, teenager, toddler—with different personalities, understandings, and needs. Given this tension inherent to membership in the family or in any closely knit community, some have dreamed of isolation, of being Robinson Crusoe on a desert island. However, solitary confinement is not voluntary but is rather a harsh form of punishment that few can endure. Covid-19 has subjected me to that harsh punishment, and if I manage to bear up thus far, it is because I have used the surfeit of time to escape into my inner self: I wrote my autobiography.

Q: Prior to the spread of Covid-19 to these shores, the U.S. seemed to occupy a singular site of symbolic enchantment in the global imagination. In Escapism you argued that the Disneyland theme park is the ultimate expression of this ideology. Of course, the theme park businesses in Disney’s portfolio of corporate assets have been decimated by the pandemic and investors are left to wonder whether the Magic Kingdom has lost its allure. In a similar vein, one wonders: Has the pandemic, and the country’s lackluster response to it, forever diminished the soft power of American exceptionalism and mythical U.S. innocence? How might the global view of America shift in a post-pandemic world?

A: Disneyland is not as escapist as well-educated people think. It has a boat ride through the cavern of horrors, villages burned to the ground by marauders (Frontierland), and more dead bodies than UCLA's medical school. Moreover, it displays Disney's and America's work ethic. It shows grease-stained workshop next to the spic-and-span airport waiting room, and the way to the home of Mickey and Minnie is not through the manicured front door but through the cluttered backyard, with a laundry machine tossing Mickey's dirty jeans, shovels, spades, and other household utensils thrown here and there. Asian visitors wondered about the grease, the clutter, and the untidiness. They didn't understand the extent that Americans-and outstandingly, Disney himself--appreciated hard work and hard workers. It is an appreciation that not even the pandemic can dent.

Q: The pandemic poses an interesting social conundrum. On the one hand, we need close contact with others to fortify our sense of a healthy personal identity. Yet, the disconnectedness of social distancing could easily propagate the sort of radical indifference that could lead to self-harm and intra-communal hostility. As you said in Landscapes of Fear, “People are our greatest source of security, but also the most common cause of fear.” It has been encouraging to see how people have worked together to preserve a sense of solidarity during this first stage of mitigation. At the same time, a wide range of civil disturbances indicate that the honeymoon phase for shared purpose might be over. What do you anticipate next?

A: When I go to the grocery to buy food, the few people I meet on the sidewalk make a point of stepping aside and, indeed, even stepping right off the sidewalk into the gutter. They may have my well-being in mind, given my age and possible susceptibility to the virus, but I am displeased and a little angry too. We are all in this together and yet to fight the common enemy we must stand, not shoulder to shoulder, but at least ten feet apart. What will happen in the post pandemic period? Impersonal communication and social distancing may continue or even increase, not so much from habits left over from the pandemic as from the pressure of advances in communicative technology. On the other hand, there is the possibility that the old norm will return, and the reason for this is that we remain tied to our animal nature, most of all, sex. For what is sex? It is two sweaty bodies rubbing together in the “enseamed bed.” Such actions prepare us to embrace nature as well. Like what? Like diving into a weed-infested lake, digging our toes into the flank of a mountain, hugging a frisky goat, or, as Birkin advises in (D.H. Lawrence’s) Women in Love, stripping oneself naked to cling to the rugged trunk of a tree.

Q: Videoconferencing and livestreaming have transformed our sense of time and space during the pandemic with untold long-term consequences. What are your thoughts on the possible implications for these media on human attachment and community?

A: E. M. Foster famously said, “Only connect.” The pandemic raises the question of whether social media and all the other hi-tech means of connecting us answer our needs, and the answer is surely yes, for lack of anything better. The “better” is that which feels more real. Touch, for example, guarantees the materiality of what we see. Thomas had to touch Jesus's wounded body to be reassured that what he saw was not just a disembodied spirit, or, in our language, just an image. Odor is another certification of the real and is, moreover, connected with the emotions, stirrings of which make us feel alive. Nature is rich in pleasing odors. Inhaling the scented air of mountain and lake, forest and grass, raises our spirit and enhances our sense of physical well-being.

Q: In this context, it’s been interesting to see adoption rates of cats and dogs from rescue shelters skyrocket during the outbreak. You’ve written before (Dominance and Affection: The Making of Pets, Yale, 2004) about the role of pets within human geography as an assertion of power over nature. What connections do you see between this general propensity and specific coping strategies for the pandemic?

A: In the pandemic, cats and dogs in crowded shelters were quickly adopted rather than, I assume, children in crowded slums and institutions. Well, the SPCA was founded decades ahead of a comparable society founded for derelict children. Why? Well, animals require only kindness, whereas children require love, an altogether more difficult undertaking. This difference between kindness and love is critical and moralists should give it more attention. So far as I know, only C.S. Lewis has done so.

Q: In Landscapes of Fear, you write that human imagination can magnify risks, and that unseen threats like infectious disease send this lens of magnification into overdrive. This might explain why pandemics frequently spark conspiratorial and paranoid belief within various social communities. What have you observed with regard to the coronavirus pandemic and populist paranoia?

A: Hostile forces from the outside create communal feeling. Even the modern saint, Dorothy Day, admits it when she says that her home looks all the cozier when she can see through the window people thrashed by the driving rain. Community thrives on hostility: in Verona, the Montagues couldn't have constituted a close-knit group if there were not the hostile Capulets. However, this only works well when there is a distinct binary of "outside" and "inside," a "them" and an "us." Wars have usually been fought over sharp boundaries, but not the war against a pandemic in which the enemy is invisible, can be anywhere and cannot even be cleanly defeated unless a superhero-the vaccine-emerges out of the blue. Paranoia flourishes when the person closest to you, in both the physical and the relational sense, may be a witch, or, in our time, the carrier of a deadly virus.

Q: In light of the recent killings of unarmed black men and women in Minnesota (George Floyd), Kentucky (Breonna Taylor), and Georgia (Ahmaud Arbery), American racial toxicity, and civil rebellion against it, have added another distressing dimension to the pandemic’s landscape of fear. How do you think race and geography mesh in this light?

A: The “us” vs “them” mentality is a human universal because it has survival value in that it makes the “us” feel superior and more confident. Anthropologists who studied five ethnic communities in northwestern New Mexico found that each community has a word for its members that means essentially “human,” with the implication that peoples in other communities are less than fully human. “Sure, you can trade with them and even have friends there, but, well, they are not quite....” is the common sentiment. Implicit in this distinction is the existence of a boundary and perhaps the simplest example of this boundary is the house: inside it is nurturing family, outside it is danger. However, in the United States, the most important and contentious boundary is not between inside and outside of a house, but between black and white, between black folk and white folk, black neighborhood and white neighborhood; and even in a mixed neighborhood, there exist smaller entities, separated from one another by race, and this holds down to the scale of the individual. To a racist white policeman, the black man is simultaneously inferior and dangerous, and he will act forcefully at the slightest perceived transgression of the invisible boundary between them. I have touched on two scales, the individual and the community. Let me jump to the geopolitical scale. The pandemic threatens everyone anywhere any time. Under the current administration, America’s response to that threat is to create an artificial “us” vs “them” mentality by calling Covid-19 the “China virus” or the “Wuhan virus.” Give evil a geographical location and it can arouse patriotic fervor and, at the same time, make the threat seem manageable. A step in this direction is to trash all organizations that transcend the “us” vs “them” mentality, beginning with the WHO.

Q: It would seem that “straight talk,” evidence-based communication, and moral credibility would best serve the interests of those leaders who intend to quell the anxieties of their constituencies in times of crisis. Yet, many authoritarian and populist leaders have opted for the kind of self-deluded rhetoric and misinformation campaigns that stir up greater degrees of confusion and apprehension. What do you make of these trends in governance?

A: Straight talk does not necessarily quell anxiety. Quite the contrary. Truth is almost always scary. Hence, when a nation is in dire straits, it hopes for a Churchill whose soaring rhetoric can stiffen the nation's spine and defeat even the most formidable adversary. But soaring rhetoric doesn't work when the enemy is Covid-19, as Boris Johnson, a Churchill admirer, was to discover. To defeat the virus, hiding in one's home, suspecting everyone-even the friendly grocer-is the best strategy. What America needs, then, is Dr. Fauci, whose calm, unvarnished truth-telling produces so much anxiety in his nation-wide listeners that they will all want to stay home and routinely shun their neighbors.

Q: I am particularly curious about your view on how China and the United States, the world’s two reigning superpowers, have coped with Covid-19’s unique spatial circumstances and civic demands in radically different ways.

A: China and America are geopolitical rivals with the Trump administration stoking the rivalry as China threatens to catch up with not only the economy but also in technological prowess. In the current pandemic, what if China comes up with a vaccine? It is a haunting possibility for three reasons: China's prior experience with SARs, its current early experience with Covid-19, and massive state support in micro-biological research. For China to have a solution to “the Chinese virus,” as Trump puts it, would be as intolerable to America as when the Soviet Union came up with the Sputnik. So, let's hope that the Brits have the vaccine first.

Q: Can the cosmopolitan ideal of globalization survive the pandemic?

A: Globalization went apace between 1945 and 2000 under the American imperium. It started to frazzle when America saw its imperium challenged by China, not as a rival but as a co-equal, sharing the business of the globe with Europe as the third partner. Such an arrangement makes America feel unsettled, paranoid, especially with the onset of the pandemic. A common enemy—Covid-19—that should have brought the world together threatens to tear it apart. In daily reports on the pandemic by Western outlets such as BBC and PBS, China is so far beyond the pale that how it coped with the virus, especially when it coped successfully, is not even mentioned whereas client states such as South Korea and Taiwan receive top billing for their virus-stopping prowess.

Q: Overall, what sort of lasting impact do you think the pandemic will have on a collective understanding of place and space?

A: I think the pandemic will push the collective understanding of space and place in two opposed directions: either into a future of imaging and hi-tech communication that diminishes the importance of both space and place, or into a future that seeks to recapture some of the closeness and intimacy that existed prior to their rude interruption by the pandemic. Take sports. Is there any evidence that fans prefer to watch football games on a giant screen, where they can see the sweat on the player's face, to being wedged in huge crowds in sunbaked stadiums?

Related CityReads