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Strangers and Strangeness

1986; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 76; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/214781

1931-0846

Yi‐Fu Tuan,

Diverse Aspects of Tourism Research

Culture seeks to create a familiar world, yet an element of strangeness not only persists but also performs an important role in the quickening of culture. Wilderness, with its capacity to surprise, serves culture this way, and so does the stranger who is a potential source of inspiration and renewal. In modern society, the experience of the strange-a kind of grace-may have waned as a result of people's power over nature, but contact with strangers and dependence on them have increased. A mode of religious apprehension is this awareness of the strange not only but also in the midst of the familiar world. L IFE is difficult, as we all know, and there are few places on earth where appear to have found genuine happiness. One place is suburban Australia. In a book on Australia, called Shining Eldorado, Elspeth Huxley wrote, recall a sun-tanned young man standing in the sunshine on the steps of an office block in, I think, Perth-but it might have been almost anywhere-and saying, 'It is too good to last. I've got it all-a good job, my own home just the way I planned it, a pretty wife, healthy kids, the garden's coming on nicely, at weekends I go fishing. I enjoy fishing. I enjoy my work. This is what human beings have always wanted, and now I have it and it's wonderful.' What more is there to add? What more can one ask for? While reading this passage, my mind drifts to the fictional world of Kenneth Grahame in Wind in the Willows. Mole has returned to his cozy home underground. Soon he laid his head on his pillow in great joy and contentment. But before he closed his eyes he let them wander round his room, mellow in the glow of the firelight that played and rested on familiar friendly things. He could see how plain it all was, but also how much it all meant to him. He would not want to abandon the new life above ground and its splendid spaces, to turn his back on sun and air and creep home and stay there. upper world was too strong, it called to him still, even down and he knew he must return to the larger stage.2 What lessons can we draw from these texts? The contentment of the Australian homesteader seems impregnable. Not only the awe of nature is tamed by suburbia, but also that of religion. How can a premonition of the wholly other, or mere strangeness, penetrate his world? Mole's life is more ambivalent. He loves his cozy shelter mellow in the glow of firelight, but he is not content. He never ceases to long for the open spaces of sun and wind with their whispers of danger. In this essay, I explore the experience I Elspeth Huxley, Their Shining Eldorado (New York: Morrow, 1967), 153. 2 Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows (New York: Heritage Press, 1944), 76. * DR. TUAN is the John K. Wright Professor of geography and a Vilas Research Professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin 53706. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.24 on Sat, 23 Apr 2016 05:41:47 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms STRANGERS AND STRANGENESS 11 of strangeness, not only in nature but also in the midst of the familiar human world, as a mode of religious apprehension. NATURE VERSUS CULTURE The earth is our home-we have no other-yet we do not feel at home in it. Alterations have to be made. These may be small and imperceptible such as naming the parts of nature; in the mere process of naming, strange plants, animals, and rocks are subtly altered to become suitable denizens of the human world. Large, tangible changes occur when we apply physical force to clear bushes and trees and convert wild nature into orderly fields and houses. All these changes-tangible and intangible-are works of culture. Human beings everywhere distinguish between nature and culture. We are proud of culture, for it is that which elevates us above other animals. The first and most important aspect of nature that we transform is ourselves: we do so by classifying human individuals, by establishing their relationships to each other with the help of a more or less elaborate kinship terminology, and by applying cosmetic art to our bodies. Many societies use the honorific term people for their own members. Outsiders, by implication, belong to a lower order. They are strangers who have not submitted to culture at its best. They are raw, unpredictable, and dangerous. As a result of classificatory science and of cosmetic art, we live in a world of familiar and setting. Outside this world is nature: the primordial and chaotic bush or haunted by demons, witches, and strangers. Note that the words forest and foreigner have the same root. The basic idea is derived from the Latin foranus, which means situated on the outside. Forests and foreigners lie outside the known world of kinsfolk and cleared fields. They are strange, vaguely threatening, but because they are out of the ordinary-extraordinary-they also carry an aura of mystery and hint at the existence of the superhuman or of a grace beyond the good as ordinarily conceived. Human beings generally prefer culture to nature, the familiar to the strange. But there are striking exceptions. Nature rather than culture may have the higher status. We know how this has come to be true in affluent Western society, in which the most ambitious creation of culture-the citymay be an object of fear and a target of disdain while encomium is lavished on wilderness. This reversal of values is shared as well by certain primitive peoples. Thus, to the Gimi of New Guinea and the Lele of Africa, whose livelihood depends on a combination of simple agriculture and hunting, what carries prestige is not, as one might expect, the fields and huts of culture, but the natural forest. The is viewed as a sort of sacred place, cool and generously nurturing. In the forest, edible plants and game can be obtained pleasantly, with little effort. The natural foods of the seem a gift-the gratuitous gift of a nonhuman world and stranger. The clearing, in contrast, is hot and infested by pests. It provides food, but only after a This content downloaded from 157.55.39.24 on Sat, 23 Apr 2016 05:41:47 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 12 THE GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW struggle. Culture is regarded not as creativity-the creation of a secondary world out of the primary one-but as maintenance. Domesticated plants and animals, the clearing itself and the huts in it, require the kind of care and work that must be done over and over again. To the Gimi and the Lele, such maintenance has no prestige; neither has the constant and often frustrating effort to maintain social ties. Vastly different and superior is the surrounding forest. Life there is viewed as wild, spontaneous, and spiritual. When the Gimi and the Lele take up hunting and plunge into the cool dark forest, they feel free.3 Close-knit social life offers many rewards, but it also imposes severe constraints. Life in a traditional village combines neighborliness and human warmth with conflicts that inevitably emerge from the tensions of living close together during long periods of time. The familiar can be suffocating. People seek liberation from the common routines of life. In premodern times, they can do so through two practices: one is the festival, and the other is the pilgrimage. In a festival, move from the ordinary world of work and social obligations to another of communion with sky and earth and with nature's gods. In pilgrimage, they abandon the local community to undertake a demanding and dangerous journey, for a out there, a sacred center and a strange place at which pilgrims, all strangers to each other, nevertheless feel a common bond: they have moved from a local community to something larger and freer-to communitas, a term that Victor Turner has usefully introduced into the sociological discourse.4