7/21/2019 Cosmos and Hearth

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Cosmos And Hearth A Cosmopolite’s Viewpoint 

Yi-Fu TuanPublication Year: 1999

In this moving meditation on the difficult choices facing humanity in the next millennium, celebrated scholar Yi-FuTuan reaffirms his faith in the value of a cosmopolitan worldview

In a volume that represents the culmination of his life!s wor" in considering the relationship between culture andlandscape, Tuan argues that #cosmos$ and #hearth$ are two scales that anchor what it means to be fully and happilyhuman %earth is our house and neighborhood, family and "infol", habit and custom &osmos, by contrast, is thelarger reality-world, civili'ation, and human"ind Tuan addresses the extraordinary revival of interest in the hearth inrecent decades, examining both the positive and negative effects of this renewed concern (mong the beneficentoutcomes has been a revival of ethnic culture and sense of place )egative repercussions abound, however,manifested as an upsurge in superstition, excessive pride in ancestry and custom, and a constricted worldview thatwhen ta"en together can inflame local passions, leading at times to violent conflict-from riots in (merican cities towars in the *al"ans In Cosmos and Hearth, Tuan ta"es the position that we need to embrace both the sublime andthe humble, drawing what is valuable from each Illustrating the importance of both cosmos and hearth with examples from his country of birth, &hina, and from hishome of the past forty years, the +nited tates, Tuan proposes a revised conception of culture, the #cosmopolitanhearth,$ that has the co'iness but not the narrowness and bigotry of the traditional hearth Tuan encourages not onlybeing thoroughly grounded in ones own culture but also the embracing of curiosity about the world .ptimistic anddeeply human, Cosmos and Hearth lays out a path to being #at home in the cosmos$show less

/ublished by0 +niversity of innesota /ress