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Ambiguity in Attitudes toward Environment

Author(s): Yi-Fu Tuan
Source: Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 63, No. 4 (Dec., 1973), pp.
411-423
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of the Association of American Geographers
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2562050
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 AMBIGUITY IN ATTITUDES TOWARD ENVIRONMENT
YI-FU TUAN

ABSTRACT. The published literature on attitudes toward environment and space

has neglected ambiguity and ambivalence, an aspect of human psychology which
we aIl recognize, but one which is difficult to measure. Three conditions promote
ambiguity and ambivalence: 1) complex environments (stimuli); 2) the discrepancy
between the mind's search for symmetry and life's bias in favor of movement and
of certain psychological values; and 3) the tendency for feelings and primitive con-
cepts to polarize. KEY WORDS: Ambiguity, Attitude, Environment, Polarized feelings,
Symmetry and asymmetry.

2) the discrepancy between the mind's search

I Ncated
recent years, sorne geographers have indi-
an interest in the psychological dimen-
sion of attitudes and values, particularly those
that pertain to environment and space. The con-
fidence that we have had in mapping the visible
ef!ects of natural and human action is no longer
appropriate when we survey the psychological
domain of feelings and values. Questionnaires,
for example, are an indispensable tool for re-
search on large human groups, but they can
give a misleading picture of human psychology
since their tabulated results do not register the
hesitations and indecisiveness that plague hu-
man beings who must decide and act in the com-
plexity and shifting demands of the real world.
Field workers are weIl aware of the uncertain-
ties and ambiguities in the replies of the people
they interview at length. Unstructured knowl-
edge, however, fits ill with formalized research
design and in published works it is either ex-
cluded or relegated to marginal commentary.
People are not calculating machines. Their
desires and acts, even their theoretical con-
structs, are often confused, torn by ambiva-
lence. This common knowledge is seldom ex-
pressed in the literature on human geography,
or even in research on "environment and be-
havior." Without doubt people's attitudes to en-
vironment and space are ambiguous for many
reasons: they may refiect, for instance, the par-
ticularity of circumstance, of individual tem-
perament, and of group values. Broadly speak-
ing, however, ambiguity and ambivalence are
the result of three principal sets of facts or con-
ditions: 1) complex environments (or stimuli) ;
Accepted for publication 15 June 1973.
Dr. Tuan is Professor of Geography at the University
of Minnesota in Minneapolis, MN 55455.
ANNALS OF THE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICAN GEOGRAPHERS Vol. 63, No. 4, December 1973
© 1973 by the Association of American Geographers. Printed in U.S.A.
for symmetry and the bias of human intention
toward specific values situated in the future;
and 3) the tendency for feelings and primitive
ideas to polarize. The purpose of this paper is
to expand and illustrate the three conditions,
with the hope that their description will plug a
small but conspicuous lacuna along the psycho-
logical margin of human geography.
COMPLEX ENVIRONMENTS
Except under controlled laboratory condi-
tions the physical environments in which people
live are seldom so simple that responses to
them lack aIl ambiguity. On monotonous plains,
weather can be changeable and complex; where
the climate is uniform, as in the tropical rain-
forest, the visual setting is variegated. Manmade
worlds are no less rich in stimuli. The larger the
area over which we are free to move and the
longer the time we stay in it, the more likely it
is for our experience of the environment to be
complex, and hence ambiguous. A sparsely fur-
nished room induces the unambiguous response
of boredom, but the room is a single unit in a
large house of rich architectural design: to es-
cape the boredom one has only to step out and
explore the larger setting. A natural environ-
ment such as the Texas Staked Plains can be
extremely monotonous, but live in it (i.e., ex-
tend the time span) and the drama of weather
will unfold to alter one's experience of monot-
ony. If this is true, then it is not surprising that
one-shot surveys of environmental attitudes
tend to minimize the component of ambiguity
and ambivalence. Such surveys usually calI for
two kinds of simplification: 1) people are asked
to respond to an environment that is spatially
confined and specific, that is, organized (as in

411
412 YI-Fu
photographs) into clear categories by the re-
search worker; and 2) the time span of experi-
ence is necessarily reduced to the present or to
a time when the environment is ideal. For exam-
pIe, in surveying attitudes toward residential
desirability, the prospective buyers are shown
pictures of houses taken under a blue sky, or
they are given a tour of housing estates on a
fine warm day.
Among the complex purposes and demands
of the real world, attitudes to environment are
no more likely to be consistent than attitudes to
people whose company we enjoy on one occa-
sion and find irritating the next. Strongly stated
views are no proof of single-mindedness. They
may harbor seeds of doubt and shift, even re-
verse themselves, as circumstances change.
What people do is a simple matter for observa-
tion; what they think or hold can only be in-
ferred, for verbal expression itself is evidence,
not incontrovertible proof.
Assuming that verbal statements are aIl that
we have, how are we to interpret them? To
illustrate both the impact of complex environ-
ments on attitudes and the difficulty of inter-
preting verbal evidence, l shaH consider a ques-
tion relating to environmental attitudes that has
captured the interest of Americanists, historians
and geographers, for sorne time. The question
is: What was the American attitude to the en-
vironmental qualities of the Western interior in
the decades before the Civil War? Until recently
the answer would probably be that Americans
saw the Western interior as largely useless: it
was the Great American Desert. In 1969 Mar-
tyn Bowden challenged this view. He suggested
that, apart from the explorers, the idea of the
Great American Desert was widely entertained
only by the educated elite of New England and
of the New York area. 1 However, for our pur-
pose the crucial question is the more limited
one of whether the educated travelers them-
selves-the explorers, military men, scientists,
and traders-believed in the sterility of the
Western plains. The consensus of scholarly
opinion seems to be yeso A strong case can be
made that the more prominent and influential
explorers and travelers of the period did indeed
hold the Western plains in low esteem. But am-
1 Martyn J. Bowden, "The Perception of the West-
ern Interior of the United States, 1800-1870: A Prob-
lem of Historical Geosophy," Proceedings, Association
of American Geographers, Vol. 1 (1969), pp. 16-21.
TUAN December
bivalence and contrary views penetrated this
evaluation. How could it be otherwise? The
plains region is a complex and vast environ-
ment of striking topographic and climatic con-
trasts. The travelers crossed different parts of
the Western interior at different times of the
year. The journeys took months to complete
during which the appearance of the land
changed with the drama of aperiodic weather
and with the seasons. Moreover, the condition
and mood of the traveler, which necessarily
affected his perceptions, could hardly remain
constant through a long and arduous journey.
The reports of explorers in the first half of
the nineteenth century are peppered with deso-
late images of the West. On the other hand, it is
not difficult to find countervailing and flattering
images of the country, often in the work of the
same writer. Consider the report of Major Ste-
phen H. Long, who led an expedition across the
plains in 1819 and 1820. He is usuaHy credited
with starting the myth of the Great American
Desert. He reported that the country he ex-
plored was "almost wholly unfit for cultivation."
Even the climate he found unhealthy. Yet he
was impressed by the vast herds of bison whose
meat "is equal, if not superior to beef, and af-
fords not only a savoury but a wholesome diet."
Although the expedition occasionally suffered
from the want of food and water, "the game of
the country yielded us an ample supply of the
former, and the watercourses . . . satisfied our
demands for the latter."2 John R. Bell was the
official journalist of the Long expedition. His
comments were often damning: for instance, at
the junction of St. Charles Creek and the can-
yon of the Arkansas River, near Pike's Peak,
he saw "a plain of sand and gravel, barren as
the deserts of Arabia." However, when Bell
stood in the middle of Long's Great American
Desert (west of l02°W., latitude of the Arkan-
sas River), he could say that "The plains are
beautiful, somewhat resembling the country
along the Platte except that they are more luxu-
riant."3 Bell's report was less influential in pro-
jecting an image of the Western interior than
2 Stephen H. Long, "A General Description of the
Country Traversed by the Exploring Expedition," in
R. G. Thwaites, editor, Early Western Travels (Cleve-
land: Arthur H. Clark Co., 1904), Vol. 17, pp. 101
and 145.
3 Harlan M. Fuller and Leroy R. Hafen, editois,
The Journal of Captain John R. Bell (Glendale: Ar-
thur H. Clark Co., 1957), pp. 178 and 207.
1973 AMBIGUITY IN ATTITUDES
that of Edwin James, the expedition's unofficial
chronicler. James, basing his report in part on
Long's notes, was almost consistently harsh in
his account. He described the plains as "pre-
senting the aspect of hopeless and irreclaimable
sterility," yet he also noted, with atypical opti-
mism, that "forests will hereafter be cultivated
in those vast woodless regions, which now form
so great a proportion of the country; and wells
may be made to supply the deficiency of running
water."4 These are summary judgments of the
same country, and they are conflicting.
Response to complex environments tends to
be ambiguous, especially when it is measured
over a period of time. This simple idea is easy
to overlook because the verbalized response
may lack all ambiguity. A capsule statement on
environmental attitude distorts through simpli-
fication: it fails to do justice to experiences that
result from the accumulation of positive and
negative impressions, sorne of which may be
conflicting. A person who summarizes his com-
plex experience of environment with a few
words is likely to mislead not only the listener
or reader but himself; for the articulated idea
will tend to displace the inchoate feelings.
Moreover, once formulated and accepted the
concept renders prior experience largely obso-
lete, since the concept, rather than the prior
experience, will guide the reception of new im-
pressions. From the standpoint of social action,
therefore, we are well advised to encourage peo-
ple to ignore the complexity of their experience
in favor of simple articulation. From the theo-
retical standpoint, however, the neglect of am-
biguities that underlie stated beliefs which ap-
pear to be simple makes it difficult for us to
understand the phenomenon of radical change.
SYMMETRY AND ASYMMETRY
Ambiguity emerges, we have seen, because
environmental stimuli are complex and human
moods shift through time. What are sorne other
sources of ambiguity and ambivalence? l sug-
gest that the effort to impart meaning to the dis-
position of space can lead to contradiction: am-
biguity and ambivalence emerge when the
mind's desire for spatial arder is distorted by
the asymmetry of the human emotional poles
and the asymmetry of the human sense of time.
4 Edwin James, "Account of an Expedition from
Pittsburgh to the Rocky Mountains," in Thwaites, op.
cit., footnote 2, Vol. 14, p. 214.
413
The desire for spatial symmetry is widespread,.
but it is not universal and it can take different
forills. On the level of mythological and cosmo-
logical thinking, evidence of the mind's pen-
chant for balance lies in the common occur-
rence of three types of symmetrical structures:
1) the vertical ordering of the cosmos into an
upperworld and an underworld, with the earth,
the home of man, occupying the middle posi-
tion; 2) the imposition of a grid, the cardinal
directions and the center, on the earth's surface;
and 3) the organization of space into a center
and periphery for which the ideal shape is a
circle or a series of concentric circles. l shall
consider each type of structure in turn and note
how the spatial symmetry, congenial to the
mind for its simplicity, is pulled awry by the
goal-directed processes of life.
Vertical COSI110S
A tripartite division of the cosmos into
heaven, earth, and underworld is cornmon to
people living in widely different parts of the
earth. Wherever the stars are perceived and the
astronomical rhythms recognized, a multilay-
ered conception of the cosmos is likely to exist:
thus we find it among the Sumerians (ca. 3000
B.C.), the Egyptians, the medieval Europeans,
the Chinese, the Pueblo Indians, and the Yenei-
sei Ostiak. Topographie features may serve to
symbolize the vertical structure of the cosmos.
In the more rugged parts of Indonesia, for ex-
ample, mountain, plain, and sea stand for the
layers of a vertically organized world. Concep-
tions of the cosmos usually lack coherence:
philosophy is, after all, a rare calling in any
culture. Where cosmological conceptions exist,
a fundamental source of incoherence and am-
biguity is the disjunction between the symmetry
of the spatial design and the asymmetry of the
emotional and psychologieal poles. Upperworld
(or heaven) and underworld (or hades) are not
the poles (+ and -) of an emotionally neutral
Cartesian system; they are charged with dia-
metrically opposed meaning. Where the world
is perceived to be vertically structured, a com-
mon bias is toward the upperworld. The upper-
world is perceived: it is the blue sky or the
starlit heaven that everyone can see. The under-
world, by contrast, is essentially postulated, a
construct of the mind based on slenderer evi-
dence such as the sinking of the sun below the
horizon and the existence of lakes that suggest
conduits leading to a lower world. "Above" is
414 YI-Fu
sensed, "below" is inferred. A child uses the
words "up" and "upstairs" before the words
"down" and "downstairs." A child can tell that
birds live in the air at two and a half years but
cannot tell that angleworms live in the ground
until four years of age. 5 The conceptual cosmos
is symmetrical, the perceived world is not. Emo-
tionally the three layers of the cosmos do not
make up a balanced whole. Despite the belief
that the earth represents the middle position at
which the opposing forces are balanced, human
aspirations do not rest there in quietude, but
are usually directed to the beneficent influences
coming from heaven.
Spatial Grid of Cardinal Directions
On the horizontal plane the cardinal direc-
tions combined with the idea of center or "mid-
dIe place" give symmetrical structure to space.
North and south, east and west balance each
other, and provide the basic reference points in
the human world. This is a common type of
spatial disposition. Its symmetry appeals to the
mind, but the values attached to the reference
points are not evenly balanced. Where the car-
dinal points define space, east, the place of sun-
rise, commonly symbolizes birth, and west,
where the sun sets, symbolizes death. In the
Chinese schema east is further identified with
such positive values as the spring season and
growth, whereas west connotes the dying fall
season. 6 Birth and death, growth and decay, are
the natural poles of life: they are complemen-
tary processes necessary to the maintenance of
harmony in nature. However, this belief, with its
emphasis on balance and harmony, is a philo-
sophical construct. As a construct it is, like
symmetrical space, a reflection of the mind's
need for order. Emotionally human beings turn
their backs on decay and death and look for-
ward to growth and life. Ruman beings are "ori-
ented," cardinal points are not of equal, or even
of complementary value, except in thought.
As symbols of life's experiences, east and
west are not complementary poles. Neither are
the directions north and south. In the Chinese
5 Louise Bates Ames and Janet Learned, "The De-
velopment of Verbalized Space in the Young Child,"
Journal of Genetie Psyehology, Vol. 72 (1948), p. 79.
6 Alfred Forke, The World-Coneeption of the Chi-
nese (London: Arthur Probsthain, 1925); Marcel
Granet, La Pensée Chinoise (Paris: Albin Michel,
1934), especially the section "Le Microcosme," pp.
361-88.
TUAN December
schema, south is identified with the position of
the zenithal sun, with high noon, and summer;
by contrast, north connotes darkness, water,
and winter. North and south, together with their
associated meanings, are a manifestation of the
two fundamental principles, yin and yang, that
regulate the universe. Philosophically the two
principles are believed to complement each
other; they are necessary to each other. Emo-
tionally, however, the direction of human striv-
ing is toward the positive pole of yang: in this
the Chinese are no different from any other
people. The dark side (yin) is accepted; the
sunny side (yang) is the pole toward which
aIl living things naturally move. SYlnmetrical
space is a distorted image of life insofar as
life has purpose and direction. In traditional
China the structuring of architectural space
proves that north and south are not the indif-
ferent poles of a symmetrical world. For prac-
tical as well as symbolical reasons the traditional
Chinese house, organized around a courtyard,
opens to the south. Blank walls face the north.
City plans illustrate even more strikingly the
bias in favor of the south. An ideal city is a
rectangle oriented to the cardinal points, with
the palace compound at the center: this is the
symmetrical world, imposed by thought, that
mirrors the perfect order of the cosmos. But
human values, other than those created by ab-
stract thought, fit ill with perfect symmetry.
Chinese city space is clearly structured: yet it
contains contradictory elements, because within
the same setting there exist, on the one hand, a
symmetrical frame that symbolizes the cosmos
and, on the other, a lopsidedness in the loca-
tion of architectural units that reflects the natu-
raI biases in human life. Within the city's rec-
tangular frame the principal avenue runs south
from the central palace compound. Sacred edi-
fices such as the temple for ancestors and the
earth altar are built in the southern part of the
city. Behind the palace, on the "dark" side, is
profane space, and it is there that the profane
activities of commerce are properly located. 7
Cultures other than the Chinese show the
conflict between conceptual symmetry and emo-
tional asymmetry in similar ways. The world
view of the ancient Egyptians is outstandingly
symmetrical. Jàhn A. Wilson suggested that the
7 Arthur F. Wright, "Symbolism and Function: Re-
flections on Changan and Other Great Cities," Jour-
nal of Asian Studies, Vol. 24 (1965), pp. 670-71.
1973 AMBIGUITY IN ATTITUDES
spatial balance characteristic of Egyptian art
and cosmos is prompted by the symmetry of
Egypt's geographical features: perception, in
the Egyptian environment, reinforces concep-
tion. 8 However, the psychological weight of the
cardinal points is 1).ardly equal: east, as in
China, is the place of birth and west that of
death. In the ritual that deifies the king, the
body proceeds westward from the valley tem-
ple to the pyramid at the edge of the desert.
Direction and procession detract from the con-
cept of perfect symmetry. South, to ancient
Egyptians, is the source of life, because the fer-
tilizing waters of the Nile come from that di-
rection. The word for "face" is the same as that
for "south," and the word for "back of the
head" has also the meaning of "north. "f) Like
the Chinese, but for a different reason, the
Egyptian faces south.
The Indonesian world view, we have seen, is
vertically structured into mountain, land of
man, and sea. Life-giving water cornes from the
mountain; calamity, sickness, and death come
from the underworld of the sea. The polarized
values of the upper- and underworlds are trans-
posed to the horizontal plane, imparting a simi-
lar emotional asymmetry to the points of the
cardinal directions. In central Bali the center is
the human sphere (madiapa). It is subject to
beneficent influences (winds) from the north
and east, which are the directions of the moun-
tain and of sunrise; it is also subject to nefari-
ous influences from the west and the south,
which are the directions of the sea and of sun-
seL 10 The spatial meaning of central Bali is
complexe On the one hand, a reference grid of
cardinal points gives order and symmetry to
space. The concept of balance is reinforced by
the idea that the northeast and southwest winds
are complementary forces impinging on the
middle world of human beings. On the other
hand, the emotional attraction of the north-and-
east pole must greatly outweigh that of the
south-and-west pole. Ruman beings are directed
to the pole of life, whether this lies in the north
and east as in central Bali, or in the north and
8 John A. Wilson, "Egypt: The Nature of the Uni-
verse," in Henri Frankfort, H. A. Frankfort, John A.
Wilson, and Thorkild Jacobsen, Before Philosophy
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Book, 1951), pp. 49-51.
9 Wilson, op. cil., footnote 8, p. 51.
10 Justus M. van der Kroef, "Dualism and Sym-
bolic Antithesis in Indonesian Society," Anzerican
Anthropologist, Vol. 56 (1954), pp. 847-62.
415
west as in Java. The conflict extends into the
social dichotomies. Societies in Indonesia are
sometimes divided into "sacred" (leader) and
"profane" (fol1ower). The inequality of the two
parts is evident, yet they are conceived to be
complementary and "equal," in the value-neu-
tral sense that the one is necessary to the other .11
The world of the Keresan Indians in New
Mexico is highly structured and symmetrica1. 12
Cardinal points are important. They are called
"middle north," "middle east" and so on, mean-
ing that they lie at midpoints between the cor-
ners of the earth. The psychological weight of
the cardinal directions in the Keresan cosmos is
not so sharply differentiated as that in Chinese,
Indonesian, and Egyptian mythical spaces. To
the Indians the god who lives at the north moun-
tain is indeed the god of winter and snow, and
the god of the south mountain helps crops to
grow, but the Indians make no sharp distinc-
tion between a dark world of sleep and death in
the north and a light world of growth and life in
the south. The winter-summer dichotomy is a
major component of aIl pueblo Indian world
views: major festivities are geared to the sea-
sonal cycle, but the temporal poles "winter" and
"summer" do not appear to be identified ritually
with specifie cardinal points. In the disposition
of Keresan space, east and west are no more
polarized emotionally than north and south.
East is the location of Dawn Mountain and the
Place of Sunrise. These names suggest birth and
life's renewal, but the west is the home of the
Katsina, the rainmakers. Warmth is associated
with the directions east and south: warmth is
essential to plant life but so is rain, and the
rainmakers live in the west. Thus, unlike the
quasi-symmetrical world views of other peoples,
the world of the Keresan Indians appears to be
symmetrical both in conception (i.e., in the spa-
tial grid defined by directional points) and in
the emotional tone and stress of the points.
11 Kroef, op. cil., footnote 10, pp. 853-54. Kroef's
authority is N. J. C. Geise, Badujs en Moslems in
Lebak Parahiang Zuid Banten (Leiden: 1952), p. 25.
12 Leslie A. White, "The World of the Keresan
Pueblo Indians," in Stanley Diamond, editor, Primi-
tive Views of the World (New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 1964), pp. 83-94. For a recent survey
of the Pueblo world view, see Alfonso Ortiz, "Ritual
Drama and the Pueblo World View," in Alfonso Or-
tiz, editor, New Perspectives on the Pueblos (Albu-
querque: University of New Mexico Press, 1972), pp.
135-61.
416 YI-Fu
However, this is not aIl. Though the mythical
space of the Keresan is symmetrical, their myth-
ical history, with its necessary passage through
time, is not. The Indians trace their origin to a
point in the north. They emerged from the earth
at Shipap, close to "middle north," and migrated
south to the White House where they acquired
their cultural skills; thence they moved further
south, after much wandering, to the present site
at the center of the cosmos. History and move-
ment, which are registered in Keresan space, are
directional: they point south. The arrow of his-
tory and movement distorts the static symmetry
of the Keresan world. Its ambiguity and ambiva-
lence lie in this mapping of history and move-
ment on a symmetrical spatial concept.
In the modern world the cardinal directions
carry no symbolical overburden. They are sin1-
ply a convenient means to differentiate a terri-
tory. Australia, for example, is divided into
Western Australia, Northern Territory, and
South Australia. The eastern and older part of
the island-continent is known under other
names. "Western," "Northern," and "South" are
labels and no more. Similarly, city streets in the
United States are qualified by directional terms
with no value significance. In Minneapolis, an
address on the twenty-fourth street south hardly
suggests that one lives closer to the sun, the
source of life. But the United States as a whole
is divided into regions with directional labels:
the East (or Northeast), the South, the Deep
South, the Midwest, the Upper Midwest, the
West, the Far West, and the Southwest. Unlike
the Australian use of directional terms, regional
labels in the United States are not promulgated
by central authority; like the regions of mythi-
cal space the names and meaning of American
regions are acquired in the course of time, as
part of the growing lore of a people. In the
mythical space of traditional societies, cardinal
points are tied to astronomical events and to the
seasons with their control over life and death.
American space is not a stage set for the enact-
ment of cosmic drama, but, as regional novels
and literature show, the physical environment,
particularly climate, does play a large role in
giving personality to such regions as the South,
the Northeast, and the West. 13 In the mythical
space of traditional societies the idea of center
or "middle place" is important. The idea of a
13 Leslie A. Fiedler, The Return of the Vanishing
Anlerican (New York: Stein & Day, 1968), pp. 16-22.
TUAN December
center or heartland is also important to Ameri..:
can space. But movement is another central
theme in American history. The movement of
the people to the west, combined with the pow-
erful lure of the West as an ideal, distorts the
sense of symmetry that the concept of center
and of cardinal points imparts. Hence the term
"Middle States" is short-lived. Heartland Amer-
ica is not known as the Middle States but as the
Middle West.
Center and Periphery
Neither the idea of the vertical cosmos nor
the structuring of space within a grid of cardinal
directions is universal. The habit of differentiat-
ing space into center and periphery, however,
seems to be worldwide. It is the expression in
space of ethnocentrism, a posture that perhaps
aIl human groups assume, though in varying de-
gree. A circle or a series of concentric circles
represents best the closely linked ideas of cen-
trality and symmetry. The cosmographic dia-
grams of many cultures are circular. From the
sacred center, whether it be Babylon, Delphi,
Jerusalem, the Imperial City of China, or the
Yurok tribe's Qe'nek, space radiates outward
and becomes increasingly profane, ending in
wilderness or in a ring of primordial waters.
What kinds of ambiguity and ambivalence are
built into the "center-periphery" or circular
type of spatial structure? Three can be distin-
guished: 1) the ambiguous meaning of the sa-
cred center; 2) the contradiction between myth-
ical heartland and geographical reality; and 3)
the disjunction between isometric architectural
space and oriented man.
The meaning of the sacred center is ambigu-
ous. Whereas profane space at the periphery is
chaotic, wild, threatening, and dark, sacred
space at the center is orderly and secure, yet it
can inspire awe. The sacred center is bathed in
light, yet it is also veiled in dark mystery. The
center, whether occupied by the men's house,
shrine, or temple, is space that is set apart archi-
tecturally and by custom. The center has high
accessibility, yet to reach it is difficult as would
be any journey that takes one into the heart of
the matter, the sacred core of mystery.14 In
Sumer, for example, the increasing isolation of
the center could be traced from the early part
of the fourth millennium B.C. The city's tem-
14 Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Conlparative Religion
(Cleveland: World Publishing Co., 1963), pp. 367-85.
1973 AMBIGUITY IN ATTITUDES
pIe tended to be more and more isolated from
the daily affairs of the people. l t was raised on
platforms of increasing height and bounded by
thick walls.l 5 In this way an area of darkness
and mystery, inaccessible to common folk, was
created at the heart of a space that had been
originally wrested from the wilderness for hu-
man benefit.
When we consider a large country another
type of ambiguity and ambivalence may emerge
in the evaluation of space that is differentiated
into center (or core) and periphery. The wealth
of a large country is likely to be distributed over
its fringes. There, under a favorable climate ag-
riculture and settlements can be expected to
flourish. The core area, by comparison, is un-
productive. Its climate tends to be severe; it
may be dry or poorly drained; above aIl, it is
remote from the focal points of international
trade. Yet the core (i.e., "heart") of a country
has a mystique that the materially well-endowed
periphery lacks. A common geopolitical myth
is that the "soul of a nation" does not lie in thé
coastal cities but up-country, in the interior. A
recent example of the potency of this myth is
the creation, at great expense, of a new capital
for Brazil in the depth of that nation's unde-
veloped land. 16 Americans have also subscribed
to the mystique of the heartland. By the late
1860s Americans east of the Mississippi and
north of the Ohio began to drop the term
"West" for their part of the republic in favor of
the hybrid "Midwest." The Midwest, as J. B.
Jackson puts it, "had from the start far more
than a geographical significance; it meant the
heartland of the United States, the moral and
social epicenter of the nation. "17 Midwestern
Congressmen agitated briefly for moving the
national capital inland to St. Louis. Interior
cities nurtured overweening ambitions. At dif-
ferent times Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Chicago
vied for supremacy, until the palm finally went
to Chicago. By the end of the nineteenth cen-
tury Chicago was not only the transportation
and manufacturing pivot of the heartland, but it
15 S. Giedion, The Eternal Present: The Beginnings
of Architecture (New York: Bollingen Foundation,
1964), pp. 189-93.
16 Philippe Pinchemel, "Brasilia-ville symbole ou le
mythe devenu réalité," La Vie Urbaine, Vol. 3 (1967),
pp. 201-34.
17 J. B. Jackson, American Space: The Centennial
Years 1865-1876 (New York: W. W. Norton & Co.,
1970), p. 58.
417
also aspired to becoming the literary center of
the United States and the capital of a specifi-
cally American civilization. 18 Unlike sorne other
large countries the core area of the United
States was and remains exceptionally produc-
tive. The heartland mystique thus did not con-
flict with geographical reality, but it had to com-
pete with the rival mystique of the West, a term
that eventually embraced the vast wealth of the
Pacifie coast. The theme of westward movement
in the United States has distorted the idea of
symmetrical space and compromised the heart-
land myth. Disregarding sense, the core of the
United States is both "middle" and "west."
Australia's heartland myth, unlike its Ameri-
can analogue, is not weakened by the competing
lure of a moving western frontier. Renee, in
Australia the core-and-periphery dialectic has
played a more central role in the makeup of the
nation's personality. The core of the island-
continent is a desert or steppe, a "Brown coun-
try." Agricultural wealth and settlements are
concentrated along the coastal fringes. Yet, as
the Australian literature amply shows, the in-
terior (bush or outback) is the nation's "sacred
space." Since the 1830s the dry interior has
evoked the ambivalent images of beauty and
terror. The bush country is sterile and miserable,
but it is also, in sorne sense, sacred as the popu-
lar epithets of landscape description, "prime-
val" and "timeless," suggest. Most Australians
live on the well-watered periphery, but "home"
is the interior. Dorothea Mackellar captured this
sentiment in a popular poem called My Coun-
try.19 Here is a representative stanza:
Though earth hold many splendours,
Wherever 1 may die,
1 know to what brown country
My homing thoughts will fly.
Closely paralleling the idea of center and
periphery is that of center and symmetry. The
18 Howard Mumford Jones, The Age of Energy:
Varieties of American Experience, 1865-1915 (New
York: Viking Press, 1971), pp. 71-72.
19 Quoted by Brian Elliott, The Landscape of Aus-
tralian Poetry (Melbourne: F. W. Cheshire, 1967),
p. 3. On the origins and development of the Australian
national mystique, see Russel Ward, The Australian
Legelld (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1966).
The author argues that a specifically Australian out-
look grew up among the bush workers in the interior,
and that this group has had an influence, far exceed-
ing its numerical and economic strength, on the atti-
tudes of the whole Australian community.
418 YI-Fu
idea of center and symmetry is weIl represented
by any isometric figure, and perfectly by the
circle, which has no favored directions, and
whose symmetry is independent of any external
reference grid. In different parts of the world
the circle, the square, or regular polygon is a
popular motif in art and religion; it symbolizes
timelessness, harmony, and perfection. Sacred
architecture embodies eternal values and is per-
ceived to stand at the center (navel) of the
world. The shape of the circle expresses ideally
the meaning of sacred space. To a lesser degree
any isometric form signalizes the values of cen-
trality, timelessness, and harmony. But the hu-
man figure, with its front and back, is asym-
metrical. Moreover, time for the human being
is pointed to the future by his sense of purpose.
Events move forward. Architectural forms that
are isometric, with no clear indication of front
and back, confuse the person who is not con-
cerned with the contemplation of eternity. He is
disoriented by the contradiction between the
mind's pleasure in symmetry and the forward
propulsion of life and events. The flow of time
and the progression of events are denied by
such architectural forms as the circular discs of
Peking's Altar to Heaven, the hemispherical
shrines (stupas) of India, and the domes that
soar above churches, mausoleums, and public
buildings.
Ambiguity exists both in large mythical space
and in small architectural space, for similar rea-
sons. But symmetry in architecture, unlike that
which cardinal points give to mythical space,
can be directly perceived, and its lack of con-
cordance with human asymmetry is immedi-
ately experienced. Ambiguity in architecture,
however, may be intentional. Architects have
deliberately introduced contradiction into their
works to increase the feel of tension, and hence
interest. Clarity is sacrificed for the kind of am-
biguity that makes the experience of spatial
forms more complex. Numerous examples of
contradiction appear in Mannerist and Rococo
architecture. Consider church plans in Western
Christendom. Two well-known traditions are
the basilica, which has monodirectional space,
and the central-type church, which has omnidi-
rectional space. But a third tradition departs
from the clarity of these "either-or" forms, and
deliberately seeks the ambiguity of "both-and."
Mannerist elliptical plans of the sixteenth cen-
tury attempted to be both central and direc-
tionaI. An unusual illustration is Gianlorenzo
TUAN December
Bernini's church, the Sant' Andrea al Quirinal
(1658-1670) in Rome; its main directional axis
spans contradictorily the short axis of the oval
ground plan. 20
POLARIZED FEELINGS
Folk wisdom sometimes suggests the ambi-
guity and ambivalence of attitudes to environ-
ment. People say, for example, "New York is a
good place to visit but you won't want to live
there." Or "the Midwest is a good place to live
in but who would want to visit it?" Excitement
brings the threat of intolerable strain, peaceful
life the shadow of boredom. Total endorsement
of a place is rare and somewhat suspect. Super-
patriots protest too much. The shifting, and even
polarization, of the meaning of words is one
kind of evidence for the instability of feelings
and of aIl mental phenomena. Words that de-
note qualities give rise to aIl sort of derivative
words which involve these qualities but also de-
part from them in varying degree: progressive
departure produces cognate terms in which the
original meaning is increasingly attenuated, end-
ing up in its exact opposite. Susanne Langer
notes that "gloom," which means darkness, is
derived from its opposite "glow. "21 "Swoon," tü
faint, has its origin in swogan, which means "to
sound, resound; make a noise." "Black" and
words designating "white" appear to have a
common root. "With" means "agreement" but
also "opposition and conflict." "Cleave" means
"to split apart" but also "to cling to." The Latin
altus means both "high" and "deep." Homo-
nyms with diametrically opposite meanings are
common in European languages. The Chinese
language can be just as contrary: it eschews sim-
ple denotations and often uses antonyms to
make an idea complete. Not only is this true
of propositions like "non-resistance means
20 Robert Venturi, C on7plexity and C olltradictioll in
Architecture (New York: The Museum of Modern
Art, 1966), pp. 30-33.
21 Susanne K. Langer, Mind: An Essay on Feeling
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1967), Vol. 1, pp.
195-96. Two major sources for Langer's explication
of word meanings and word origins are W. W. Skeat,
An Etymological Dictionary of the English Lan-
guage (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910), and Alois
Walde, Vergleichendes W orterbuch der indo-gern1an-
isclzen Sprachen, edited by S. Pokorny (Berlin and
Leipzig: W. de Gruyter & Co., 1927-1932). Langer
gives Skeat as the authority for deriving "gloom"
from "glow," but 1 do not find explicit support for
this derivation from Skeat.
1973 AMBIGUITY IN ATTITUDES
strength," but in single words. For example, in
the dictionary Shuo Wen (compiled around
120 A.D.), the word ch'u (going out) also
means chin (coming in), and the word luan
(disorder) embraces the sense of its opposite
chih (order). 22
The history of word-meanings shows that
feelings and primitive concepts, including those
directed to environment and place, have a tend-
ency to require their opposites for completion.
The nature of our own feelings confirms this
tendency. Experience tells us that when a feel-
ing or perceived quality reaches a great intensity
it is ready to induce its converse. The perfect
moment in feeling is one in which the threat of
evanescence and the threat of intolerability
achieve a precarious balance. This potential in-
stability and ambivalence of feeling finds paral-
leI in conceptual thought. Not aIl aspects of
thought can be expressed by conventional sym-
bolism without contradiction, for thought has
roots in primitive ideas of felt experience, and
these are ambivalent. Every primitive concept,
Langer believes, arises and exists in an area of
relevance which ranges from its own logical do-
main to its converse domain, and includes aIl
conceptions lying between these extremes: 23
The roots of language usually convey ideas of felt
experience, i.e., either of action or of impact, and
feeling is good or bad, pleasant or unpleasant, with
a continuum between them, which, taken from either
end, somewhere (not necessarily halfway) breaks
over into its opposite.
WILDERNESS, GARDEN, CITY
An extensive literature has grown around the
theme of how people from different back-
grounds have conflicting views of the environ-
ment. A lover of wilderness would want it
preserved, a motorboat enthusiast might seek
limited development and multiple use, while a
mining engineer urges maximum exploitation of
the wilderness area's mineraI resources. Here
we see confiicts that arise out of strongly held
opinions. Though confusion is a likely result
and compromise may be necessary to resolve
the confiict, each party may nonetheless see its
own program as clear and logical. A multiplicity
22 Tung-sun Chang, "A Chinese Philosopher's The-
ory of Knowledge," in Gregory P. Stone and Har-
vey A. Farberman, editors, Social Psychology through
Symbolic Interaction (Waltham: Gin-BlaisdeIl, 1970),
p. 131.
23 Langer, op. cit., footnote 21, p. 197.
419
of views held by different persons or interest
groups is psychologically distinct from the am-
biguity and ambivalence that arise out of the
nature of feeling in the same person or in the
same group of persons. It is with the latter that
we are concerned. Just as relations between
people may combine love and hate, attraction
and repulsion, so also the relations between peo-
ple and a physical setting. "The land, it's friend
and an enemy; it's both," said a yeoman of the
Deep South to Robert Coles, a clinical psychol-
ogist who uses in-depth interviews to arrive at
attitudes. 24 If human feelings and the primitive
concepts derived from them do indeed show a
tendency to polarize, then the strong and sim-
ple expressions of opinion that lead to action
may belong to the superficial layers of the mind
and hide undercurrents of doubt. Nothing, how-
ever, infuriates a person of passionate views
more than to be told that they are a cover for
deepseated uncertainties, and there is no way
of proving the uncertainties to him except in
pointing out the contradictions in his life and
beliefs. When the meaning of words and of
serious literature is analyzed, the presence of
doubt becomes evident in every important
sphere of experience, whether this be the fam-
ily, politics, or nature. In fact, a major role of
24 Robert Coles, Migrants, Sharecroppers, Moun-
taineers (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1971), p.
411. This book is an immensely rich source on the
environmental attitudes of inarticulate people, that is,
people who are not in the habit of rhapsodizing over
the beauties of nature and who would not respond weIl
to complicated and highly structured opinion surveys.
Coles knows the people because he has lived with
them over a period of years and is deeply concerned
with their everyday problems. His professional per-
spective is that of a clinical child psychologist. He
tries to know men, won1en, and children in sorne
depth. Not surprisingly he finds that their attitudes
toward place, home, and nature are often ambivalent.
A fairly typical sentence in the book is this: "1 [Coles]
have watched mountaineers slip through mountain
passes and valleys toward Dayton, say, or Chicago-
aIl too willingly, because work and the food money
can buy is far better than constant and unappeased
hunger. As they get ready to leave, those many men
and women and children, they deny having any re-
grets. And yet they do: they are losing something;
they feel low and sad; more precisely, they anticipate
the yearning they may later have, the homesickness,
the lovesickness, the sense of bereavement." (p. 23).
The expression "and yet" appears frequently in Coles's
book, suggesting the ambiguous and contradictory
feelings of migrants, mountaineers, and sharecroppers,
but also the author's own uncertainty before the task
of trying to understand other human beings.
420 YI-Fu
literature, oral and written, is to remind people
of the ambiguities in attitudes and values, ambi-
guities that people try to expel in the pursuit of
life's practical goals. Here are sorne illustrations
of ambiguity in the response to the basic envi-
ronmental categories of wilderness, garden, and
city.
Generally speaking, "wilderness" means the
unsown. Specifically, the term has been used to
designate different kinds of uninhabited terrain
including sandy or rocky desert, steppe, and
forest. The geographical image of wilderness has
changed as the word was applied successively to
European and North American environments,
but its fundamental meaning has remained the
same until the twentieth century. Its funda-
mental meaning, as given in the Bible, is nega-
tive: wilderness is primordial chaos, a howling
trackless waste, a dark world inhabited by mon-
sters and evil spirits. In the early part of the
eighteenth century, New England settlers still
saw the forests as formless wastes, the haunt of
savages and demons. 25 Even late in the nine-
teenth century, lumbermen in the remote forests
of the Upper Midwest nurtured a lively lore of
fantastical beasts and monsters. 26 Wilderness
was the realm beyond God's presence and some-
what beyond his control, a belief that Persian
dualism might have injected into the Judeo-
Christian faith. Yet the image of wilderness was
not wholly dark. In the Old Testament the Sinai
wastes symbolized death, disorder, and dark-
ness, but also God's redemptive love. The pre-
exilic prophets, in particular, interpreted the
forty years of wandering in the desert as a pe-
riod when God was especially close to Israel. 27
Christ was sent into the wilderness to be
tempted by Satan (Matthew 4: 1), yet Christ
also withdrew from men into a lonely spot so as
to pray to his Father (Mark 1: 35). Both the
temptation and the transfiguration took place on
a high mountain (Matthew 17: 1-3). Contra-
dictory attitudes persisted into the early Chris-
tian era. From the second to the fourth century,
hermits ventured into the Egyptian wilderness
25 Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the An1erican
Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), pp.
36-37.
26 Walker D. Wyman, Mythical Creatures of the
North Country (River Falls: State University Press,
1969) .
27 John W. Flight, "The Nomadic Idea and Ideal in
the Old Testament," Journal of Biblical Literature,
Vol. 42 (1923),pp.158-224.
TUAN December
as spiritual athletes: they hoped to strengthen
their souls by doing battle with Satan in his own
realm. Evil spirits and wild beasts, Satan's min-
ions, constantly tried their faith. Yet the her-
mits also saw themselves as living in Edens of
innocence. The wild beasts served Satan, but
they were also animaIs before the Fall who lived
in peace under man's dominion. "The desert
was, in effect, for the ascetics as for the biblical
Israelites at once the haunt of demons and the
realm of bliss and of harmony with the crea-
turely world."28 Tales of how the Desert Fathers
cared for wounded animaIs are perhaps the ear-
liest evidence we have of Western man's disin-
terested devotion to wild creatures. 29
The image of the garden is predominantly
positive. Most people now hardly suspect that
it has dark corners. The garden is ordered na-
ture, a place set apart from wilderness. It is the
oasis in the desert, the 1ush island in the ocean,
and the human settlement in the forest. 30 It is a
place of innocence, an Eden~ ln Sumerian, how-
ever, the meaning of edin is highly ambivalent.
On the one hand, it is a common designation for
the desert or steppe, the Nether World and
abode of hostile powers; on the other, it can
mean the opposite, a beautiful place adorned
with greenery. From the evidence of the ritual
texts it would seem that verdant edin turned into
a steppe when the invading demons carried off
the god Tammuz. Yet in other parts of the texts
it was the god himself who through his "word"
destroyed the land. 31 The meaning of Eden in
Genesis is likewise ambiguous. Eden contained
the snake which tempted Eve, who tempted
Adam to eat fruit from the tree of the knowledge
of good and evil. Yet God, the omnipotent cre-
ator, was ultimately responsible for both the
28 George H. Williams, Wilderness and Paradise in
Christian Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1962),
p. 41.
29 Sir Ernest A. Wallis Budge, translator and editor,
Staries of the Roly Fathers, Being histories of the
anchorites, recluses, monks, coenobites and ascetic
Pathers of the Deserts of Egypt, between A.D. 25 and
A.D. 400 circiter, compiled by Athanasius, Archbishop
of Alexandria; Palladius, Bishop of Helenopolis; Saint
Jerome, and others (London: Oxford University Press,
1934) .
30 For the ambivalent symbolism of the garden, the
desert, and the sea in Western literature, see W. H.
Auden, The Enchafèd Flood (New York: Randonl
House, 1950).
31 Alfred Hader, "The Notion of the Desert in
Sumero-Accadian and West-Semitic Religions," Upp-
sala Universitets Arrskrift, No. 3 (1950), pp. 14-34.
1973 AMBIGUITY IN ATTITUDES
snake and the tree: God tempted Adam and
Eve. The trees of life and of the knowledge of
good and evil were planted in the middle of the
garden. The Eden myth thus locates tempta-
tion in the heart of the landscape of innocence.
The Fall itself had ambivalent results. It led to
Adam's and Eve's banishment, but it "opened
their eyes." (Genesis 3: 7). Theologians in the
Middle Ages elaborated a distinction between
the good garden of sapienta and the evil garden
of scientia. 32 Here, then, is a persistent theme in
Western history: the conflict between the de-
sire, on the one hand, for a life of innocence
and retiring wisdom in the garden, on a tropical
island, in a monastery, in a village or small
town, in a commune; and on the other hand,
the desire for knowledge or a life of effective
and strenuous action. The garden, like its sym-
bolical analogues the tropical island or the iso-
lated small town, is a small world set apart, the
hoytus conclusis and the vulva of the earth. Its
symbolisms of enclosure, of water and fertility,
are feminine. It is an organized world that nur-
tures life: to it one withdraws for solace, se-
curity, and rest. Yet it is a smothering world,
and the temptation to open one's eyes and strike
out can be irresistible, whether this be in the
direction of wilderness or in the opposite direc-
tion of the city.
The city is a supreme achievement of man-
kind, architecturally and as a social system. In
antiquity, it was an image of the cosmos; it
stood for the universality and majesty of the
heavens. The city was sacred and a ritual cen-
ter: a wall commonly separated it from the pro-
fane suburbs and countryside. 33 Among thinkers
from Aristotle and Augustine to Ebenezer How-
ard and Lewis Mumford, the city meant far
more than bricks and mortar: it signified an
ideal state of society. Among utopian writers
from Sir Thomas More (Amaurot) to Edward
Bellamy (Boston), utopias either contained im-
portant cities or took the form of a city. In
China, nature and the countryside received the
endless encomiums of poets, yet it was the city
that imaged the cosmos, and language itself be-
trays the preeminence of the city in the expres-
sions shang ch'eng and hsia hsiang, that is, "go-
ing up to the city" and "going down to the
32 Williams, op. ciL, footnote 28, p. 47.
33 Paul Wheatley, The Pivot of the Four Quarters
(Chicago: Aldine, 1971).
421
countryside."34 In the Western World, such hon-
orific words as "civil," "civilized," and "citizen"
share a common root with "city," and are re-
lated ultimately to the Sanskrit siva, which
means "friendly," "dear to one," and has the
connotation of home. 35 By contrast, "peasant,"
"pagan," "heathen," "villein," and "villain" are
terms derived from aspects of the countryside.
The images of the city are positive. Yet from
the beginning the city also repelled. In man-
kind's earliest epic, Gilgamesh, the lord of Uruk
(Sumer) enjoyed the amenities of his wealthy
and powerful city; nonetheless he abandoned it
in favor of the company of the wild man En-
kidu, who "knew nothing of the cultivated
land . . . , ate grass in the hills with the gazelle,
and jostled with wild beasts at the water-
holes."~~6 In the üld Testament it was Cain, the
fratricide, who first built a city (Genesis 4: 17).
Later when the descendants of Noah attempted
to build a city in the land of Shinar, and so
"make a name of themselves," the jealous God
intervened. He saw that mortal men strove to
join forces and reach the heavens on their own
strength. To prevent this, he dispersed the build-
ers. Moreover, he made them speak in mutually
incomprehensible tongues so that they could not
hope to congregate again in sufficient numbers
to form a great society (Genesis 11: 1-9). This
story would seem to suggest that the ancient Is-
raelites were ambivalent toward the city, which
symbolized for them achievement, but achieve-
ment was a temptation to pride and an offense
to God. Among peoples of the ancient world,
the Greeks of the Periclean Age were reputed to
have had the most uncompromising loyalty to
the city: the city-state as a sociopolitical ideal
34 The effort made by the government of the Peo-
ple's Republic of China to send young people from
the cities into the countryside and distant provinces
has met with resistance. The slogan shang shan, hsia
hsiang ("up to the hills, down to the villages") says
rather more than is intended, for going down to the
villages (hsia hsiang) is going down in more than one
sense of the word; "Chinese Youth Given Rural Life,"
New York Times, January 14, 1973, section A, p. 10.
Rhoads Murphey discussed contemporary China's am-
bivalent attitude toward the city and the countryside
in "City and Countryside as Ideological Issues: India
and China," Comparative Studies in Society and His-
tory, Vol. 14 (1972), pp. 250-67.
35 Eric Partridge, Origins: A Short Etymological
Dictionary of Modern English (New York: Macmil-
lan, 1959).
36 N. K. Sandars, The Epic of Gilgamesh (Har-
mondsworth: Penguin Books, 1964), p. 61.
422 YI-Fu
was their invention. Greek citizens supposedly
enjoyed the marketplace and public life, leaving
the domestic sphere to women, children, and
slaves. Fifth century Athens boasted fine pub-
lic buildings and modest residences, yet wealthy
citizens probably spent at least a part of the
year away from the crowded city in the peace
and privacy of their country estates. 37
The meanings of wilderness, garden, and city
change through time, becoming more compli-
cated as the objective relations between and
among the three environments shift, and as new
significances are added to the old. 1 should like
to stress not so much the fact that meaning al-
ters through time as the fact that ambiguity and
ambivalence inhere in the concepts of wilder-
ness, garden, and city from the very beginning.
As the relative extent and character of the ob-
jective environments change, sorne of the nega-
tive meanings that lie embedded in the concepts
of environment can be expected to surface while
the positive meanings recede, or vice versa. It
is the persistence of the meanings and their per-
sistent ambiguity that is worth noting. Wilder-
ness, garden (countryside), and city are endur-
ing metaphors for states of the mind in civilized
man. The city symbolizes social order and
power, as weIl as confusion, strain, and sterility.
The garden or countryside is the idyIlic place of
temporary withdrawal, but as a permanent
abode it raises the specter of ennui and defeat.
Wilderness is primeval chaos and potency, a
threat and a lure. It is remarkable how this dia-
lectical schema of human yearning, with its
landscape correlates, appears repeatedly in the
literature both of the West, from the time of
Virgil, and of China from the Han dynasty.38
Its importance in American literature has been
amply demonstrated by Leo Marx, who traced
the course of the schema from Thoreau and
Emerson to such noted writers of the twentieth
century as Frost, Hemingway, and Faulkner. 39
The tendency of feelings to polarize applies
not only to wilderness, garden, and city, but to
any environment for which we feel deeply. Atti-
tudes, of course, change. A whoIly new physical
37 G. Glotz, The Greek City and Its Institutions
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965), pp. 302-03.
38 Gilbert Highet, Paets in a Landscape (New York:
Knopf, 1957).
39 Leo Marx, "Pastoral Ideals and City Troubles,"
in The Fitness of Man's Environn1ent, Smithsonian
Annual II (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institu-
tion Press, 1968), pp. 121-44.
TUAN December
setting, or a radicaIly different socioeconomic
order, stimulates response that has. no deep
roots in the past. Not aIl ideas and sentiments
go back to the Greeks. Yet often, when we ex-
amine a new attitude closely, we find that it has
existed in the past as a subdued counterpoint to
what was then the major theme: the city, for
example, is always both loved and hated; at one
time it is more loved than hated, at another,
more hated than loved-and this shift from one
pole to another of complex and ambivalent feel-
ing is what we calI change. 40
CONCLUDING REMARKS
Attitude to environment and space is insepa-
rable from attitudes to people and life's purpose
and meaning. In the thick of life we find that
feelings, even those we hold strongly, are not
without their ambiguities. Niobe's twelve chil-
dren were kiIled, yet in the midst of tears she
could feel the pleasant pang of hunger, so noted
the lliad. In the theater one enjoys a tragedy.
Children say, "it's so hot, it's cold," just as in
camp art criticism, sorne films, places, and
things are deemed so bad that they are almost
good. Theologians declare paradoxicaIly feUx
cuipa. Art is a search for harmony but also
"man's rage for chaos."41 Ambiguities and con-
tradictions of this kind are the commonplaces of
life, and they naturaIly permeate our feelings
for, and attitudes toward, environment and
space. The reasons for the ambiguities and con-
tradictions are manifold. In this paper 1 have
not sought to prove that people have ambiguous
attitudes: the fact is hard to prove since the
workings of the mind cannot be directly ob-
served and people tend to deny their ambiva-
lences; rather 1 have described three situations
or causal conditions under which ambiguous re-
40 The idea that dominant visions persist, and that
changes are often shifts of emphasis in the same vision
or shifts in the relative importance of the dominant
visions, is illustrated in the Australian experience.
R. L. Heathcote recognized five basic historical atti-
tudes toward the Australian landscape and concluded
that, "At any one time particular emphasis might be
on one or another, but l suggest that all will remain
-if not in the foreground certainly just over the hori-
zon." R. L. Heathcote, "The Visions of Australia
1770-1970," in A. Rappoport, editor, Australia as
Human Setting: Approaches ta the Designed Environ-
n1ent (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1972), pp. 77-98.
41 The theme of Morse Peckham's book Man's Rage
-for Chaos: Bi%gy, Behavior, and the Arts (New
York: Schocken Books, 1967).
1973 AMBIGUITY IN ATTITUDES
sponses may emerge. Briefly, the causes of am-
biguity are:
1) The fluctuations of mood and perception
in the experience of a complex environ-
ment over an extended period of time.
Even Edwin James, Long's chronicler
and a major contributor to the myth of
the Great American Desert, held an op-
timistic view of afforestation that was out
of keeping with his dominant mood.
2) The discrepancy between the mind's pen-
chant for symmetry and life's bias in fa-
vor of movement and of certain psycho-
logical values. The reference grid of
mythical space is symmetrical, but cos-
mogony or a mythical history of human
origins tends toward asymmetry since it
usually has a beginning and is directed
toward an end.
3) Feelings and primitive concepts contain
the seeds of their converse: they require
their opposites for definition.
Action, it is claimed, speaks louder than
words; hence to determine a people's attitudes
one has only to observe the action and its effects.
Geographers tend to favor this approach, since
we have traditionally studied the material im-
423
pact of natural and human forces on the earth·'s
surface. The approach has the defect of arbi-
trarily excluding the mental realm in the study
of behavior. Moreover, its practical value is
limited. It does not tell the real estate developer
whether people will want to move into housing
of a certain quality. To find out, a survey of
opinions backed by an analysis of the socioeco-
nomic status of prospective buyers is necessary.
S~c~ a survey would have much greater pre-
dIctIve power and long-range value if we recog-
nize the ambiguity and ambivalence in the so-
licited answers and can ascertain their cause. A
technique for the measurement of ambiguity and
ambivalence is not available: one difficulty is
that the strong verbal expression of a belief is
not in itself sufficient evidence for concluding
the absence of ambivalence. Before we can de-
velop a technique to measure a phenomenon, it
must be recognized and its general character de-
scribed. The phenomenon of ambivalence in hu-
man nature is clearly recognized in the humani-
ties, particularly in literature. Geographers
should feel free to explore this insight and bring
it to bear on the problems of perception, atti-
tude, value, judgment, and behavior that are the
quintessentially human horizons of our field.