Mirrors, masks and diverse milieux

Abstract

Was Ihr den Geist der Zeiten heist Das ist im Grund der Herren eigner Geist In dem die Zeiten sich bespiegeln… (Faust) (And what you call the Spirit of the Ages Is that the spirit of your learned sages The times a-mirroring…) At Columbus, Ohio, where the Association of American Geographers met in 1965, there was obviously something new in the air. Eminent geographers and psychologists charmed a packed auditorium with ideas about environmental behaviour and perception. This new frontier was to welcome not only interdisciplinary research, but it was also to offer a common focus of curiosity to geographers of both ‘man-land’ and ‘spatial’ traditions. Why, even the age-old impasse between ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ orientations could be transcended. Some 17 years later in San Antonio, Texas, the same Association hosted sessions on environmental perception. One caught a glimpse of the volume and variety of research which the intervening years had produced and, even more, one noted the drama of a selective migration of ideas back and forth across the Atlantic: Marxist, positivist, phenomenological, and structuralist approaches were juxtaposed, not always too harmoniously