Abstract
This chapter tries to scope the influence of phenomenology and hermeneutics for place-based methodologies and concepts in Geography. As this metatheoretical concept is seen as paradigmatic to cope with the understanding of places and (social) spaces, it is astonishing that its significance seems to be still underdeveloped or overlooked. The importance and productivity of hermeneutics and phenomenology to contribute to place-related phenomena like globality or transnationality is evident, but not the most popular strand in contemporary Human Geography. As well, it is challenged by ‘post’- and by ‘anti’-hermeneutic approaches like post-phenomenology or deconstruction, which misconceive its potential to raise their argument against the ‘limitations’ of classic phenomenology; it is argued that this perspective is based on a self-contradicting conceptionalizing of the social, which cannot tap the potential of hermeneutics to reconstruct life-world experiences like places, architectures, other beings, or atmospheres. Here we trace the arrival as well as the significance and the prospects of hermeneutic approaches in Geography in the light of such discussions.
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Notes
- 1.
There is no English or French equivalent to the German term “Leib”, which is at the center of phenomenology. Body/belly might accomplish with corpes/ventre in French, but can’t cover fully the meaning of “Leib”: the reason why Merleau-Ponty (1962) used this term.
- 2.
Even the most ‘decentering’ approach to human subjectivity, Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalysis, had to bend back the unconscious talk of the analyzed to the subject of analysis, let alone that he explicitly declared that the analyst knows nothing about the analyzed. There is no social knowledge without a subject, a fact that the ‘postmodern’ interpretation of Lacan’s writings never realized.
- 3.
What is disturbing about a ‘post’- or ‘anti’-phenomenological critique on hermeneutics - drawing on constructivism and/or deconstruction – is, that it doesn’t provide any precise method or a general methodology in the light of their popular claims (comp. Ash and Simpson 2014; Lea 2009; Lorimer 2005).
- 4.
For instance, Lea (2009, 377 f.) who is self-critical on this.
- 5.
Bollnow is particularly interesting, because he explicitly refers to physical space (dimensions) as well as social space (built environment, other beings) as constitutive for (spatial) experiences, the first often being neglected in contemporary discourse or even ‘accursed’ in the sense of Bataille.
- 6.
But he did not have a conception for what is now called ‘place’ in the sense-of-place or place-and-space debate. He called it “lived space”, being very near to what H. Lefebvre developed and what is now at the heart of the discussions.
- 7.
There might occur some possible connections to Deleuze’ ideas here, but he stresses more (or solely) the aspects of power incorporated in this volatile process. But one might see congruencies of the phenomenological concept of the Leib and the corporeal practices Psychogeography and others point out; alone, we don’t have the possibility to discus this here.
- 8.
This separation only makes sense for analytical reasons. In fact, every practice seems to be a dialectics between both as there is nothing purely natural (mountains) nor purely social (a path), but – to reject any postmodern relativism – incorporates always a material/physical aspect (dimension, surface etc.), which is not ‘constructed’, but constitutive.
- 9.
That emotions are seen as ‘inner’ feeling is moreover a historical effect of the modern, see Löw (2008, 44) in accordance with Schmitz.
- 10.
Schütz had appropriated the notion of flowing consciousness, or duration, from Henri Bergson (see Srubar 1981, 25 ff.).
- 11.
That is the reason why virtual social contacts (Facebook etc.) are felt as ‘abstract’ and don’t have the same social consequences real world relations have. Some even avoid them for that reason and ‘escape’ to virtuality, trying to substitute them. Both aspects show the distinct and basic influence the living body/Leib may have on social ties.
- 12.
Place, of course, is also ‘produced’ by these bodily subjects (see Cresswell in this volume), and not to be understand as a passive container.
- 13.
A very helpful qualitative approach to structure and objectify the constructions of the researched subjects and their spatialities of the life-world in a reconstructive process was developed by Rolf Bohnsack (2000). Unfortunately we cannot discuss the implications for methods here. See also Winchester and Rofe (2010).
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Dörfler, T., Rothfuß, E. (2017). Place, Life-World and the Leib: A Reconstructive Perspective on Spatial Experiences for Human Geography. In: Janz, B. (eds) Place, Space and Hermeneutics. Contributions to Hermeneutics, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52214-2_29
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