Classics in Human Geography Revisited: Buttimer, A., 1976: Grasping the dynamism of Lifeworld. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 66, 277-92

Commentary 1
This article appeared in a classic number of the Annals. Some of the best younger talents in the Association of American Geographers were commissioned to show the state of the art of American geography to the 1976 IGU Congress in Moscow. There was no overall theme but one emerged none the less. With articles by Yi-Fu Tuan on humanistic geography, Robert Sack on magic and space, David Ward on the mythology of the Victorian slum and Leslie King on alternatives to positivist economic geography, it amounted to something of a special issue on the philosophical turn of the time in Anglo-American human geography. As a graduate student then at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, I was acutely attuned to this mid-1970s turn to more cultural-humanistic perspectives and the possibilities they offered.