2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Humanistic geography approaches research with the moral, epistemological (and sometimes metaphysical) principles and prejudices of humanism and the humanities. Geographers use the adjective humanistic primarily to denote a nonpositivist epistemology. Humanistic geography prospered after 1970 because it spoke to the millenarian fears and utopian hopes of the period. From phenomenology it adopted the concept of the life-world, a representation of reality constructed by the intentions and functional categories of particular human subjects, and it studied these 'places' phenomenologically and semiotically. Humanistic geography insisted that humans act, that is, deliberately cause things to happen, and are not mere passive, irresponsible agent of historical forces, hoping thereby to overcome the debilitating fatalism of structural thought and to properly understand the moral dimension of interpersonal relations. The fundamental humanistic method is interpretation, the attempt to understand the world as it appears to another person (to stand in his 'place'). Humanistic geographers entered this inner world primarily through landscape symbols and descriptions, and in doing so realized the goals of humanistic scholarship and education. Humanistic geography remains viable, but since the 1990s has yielded to instrumental rationality and the will to power.
