PASSING STRANGE AND WONDERFUL

A s with each of his previous works, Yi-fu Tuan’s Passing Strange and Wonderful is an enlightening, and educational, tour into the world of culture. Building on his previous studies of life, self, and social groups as situated in culture and cosmos, Tuan introduces new and timely forays into not only the realm of aesthetics, but also the particular domain of aesthetics that constitutes "our lives. " In the introduction to Passing, his call to explore a world of everyday aesthetics suggests tremendous potential. One potential is that Tuan’s sensitive and easily read writing style will bring to a broader audience the emerging ideas on aesthetics and everyday life being explored in the more esoteric works of Giddens’s The Constitution of Society and Shusterman’s Pragmatic Aesthetics. Another potential is that having introduced the existence of a mundane aesthetic, a realm taken for granted by too many designers and planners, Tuan will provide neotraditionists with a substantive argument previously overlooked. Tuan’s wish, to deal with "the great importance of the aesthetic in our lives," is, however, sown only on ground he has previously covered. Aesthetics and nature as they influence "our lives" remain an idea in progress. Two feelings pervade Passing. The first is a sense of promise, which is enhanced through the prologue and Part I ("Aesthetics, Nature, and Culture") and Part II ("Sensory Delights"). The second feeling, that of having been misled, permeates Parts III, IV, and V: "A Cultural-Aesthetic Spectrum," "Synthesis of Space and the State," and "Aesthetics and Morality," respectively. Tuan does not mislead the reader intentionally. In his first sentence he states that he will delve into the importance of the aesthetic in our lives and the "different forms it takes in a spectrum of cultures. " That first sentence foreshadows the very difficulty that follows: Tuan’s unwillingness to let go of and build on his previous work on culture. In Parts I and II, Tuan lays the foundation for a recognition of culturally and physiologically derived aesthetics in our daily routines. The existence of such a view of life and land, and the reflective thinking it occasions in the reader, is worth the price of the book. Planners and designers would gain from reading about the routine aesthetics of taste, smell, touch, and sound that supplement the world they often know only as visual and two-dimensional. Tuan forces the reader to reflect on the taken-for-granted aspects of human habitation: desire, emotion, manipulation, and maintenance of space, and the part played by time as biography and as history. Through an overview of food, he reminds us of the scope of that which we take for granted. Food as sustenance, like other aspects of daily life, is also ritual, ceremony, manner, and mannerisms, an orchestration of harmonies of not only tastes but also colors, textures, and smells. The direction established in Parts I and II, our movement through aspects of visceral, routine life, through sensory needs and impulses, takes a sharp 180-degree turn in Part III: "A Cultural-Aesthetic Spectrum. " Rather than continue deeper into the world of personal and pragmatic aesthetics, Tuan reverts to what he knows best, culture. The remainder of Passing is pervaded with the sense that "I’ve read this before. " The return to Australian Aborigines, the Chinese, and Medieval Europeans, over and over again, brings Topophilia to mind. Through the remainder of the book, too many invaluable and diverse aspects of aesthetics as an integral part of our lives become implicit. The reader becomes increasingly responsible for making the connection between cultural norms and the aesthetic qualities of people’s personal environments. The sense of d~j~t vu is put aside in Chapter 7, "American Place and Scene," and Chapter 8, "Synesthesia, Metaphor, and Symbolic Spaces. " In both chapters the beginnings are more promising than their conclusions. In the former, Tuan summarizesJohn Stilgoe’s andJ. B.Jackson’s works rather than referencing them as he builds upon his own characteristic ways of knowing aesthetes and nature. In the latter, he relates the multisensory world, the world in which he reminds us that we hear colors and imagine smells, to cultural histories rather than personal situations. Aesthetics, as part and parcel of people’s daily lives, rather than a general aspect of various cultures, will hopefully be the focus of a future work by Yi-fu Tuan.