Geographies of meaning and experience : Anne Buttimer's lifeworld

Anne Buttimer was an innovative human geographer who exerted an influence on the discipline from the early 1970s. This chapter explores Buttimer’s commitment to Humanistic Geography. That involved scrutinizing and putting to work ethical and social values to make Geography matter beyond only the university and theoretical speculation. Here, Buttimer drew especially on the idea of the “lifeworld”, that is, a person’s subjective lived experience. It was central to her key publications that included Values in Geography (1974), the article “Grasping the dynamism of lifeworld” (1976), and The Practice of Geography (1983). These publications demonstrated the situated and material links that exist between Geography and a person’s life trajectory, and were core to Buttimer’s humanistic approach. Her work established situated human experience as a key disciplinary research object.