Traveling in Lifeworlds: New Perspectives on (Post) Humanism, Situated Subjectivities, and Agency from a Travel Diary

This article argues for building bridges between humanistic geographical traditions and current posthumanistic approaches destabilizing the centrality and the very epistemological status of the human subject. Extending and putting in relation recent literature highlighting the possible continuities over the ruptures between these traditions and feminist scholarship arguing for the political relevancy of intimate writings and emotional geographies, I analyze an exceptional archival document recently discovered in the Anne Buttimer archives at University College Dublin: Buttimer’s travel diary relating her 1965 and 1966 trips to France and continental Europe, when she began to build her transnational and multilingual scholarly networks. Buttimer was one of the first geographers to explore “lifeworlds,” and this document simultaneously reveals the emotional experiences of discovery and the role played in that by circumstances and external agencies decentering and problematizing subjective intentionality. These journeys profoundly affected Buttimer’s early scholarly career, leading to her first critical questionings of the institutions in which she was inserted. Complementing recent claims for a “new humanism” taking onboard the critiques coming from scholars informed by “anti/posthumanism,” I argue that the mobility, situatedness, and relational nature of in-becoming subjects, at the same time acting and being acted on, allows for reconsidering human subjectivity and agency in more complex contexts. The document that I analyze shows how human subjectivity can be considered as an actor in relational and circumstantial encounters, contextually building lifeworlds, rather than a despotic monopolist of knowledge and agency as suggested by some simplified narratives.