ABSTRACT
One way to describe progress in human-cultural geography in this century is to say that the concept ‘human’ has undergone progressive elaboration. ‘Man as a geological agent’ was an early formulation. Then came the notion of culturethat human beings are cultural beings. From the 1960s onwards a psychological dimension was added. And now, increasingly, human beings are seen as moral beings as well, subject to moral demands and dilemmas, and endowed with moral aspirations, which may be manifest as the yearning for the good life. As geographers become more fully aware of the complexity of human nature, they find simultaneously a need to re-examine certain keywords or conceptstraditional words in their subfield such as ‘home’ and ‘world’, and newer words, thrust upon them by the events of the day, such as ‘ethnicity’ (or ‘ethnicism’) and ‘cosmopolitanism’. How do we geographers understand these words? Will the attempt to articulate the meaning of these words give us a handle to understand real-life situations better at both the intimate personal and the impersonal political levels?
