ABSTRACT
According to the Web of Science, 'Grasping the Dynamism of Lifeworld' (Buttimer 1976) is Anne Buttimer's most widely-cited publication, written early in a career whose international achievements and reputation were appropriately crowned by appointment as President of the International Geographical Union in 2000. 'Lifeworld' appeared in the notable June 1976 number of the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, an issue that included the work of leading scholars including Leslie King, Robert Sack, Yi-Fu Tuan, and David Ward. The editor, John Hudson, placed Tuan's and Buttimer's papers beside each other, and together they offered an impressive manifesto for a newly-developing humanistic geography, a position that was taking shape to counter the reduction of human agency both in the prevailing tradition of spatial analysis and also in the forceful interpretations of a structural Marxism, that for all its intellectual vigour and claims to political progress was even more dismissive of the role of human agency outside the prescribed task of class struggle.
