Segmented Worlds and Self: Group Life and Individual Consciousness

In Segmented Worlds and Self, Yi-Fu Tuan is sensitive to the fact that “the isolated, critical and self-conscious individual is a cultural artifact” whose development “is closely tied to the evolution of aworld that is progressively more complex, specialized, and segmented.” (p. 139) He argues that in the West this process of segmentation began at the end of the Middle Ages when communal forms of life started to disintegrate and gave way to more individualistic modes of experience and perception. Tuan explores certain manifestations of this process, particularly how the increasing preoccupation with individuality, privacy, and interiority is mirrored in the transformation of eating habits, living arrangements, and the nature of the theatre