Born: 30 October 1937, Ireland
Died: 15 July 2017
Country most active: Ireland
Also known as: NA
This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Turlough O’Riordan. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Buttimer, Anne (1937–2017), geographer, was born in Ardcahan, Co. Cork, on 30 October 1937, one of five children (alongside sisters Mary and Carmel and brothers Denis and Andreas – another brother died in infancy) of Eileen (née Kelleher) and Jerome (‘Jeremiah’) Buttimer, who later farmed at Lackendarragh House, Glenville, Co. Cork. Jerome was a founding (1955) vice-chair of the National Farmers’ Association (later the Irish Farmers’ Association) and instrumental in the establishment (1958) of An Foras Talúntais (later Teagasc). He was president of the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society Ltd (1971–3), chair of An Bord Bainne and a member of the National Economic and Social Council. Buttimer’s father transformed his 300-acre farm from low-grade pasture, abundant in furze and heather, into a fertile and prosperous intensive dairy holding; her exposure to his cooperative and modernising impulses, integrated view of the rural environment and interest in international collaboration were formative. So too was her rural upbringing, observing how farm practices and landscapes adapted as Ireland modernised. Her childhood responsibilities on the farm grounded her impressive professional work ethic.
Buttimer attended four different primary schools, amongst them national schools in Dunmanway and Glenville. She boarded at the Presentation convent, Knocknagore, Crosshaven, then at Loreto secondary school in Fermoy, both in Co. Cork. Talented at languages, she gained a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in Latin, geography and maths at University College Cork (UCC) in 1957. She taught in a school for a year while completing a master’s (MA) in geography at UCC in 1958. Buttimer followed an elder sister into the Dominicans, enlisting in their receiving house in Crosshaven, then travelling to the Dominican community in Tacoma, Washington state, USA. She took Sister Mary Annette as her name in religion (the name appears on some of her early publications). In 1961 she obtained the standard general teaching certificate in Seattle, Washington, and worked with other religious orders on developing a curriculum for training teachers.
Encouraged by the Dominicans, in 1962 Buttimer commenced a doctorate (Ph.D.) in geography at the University of Washington, Seattle. Though undergoing training in conceptual and methodological approaches, which emphasised statistical and economic aspects of human development, Buttimer’s thesis (1965) explored human geography by examining French social geographic mentalities, then largely unknown in anglophone geography. As a postdoctoral fellow (1965–6) at the University of Louvain, Belgium, Buttimer deepened her philosophical knowledge, engaging with existentialism, phenomenology, structuralism and Marxism. She also expanded and published her thesis as Society and milieu in the French geographic tradition (1971), which proved influential. She looked back on her year in Belgium – where she was exposed to pre-1968 liberal and socialist ferment – as ‘eye-opening’ (Maddrell, 746).
Social and human geographer
Recruited by the head of the department of social and economic research following a recommendation from her doctoral supervisor, in 1968–70 Buttimer was a lecturer in urban studies at the University of Glasgow. As part of a multidisciplinary team of planners, economists and geographers, she evaluated the impact of urban planning and design on the lived experiences of communities who had been moved from slum dwellings to modern municipal housing. Buttimer thereafter focused on human lived experiences in her social fieldwork, undertaken in a variety of contexts and conditions. In 1970 Buttimer took up an invitation to return to the USA as a postdoctoral fellow at Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts. In 1971 she was appointed as an assistant professor at the university, where she taught in the graduate school of geography.
In 1976 Buttimer was a visiting Fulbright professor of social ecology at the University of Lund, Sweden. That year she relinquished her Dominican vows, commenced work on what became known as the Dialogue project (1977–88) with Torsten Hägerstrand, and gave a series of Fulbright-funded lectures around Europe. Her mother also died that year, and she came to regard 1976 as a personal watershed and a professional ‘midsummer’ (Maddrell, 748). Most of the Dialogue project was conducted while Buttimer was at Lund. There, she met mathematical physicist Bertram Broberg, rector of the Lund Institute of Technology, whom she married in 1979 in the Honan chapel in UCC. (Bertram, whose illustrations Buttimer frequently utilised in her lectures, died on 3 May 2005.) She continued the Dialogue project at Clark University (1979–81), where she was a full professor from 1980, and again at Lund University (1982–8).
Comprising recorded interviews and group discussions with over 200 academics and professionals from over thirty countries, the project employed autobiographical methodologies to better understand and stimulate interdisciplinary communication. It addressed emergent domain specialisation and the concomitant fragmentation of knowledge and expertise, seeking to bridge a growing chasm between the sciences and humanities. It yielded insights into vocational meaning, cognitive styles and the public benefits of scientific perspectives. In this influential project, and elsewhere, Buttimer formulated comprehensive frameworks to account for the temporal and spatial aspects of everyday human experience.
From 1983 to 1986, Buttimer gave lectures to UCC geography postgraduates each December, while she also held visiting lectureships at the Sorbonne in Paris (1986) and the University of Texas at Austin (1987) before she joined the University of Ottawa, Canada (1988–91). There she led a Canadian–Swedish project examining the human uses of woodland and their impacts on landscapes (1988–91), supported by the Royal Society of Canada. Made aware of a vacancy for the professorship of geography at University College Dublin (UCD), with the application deadline the following day, the chance to return to Ireland appealed to Buttimer, who submitted her application by fax; it was the only job she ever applied for.
As head of department (1991–2003) Buttimer restructured the undergraduate syllabus, adding courses on cultural geography and the history and practice of geography, and introduced postgraduate modules addressing cultural geography and sustainable development. Expecting collegiality to spur collaboration within the department, departmental tensions instead led her to establish cross-disciplinary links with UCD colleagues in the humanities, social sciences, engineering and physical sciences. They blossomed as Buttimer, keen to examine changes to the Irish agrarian milieux wrought by EU structural, regional and agricultural funding polices since her childhood, devised and led ‘Landscape and life: scale and appropriateness for sustainable development’ (1993–6), a significant EU-funded project with collaborators in Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands and Ireland. It examined transport and planning, and ecological and environmental policies, 1950–90, comparing the experiences, and changes, across four different areas. The project – utilising seminars, workshops and field surveys – generated insights into the impact of language, political culture and social attitudes on economic growth, social vitality and ecological integrity.
International collaborator
Buttimer was a founding member of the ‘Commission on the history of geographical thought’, established by the International Geographical Union (IGU) in 1968. She also co-edited a range of impactful publications, amongst them Text and image: social construction of regional knowledges (1999) and Nature and identity in cross-cultural perspective (1999), the latter utilising geography, history and literature to analyse nature and identity in specific locales. Active in the International Council for Science and the International Association for the Social Sciences, Buttimer travelled frequently to conferences and symposia and was a catalyst for numerous international collaborative projects, investigations and publications. Concerned with ecological sustainability, she urged scholars to better engage with other cultures to address global environmental challenges.
Her influential credo Values in geography (1974) challenged the positivism then dominant in geography, which reified statistical representations of human behaviour, urging geographers to instead pay greater attention to the lived experiences of ordinary people. Buttimer’s work placed the human agent at the centre of geographical enquiry, utilising qualitative methods and a widening range of source material to emphasise collective social processes over individualistic accounts of human development. Among Buttimer’s major publications (reports, monographs and books), The practice of geography (1983) – which she dedicated to her father, ‘the best story-teller of them all’ (Maddrell, 761) – and Geography and the human spirit (1993), were both widely cited and influential. The wake of Erasmus (1989), exploring knowledge communities in medieval Scandinavia, was her personal favourite. She also published over 120 widely cited papers, alongside numerous contributions to many published symposia and edited collections. Some of her writings were translated into Dutch, French, German, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Polish, Latvian and other languages. Buttimer especially championed the work of the German humanistic geographer Alexander von Humboldt, translating many of his writings into English.
Buttimer served on the council of the Association of American Geographers (1974–7) and was awarded their lifetime achievement award in 2014. She was vice-president (1996) and (the first woman and Irish) president (2000–04) of the IGU. She was on the council of the Royal Geographical Society (1996–9) and received its Murchison award in 1997. In March 2000 she was elected a member of the Royal Irish Academy. The Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography bestowed their Wahlberg award on Buttimer in 2009. She gained the fellowship of the Academia Europaea, chaired its social science section and was elected a vice-president (2012–16). Amongst many other honours and awards, Buttimer won the Vautrin Lud prize in 2012, widely regarded as the discipline of geography’s equivalent of a Nobel prize.
Buttimer’s proficiency in languages, including fluency in French, German, Spanish and Swedish (she learnt Italian in retirement), propelled a dizzying array of collaborations and international projects. She believed this impetus emanated, at least in part, from her Dominican vocation – ‘to bring one’s reflection to others’– remaining with her (Maddrell, 743). Buttimer retired from UCD in 2003, though she retained an office in the department as a professor emerita, attending weekly until late 2016. Unburdened by professional and institutional obligations, she published a range of new research, translations and writing, and revelled in spending time in nature at her Cork home.
Living in retirement between Blackrock, Co. Dublin, and her home near the family farm in Co. Cork, Buttimer died of cancer in Dublin on 15 July 2017. After a requiem mass at Our Lady Seat of Wisdom church, UCD, on 18 July, she was removed to the Church of the Immaculate Conception, Watergrasshill, Co. Cork, and buried, alongside Bertram, on 20 June at Ardnageehy cemetery, Watergrasshill. Buttimer was widely regarded as Ireland’s pre-eminent internationally recognised geographer and was mourned by colleagues globally.