Introduction

1Anglophone scholars have deployed the term ‘tropicality’ to denote a potent discourse that constructs the tropical world as the West’s environmental Other. The historian David Arnold (1996: 141-168) initially deployed this term in conscious parallel to Edward Said’s (1978) influential discussion of how the Orient has been produced, its meaning regulated, and imperial influence and authority over it exerted, by Western knowledge, institutions and scholarship –by a discourse of Orientalism, or system of representation, that constructs the Orient as inferior to the West. Orientalism and tropicality operate as discourses of power by dramatising the distance between ‘us’ and ‘them’, and ‘here’ and ‘there’. It is through this process of ‘knowledgeable manipulation’, Said (1978: 55, 327) argued, that partial and value-laden ideas and images of regions such as the Orient and tropics become taken-for-granted, texts ‘create not only knowledge but also the very reality they appear to describe’, and Western identity has been elaborated in opposition to foreign lands and peoples. Said (1978: 63-68) describes how Orientalism worked through an ‘imaginative geography’ that rendered the Orient as ‘an enclosed space’ and ‘a stage affixed to Europe’ –an entity created and controlled by Western knowledge, including academic disciplines– and Arnold (2005: 225) similarly describes how, during the early nineteenth century, the British ‘affixed’ India to the tropics through the deployment of alien European categories of nature and landscape. Or as Frederick Cooper (2005: 15) notes, the ideas and methods that Western observers and scholars brought to foreign and colonial regions were “less a natural means of analysis of bounded societies located elsewhere than part of a process of intellectual pacification and ordering of the world.”

2Arnold’s point (1996: 141-142) was that the tropics, like the Orient, “need to be understood as a conceptual, and not just physical, space”, and that work on this conceptual space would rectify the bias in the critical literature on colonial discourse towards cultural otherness and its relative neglect of “the otherness of non-European environments”. Western concepts of nature and landscape, and understanding of the relations between climate, race and disease, have also long been endowed with great moral significance. Naming a part of the world ‘the tropics’, Arnold (1996; 2000; 2005) has argued, became a way of identifying a space that was separate from the West, and of judging this space against the northern temperate zone. Tropicality can thus be conceived as a discourse –or complex of Western ideas, attitudes, knowledges and experiences– that, since the fifteenth century, has both created and been shaped by distinctions between temperate and tropical lands, with the temperate world routinely exalted over its tropical counterpart, and tropicality becoming central to the definition of the West as a temperate (moderate and hard-working rather than extreme and indolent) human as well as physical environment.

3Tropicality has been a deeply ambivalent discourse, with positive and negative strains captured, respectively, in the image of tropical island edens (such as Tahiti) and the spectre of the jungle (such as the Belgian Congo) as ‘‘the white man’s grave’’ (Stepan 2001). Such ambivalence has become the focus of a fast-growing interdisciplinary literature, as has the way tropicality can be traced through a range of disciplinary ventures (such as botany, tropical medicine and tropical geography), and discourses (most notably climatic racism and other species of environmental determinism). Yet whether viewed as the exotic site of a noble innocence and simplicity that the West has lost, or as a fertile yet primitive estate awaiting the civilising and modernising intervention of the West, the tropics have been affixed to Western frameworks of meaning, desire and knowledgeable manipulation –a framework in which tropical peoples have been deemed to be unable to represent themselves and the Westerner observer/scholar decides on what counts as right, normal and true (and what does not).

4This literature on tropicality –to which (we will see) Anglophone geographers have made some notable contributions– establishes some important links between geography and the interdisciplinary project of postcolonialism, which, among other things, has deepened understanding of how colonialism and empire operate as discourses of domination (or systems of power/knowledge) that are animated by images, narratives and representations as well as material projects and feats of power. Recognition that many ideas and practices that have been deemed pivotal to geography’s identity and development –exploration, mapping, landscape representation, regional and political geography, urban planning, and latterly GIS– have been pressed into (and designed for) imperial service has prompted soul-searching discussions –particularly within British and North American geography– over the need to ‘decolonise geography’. The discipline’s entanglement with empire infuses the argument that geography should be viewed as a power-laden, and historically, geographically and conceptually variegated, constellation of concepts and practices rather than an immutable, autonomous or value-free area of study and knowledge domain (Clayton, 2004). What tropicality adds to this discussion is further proof that geography does not inspect and represent the world from an impartial or unassailable position, and a heightened sensitivity to the colonising and othering work done by ideas of nature and environment.

5This paper seeks to augment these debates about tropicality, geography and postcolonialism by calling for more comparative scholarship. To date, tropicality has tended to be treated as broadly European or Western discourse that draws different forms of environmental otherness into an overarching split between ‘the temperate’ and ‘the tropical’. Conceived thus, tropicality can be viewed as a kind of environmental Eurocentrism. Little has been said about whether we need to distinguish between different national formations of tropicality (as others have now done for Orientalism). Does it make sense to talk in terms of shared-common national perspectives –a British, French, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish or American tropicality– which differ in terms of their make-up and geographical points of reference and application? We will consider British and French tropicality.

6There is no space here to provide a detailed comparison of these two national forms of tropicality, or of the evolution of British and French tropical geography. Our more limited aim is to explore what Anglophone and Francophone readings of the work of the French geographer Pierre Gourou –in many ways the inventor and doyen of the field of tropical geography– tell us about wider differences in Anglophone and Francophone critical engagement (especially by geographers) with issues of tropicality and postcolonialism, and, wider differences between French and British traditions of tropicality. This focus on Gourou will yield only partial comparative insights, and in what follows we do not want to imply either that Francophone tropicality is coterminous with the field of tropical geography, or that this (in many ways distinctly Francophone) field of study can be reduced to Gourou’s texts and influence. But our choice of focus is not casual. For Gourou’s influence on Western understandings of the tropics stretches well beyond both France and the discipline of geography. While his international reputation has never been fully chronicled, commentators have noted that his best-known work, Les Pays tropicaux (1947a) “inspired a generation of students” (Gottmann, 1983: 41) around the world, and provided professional geographers, politicians and development strategists with “a zonal imaginary out of which a suite of tropical geographies could be hewn” (Livingstone, 2002b: 159). This text –first published in the year Gourou was elected to his chaire d’étude du monde tropical at the Collège de France– went through four editions to 1966 and was used as a university textbook throughout the world. In short, Gourou’s work provides us with an important point of connection between Anglophone and Francophone interest in, and geographic research on, the tropics.

7We will begin by identifying some significant differences between Francophone and Anglophone readings of Gourou, and then explore what might account for such differences. What part might differences between British and French traditions of tropicality have to play? Do such differences reveal wider differences in the current critical outlooks of Anglophone and Francophone geography? Finally, we will return to some of Gourou’s arguments and texts to suggest that one way of exposing and destabilising tropicality (at least in an academic vein) is by thinking about the research sites, geographies of intellectual labour, and spaces of knowledge (such as the field and the university) in and through which authoritative geographical meanings are made and circulated. Accordingly, in the last section of the paper we will point to the importance of identifying and distinguishing between the elementary (core or intrinsic) and contextual aspects of Gourou’s tropicality.

Anglophone tropicality and French tropical geography

8This paper stems from a project we had undertaken on Gourou’s tropicality. When we started this project we were struck both by how few connections Francophone geographers had made with the literature on tropicality (and Orientalism), and by how little attention Anglophone geographers generally pay to work in other languages. We knew of past exchanges between British, French and American geographers over the aims and scope of geographical research on the tropics and human-environment interactions –not least between Gourou, Carl Sauer and British colonial administrators from the Asian tropics at the 1938 International Geographical Congress held in Amsterdam. Also think back, for example, to Lucien Febvre’s critique of the Anglophone tradition of environmental determinism spearheaded by Ellsworth Huntington and Ellen Church Semple, or to Keith Buchanan’s call in the late 1960s to have Gourou’ ‘reactionary’ geography cut from the geography curriculum at the National University of Singapore (Arnold, 2000: 16; Power, Sidaway, 2004: 592). Think, too, of the great contrast between Gourou’s gloomy assessment of the tropics (and especially of tropical soils) in Les Pays tropicaux, and the positive vision of the potential for tropical development associated with his British contemporary and counterpart, B.W. Hodder (1967).

9We could of course delve further into this shared history –a history that has revolved around the assessment of how geography conspires against the tropics, and whether our ability to master nature should be seen as a uniquely Western achievement; and a history that is recounted, in part, in Gourou’s semi-autobiographical Terres de bonne espérance (1982: 395), where he declares “my tropics are attractive; when they exude sadness, it is not for ‘tropical’ reasons” but due to “an unhappy history”. Our point, however, is that this past dialogue has largely been forgotten by a more recent generation of geographers and been deemed quite incidental to the critique of tropicality. We identified a gap between Francophone and Anglophone geographical engagements with tropicality, with the former still revolving around the framework of French tropical geography, and the latter more concerned with how we might place figures such as Gourou and the disciplinary niche of tropical geography in a wider discursive context. Let us reflect further on this gap.

Why the gap?

Elementary and contextual aspects of Gourou’s tropicality

28While Gourou produced a remarkable –and in many ways genuinely humane– body of knowledge about the tropical world, we should not overlook how and why his work can be viewed as a form of epistemological violence. Perhaps the most basic aspect of Gourou’s tropicality was his adherence to a Western model of knowledge, broadly accepted in his day, in which the locational, transactional and embodied dimensions of research (his fieldwork and use of assistants and interpreters) are largely effaced in his published work. His tropicality can be traced back to his inter-war work in Indochina and is rooted in a claim to intellectual sovereignty and self-containment –his self-understanding that his work from Les Paysans du delta tonkinois (1936) onwards was born from “purely scientific concerns”, as he put it (Bowd, Clayton, 2003: 152-155). Here, as in much of Gourou’s other writing on Indochina, he not only romanticises the peasant landscape and culture of the Tonkin Delta, representing it as a “stabilised civilisation in material and aesthetic harmony with the natural conditions” (Gourou, 1936: 576). He also speaks to French colonial and metropolitan audiences as an expert. What gives his representation of the delta as a beautiful, fragile and timeless landscape wider meaning and importance is the political implication that the peasants needed to be insulated from the contaminating influence of colonialism and modernisation.

29That the effacement of the transactional nature of his fieldwork might be excused on the grounds that such a thing was ‘not done’ in his day, or pardoned on the grounds that he later acknowledged his debt to his Vietnamese assistants in interviews, is, for us, beside the point. Rather, we should focus on how certain images, statements and diagnoses about the Tonkin Delta (its chronic overpopulation, for example) drawn from Gourou’s work gained meaning and legitimacy in France and Indochina partly on the basis of this model of rational and disembodied knowing. It was on the basis of this model –and as an independent scholar rather than as a direct servant of the colonial state– that Gourou influenced French thinking about Indochina and was invited to sit on a Popular Front Government commission on the abuses of French colonial power in Indochina. He exposed the limits of French colonialism in Indochina without being openly critical of the colonial regime. Like other French Orientalists and Africanists, he neither fully acquiesced in colonialism’s powers and privileges, nor completely rejected the colonial system that made his work possible.

30Livingstone (2003: 44-45) suggests that it is by working through the idea that all forms of knowledge production take place somewhere, and are “the compound product of personal observation, trusted testimony… [and] shared cultural resources” that we might arrive at more careful assessments of how knowledge acquires authority. Such arguments help us to cast the critical spotlight on the way Gourou (1972: 135) sought what he called “a rational, hierarchised geography” that could be produced with the objectifying tools of geographic inquiry (and particularly cartography) and gave the Western scientist-scholar special access to tropical realities –realities that, by implication, ‘tropical’ peoples were ill-equipped to discern themselves.

31One of the most innovative aspects of the methodological flight that took Gourou from a regional to a continental and zonal scale of analysis –from the Tonkin paddy fields to the tropics at large– was his insistence that geographical judgement on the tropics should stem from the application of this rationality to the comparative study of population densities and distributions, and their correspondence with “levels of civilisation” and “techniques d’encadrement”. It was from this recognition of the core relationships between population pressure, land use, landscape organisation, and civilisational (or cultural) coherence that Gourou devised an approach that accentuated the differences between the temperate and tropical world. It seemed clear to him that the developed countries of the temperate belt had wrested their development and control over nature from a number of interdependent dynamics that began to coalesce during the seventeenth century and provided the peoples of the Eurasian landmass with an unrivalled ability to adapt nature for human use: demographic growth, medical progress, increases in agricultural and industrial productivity due to scientific invention and mechanisation, and state-building (Gourou, 1971: 25-47). This, in fine, was the historical yardstick against which Gourou judged the tropical world, and its spatial equivalent can be found in his 1940 work La Terre et l’homme en Extrême-Orient, where he presents an idealised contrast between “familiar” (and by implication ‘normal’) European landscapes, such as the Norman bocage, and the “different standards” of landscape organisation in the Far East (Gourou, 1940: 88-89).

32Thus we suggest that we cannot assess Gourou’s connection to tropicality unless we come to terms with this relationship between authorship and authority. Yet ironically, Gourou started to bring more of the tropical world under the aegis of this model –during the 1940s and 1950s – during a period when it started to be vehemently questioned by colonised peoples. In his Discours sur le colonialisme (1955: 32-36), Aimé Césaire attacked what he dubbed Gourou’s “tropicalité” – his “impure and worldly geography”, which propounded that no civilisations comparable to Europe had ever developed in the tropics; a geography, Césaire continued, that cast a “geographical curse” over the tropics and made Gourou a “guard dog of colonialism”. Césaire argued that Gourou’s zonal imaginary preserved the temperate/tropical binary that underpinned European and American colonial and then neo-colonial exploitation of the tropical belt.

33Gourou’s ‘neo-colonialist’ reassertion of tropicality in a scientific-modernist mode was not only challenged at an intellectual level. Tropicality was also combated in altogether more visceral ways in a series of jungle and guerrilla wars in Malaya, Indochina, the Congo and Kenya, and that reached a head with the Vietnam War. Gourou gave hardly any credence to this world of nationalist and communist insurgency. Rather, during the 1940s and 1950s he helped to dampen the trauma of French colonial retreat by suggesting, at the continental scales of Asia and Africa, and the global scale of the tropical world, that the tropics was beset by problems that predated and superseded colonialism and the predicaments of decolonisation and Cold War aggrandisement. His colleague Charles Robequain (1952: 87) was near the mark when he wrote in a review of post-war geographical work on Asia that in “the confusion of events” it was important to discern “certain permanent factors underlying the shifting sands of history”. Gourou tried to make sense of the world in this permanent way, but did so by granting the tropics an eternal geography –an everlasting geography that he exoticised in both positive and negative ways. This helps to explain why Gourou’s comments on colonialism and decolonisation were both scant and in lack consistency. He defended colonialism in some regions and at some scales –especially the French Federation of Indochina– but questioned its legitimacy and effectiveness at others –at the regional scale of the Tonkin Delta, and in British Iraq, Jordan and Kenya (Gourou, 1936: 378, 473, 478-479, 576-578; 1947b; 1953: 110-125; 1954). He was particularly bitter about the way the Americans translated his book on the Tonkin Delta without permission, and supplied B-52 bombers with copies of his maps of the Tonkin dykes –providing Yves Lacoste with the immediate grist for his celebrated formulation that ‘‘geography is foremost a way of waging war’’ (Gourou to Gottmann 17 june 1965, Fonds Gottmann).

34In these ways and more, Gourou’s ‘impure and worldly geography’ forestalled the possibility opened up by decolonisation of exploring how tropicality has been implicated in the mutual (albeit hierarchical) constitution of nation and empire, metropole and colony, and citizen and subject. For all he wrote about ‘civilisations’, Gourou was slower than many of his students (especially, perhaps, Paul Pélissier), to move away from a binary, diffusionist and top-down train of thought in which polarities between ‘here’ and ‘there’ –the temperate and the tropical– are accentuated, and the knowledge and practices of the tropicalised are subordinated to the gaze of the Western scholar, who assumes the right to diagnose and judge.

35As these points about the elementary aspects of Gourou’s tropicality begin to suggest, it is important to establish how projects such as his, and criticism of it, came into focus at historically and geographically specific junctures. We need to think about the contextual aspects of his tropicality, and of how and why this discourse is now placed under the critical spotlight. The immediate aftermath of World War Two explains as much about the agenda that Gourou set in the late 1940s as the period 1968-1973 (culminating in the Sahel drought) does about Francophone criticism of his work and the reshaping of tropical geography in France. And different Anglophone and Francophone responses to postcolonialism help to explain why Gourou’s work has and can be historicised from different perspectives. In fine, it is important to think about how such discourses such as tropicality have been put together –and pulled apart– in specific (and some ways irreducible) times, spaces and projects such as Gourou’s.

Conclusion

36We have sought to show that past and present commentary on Gourou’s work and influence gives us a useful window on to wider questions of tropicality and the treatment of postcolonial issues within Anglophone and Francophone geography. Collectively, Anglophone and Francophone readings of him point to a central paradox in his work: that while he was deeply sympathetic to the plight of the tropics, he was committed to a scholarly (and in some ways specifically French) version of Western universalism that exalted his ‘rational’ and ‘hierarchical’ geography over other ways of knowing and made his cartography of the tropics a cartography of intellectual appropriation.

37The readings of Gourou that we have touched on also reveal that, to date, critical engagement with tropicality and postcolonialism at least as they have been propounded by Arnold and Said (although neither critical project is reducible to the work of just these thinkers), have been more accentuated in Anglophone geography than they have been within Francophone geography. We have tried to think about what might account for this difference, but sense that discussion is only in its infancy. We thus see this paper as a provocation to further dialogue and debate. While at a general level it appears that Britain’s and France’s different cultural and intellectual experiences of decolonisation have played an important part in the development-absence of a strong postcolonial agenda, and that institutional dynamics matter too, there needs to be more comparative work on geography’s entanglement with tropicality.

38The paper has traced some of the biases and limitations in both Anglophone and Francophone readings of Gourou, and we would like to end by suggesting that if we are to gauge the colonising power of tropicality, yet avoid the interpretative problems and excesses of postcolonial studies (noted above), we need a geographical approach that considers both its elementary and contextual aspects. Further Anglo-French dialogue will hopefully generate not only a fuller understanding of the different agendas (historical, institutional and epistemological) that have infused Anglophone and Francophone geographical interest in ‘the tropics’, but also yield more critically nuanced and contextualised accounts of the ways and extent to which tropical geography and tropicality can be viewed as discourses of power and modes of othering.

39Acknowledgements

40Our thanks to the editors and four anonymous referees for their useful and challenging comments. We are grateful to the participants at the ‘Géographie, exploration et colonisation’ seminar, Université de Bordeaux 3, in October 2005, where a version of this paper was presented, for their input, and especially to David Arnold, Michel Bruneau, Paul Claval and Felix Driver for stimulating conversations around the themes of the paper. All errors remain ours.