Fieldwork and Tropicality in French Indochina: Reflections on Pierre Gourou's Les Paysans Du Delta Tonkinois, 1936

Abstract

This paper examines the fieldwork undertaken by the distinguished French geographer Pierre Gourou (1900-99) in the Tonkin Delta (Red River Delta) of northern Vietnam in the 1920s and 1930s, and his wider configuration of "the tropical world" as a distinct space of knowledge and radical otherness. Gourou's fieldwork endeavours in French Indochina are interpreted in the light of recent work on "tropicality": the idea that "the tropics" need to be understood as a western cultural construction and colonising discourse that essentialised the hot, wet regions of the world, and exalted the temperate world over its tropical counterpart. The paper focuses on Gourou's monumental 1936 study Les paysans du delta tonkinois, étude de géographie humaine. It is argued that in this study, and his later comparative work on the tropics, Gourou elaborated a distinct geographical variant of tropicality, but one that, ultimately, reinforced the essentialist logic and momentum of this discourse. Particular attention is paid to the geographical ideas, fieldwork techniques and discursive strategies that Gourou used in his 1936 study, and the French colonial context in which he worked. The article shows how Gourou appealed to western reason and science as tools of study, identified overpopulation as the key problem facing the Tonkin Delta, and suggested that colonial practices of modernisation had a limited place and ineffectual role in the rice plains of the region.

French Tropical Geographies: Editors' Introduction

“…Arnold (2004b:254) has recently argued that while Said's work does not adequately convey the complexity and heterogeneity of empire, it nonetheless remains a salient examination of how and why colonialism should be regarded as "a site of profound (and physicallygrounded) difference". And we have argued that the tropicality literature does not work as fully as it might with Said's arguments about the power of Western systems of othering, like Orientalism, to ascribe difference to particular spaces, places, environments and natures (see Bowd & Clayton, 2003).…”

“…The work of Gourou and other French geographers rubbed up against other French ways of making sense of the cultural and environmental otherness in its imperial midst. In his book on the peasants of the Tonkin Delta, Gourou painted a landscape that was close to French impressionism, representing the delta as a beautiful and timeless space that was (and should be) sheltered from the travails of colonial modernisation and making rural poverty look picturesque (see Bowd & Clayton, 2003). And in a recent study of how Africa was portrayed in the Annales de géographie between 1920 and the 1960s, Marie-Albane de Suremain (1999) shows how French geographers drew on, and contributed to, a more general body of French ideas and assumptions about African and tropical alterity (also see Bruneau, this issue).…”

Imagining the Tropics: Views and Visions of the Tropical World

“…In this sense, as has recently been suggested in the pages of this journal, we might think of ideas about tropical difference as part of a wider discourse, akin to the discourse of Orientalism which works to define and delimit the essential difference between East and West. Just as the discourse of Orientalism has its genealogists following in the tracks of Edward Said, so too the discourse of "tropicality" has attracted the attention of an increasing number of historians (see, for example, Arnold, 1996:141-68;Driver & Yeoh, 2000;Stepan, 2001;Livingstone, 2002;Bowd & Clayton, 2003).…”

“…It is appropriate that a journal such as this should periodically take stock of its raison d'être, which in our case means reflecting upon the multiple histories and geographies resonating within its very title (Grundy-Warr et al, 2003;Savage, 2003). Recent work published in these pages has raised farreaching questions concerning the genealogy and the spatiality of the subdiscipline of "tropical geography", most notably in relation to contemporary concerns with colonialism, postcolonialism, the politics of development and fieldwork (Driver & Yeoh, 2000;Bowd & Clayton, 2003;Sidaway et al, 2003). In the present paper, my focus is less on the origins and evolution of tropical geography as a component of the modern geographical discipline than on the history of ideas and images of tropicality, and the role these have played in the construction of knowledge about the tropical world over a longer period of time.…”

Continuously tropical: Former editors and future tropical geographies

“…The SJTG continues to remain a voice for geographers working on tropical sites and interrogating representations of the tropics (e.g. Driver & Yeoh, 2000; Bowd & Clayton, 2003; Claval, 2005; Driver, 2004), as well as other material on development (e.g. Power et al ., 2006), society (Momsen, 2007), space and/or environment in the tropics (e.g.…”