Human Geography of the American Tropics: A Forty‐year Review

Abstract

For a decade or so after World War II, human geographers working in the American tropics found socio-political conditions and resultant research topics little changed from those before the war. This was in contrast t o the Old World tropics where decolonization processes and the demands of economic development and new nation building produced divergent research currents, For the first half of the period under review, the American tropics continued to be the province largely of geographers with culturalhistorical questions grounded in natural historical bases. The legacy is H u m b o l d t ' s ; t h e practitioners most notably students of Carl Sauer or German counterparts such as Carl Troll. French and British regionalist approaches, strong in the region before World War II, survived less successfully. By the 1980s, however, broad pan-tropical currents of geographic discourse and debate had become established. New practices and theories were formulated and tested as North Atlantic geographers borrowed from antipodean innovators and others working in the Asian and African tropics. Since the 1980s, there have been greater efforts a t dialogue and collaboration with host country colleagues. As might be expected in this era of 'globalization', national research styles and agendas have become less evident. This paper offers a highly selective map of research nodes within tropical Americanist geography since the early 1950s. The selection of examples includes qualitative criteria, but more importantly, research that signify stasis or intensification as well as turning points and departures in the overall development of this literature. The contours of this history suggest s o m e highly evolved, even idiosyncratic enterprises, but in the main, it is an unfolding that suggests broad congruencies with human geographic work elsewhere in the tropics. and agricultural systems (Northern Andes) ', Mountain Research and Development, Vol. 2,

Political Ecology and Cultural Change: Impacts on Swidden-fallow Agroforestry Practices among the Mopan Maya in Southern Belize

“…G eographers and other environmental scientists focus a significant amount of research efforts on swidden-fallow agroforestry activities in the Neotropics (Gordon 1982;Gómez-Pompa 1987a, 1987bGómez-Pompa et al 1987; Denevan and Padoch 1988;Anderson 1990;Gómez-Pompa and Kaus 1990;Mathewson 1993). Much of the existing work focuses on the sustainable nature of traditional indigenous agroforestry practices and how this knowledge might be used as an "ideological bridge to the future" in order to create more sustainable forest management and extraction policies in landscapes of rapid ecological destruction (Nations and Nigh 1980;Alcorn 1983Alcorn , 1984Alcorn , 1987Posey 1984Posey , 1985aPosey , 1985bBalée 1987Balée , 1989Gómez-Pompa 1987a, 1987b, Gómez-Pompa et al 1987Oldfield and Alcorn 1987;Denevan and Padoch 1988;Gómez-Pompa and Kaus 1990;Reed 1995).…”