Tropical Hermeneutics: Fragments for a Historical Narrative: an Afterword

Tropicality, Orientalism, and French Colonialism in Indochina: The Work of Pierre Gourou, 1927-1982

“…Livingstone notes that tropicality had long ''disciplined'' the tropics by simultaneously domesticating them to European science and casting them as essentially other. 107 Roughly the same charge can be leveled at Gourou, and also at Lévi-Strauss and French structuralism more generally, which, as Kristen Ross has observed, announced ''the death of man'' ''precisely at the moment that colonized peoples demand[ed] and appropriate[d] to themselves the status of men.'' 108 In part because of its commitment to typologize human responses to tropical environments, the paradigm of tropical geography fashioned by Gourou was resistant to the postcolonial demand that the cultures of formerly colonized peoples be placed on an equal footing with Western culture.…”

Climate and colonialism

“…Climate is “as much a philosophical concept as a material entity” (Endfield & Randalls, , p. 36). Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, climate represented an “exploitable hermeneutic resource” (Livingstone, , p. 93) used by writers and colonists to frame colonial experience and to give meaning to cultural and environmental distinctiveness (Howell, ). “Climate” has, at various times, featured both as an index of weather, stabilizing its vicissitudes into a sense of spatial and temporal coherence, and as an agent, exercising decisive influence on the forms of life which live under its meteorological regime (Fleming & Jankovic, ).…”

“…Despite the significance of formal meteorological knowledge‐making, colonial life was often shaped more fundamentally by more vernacular knowledges of climate. The imagined geographies of imperial spaces and their climates were frequently at odds with reality and lived experience (Livingstone, , ; White, ). Recent work by Australasian environmental historians, for example, had shed new light on how expectations of colonial climates often differed radically—and consequentially—from reality (Beattie, ; Beattie, O'Gorman, & Henry, ; Fenby, ).…”

“…Geographical discussions of climate matters in the 19th and early 20th centuries were linked to issues of empire, ethnicity, and also health (Edmond, ; Jankovic, ; Livingstone, ). Moral discourses linking ethnic constitution to regional climatic characteristics (Curtin, ; Driver, ; Driver & Yeoh, ; Kennedy, ; Livingstone, ; Naraindas, ) were interwoven with theories of European acclimatization or the ability of European civilization to adapt to “alien” environments (Howell, ; Livingstone, ; Osborne, ). Certain aspects of the climate were thought to have a particularly deleterious effect on the health of Europeans.…”

‘A good site for health’: Missionaries and the pathological geography of central southern Africa

“…Although the coastal regions were well charted, the map of the interior constructed by and for Europeans was still a ‘wide extended blank’ (Wheeler, 1999: 16). The want of knowledge of African landscapes and people beyond the seacoasts fuelled the emergence of an anticipative geography that was frequently at odds with reality (Livingstone, 1999; 2000). In keeping with nineteenth‐century European conceptualizations of ‘other’ places, and those parts of the world assumed to be tropical and subtropical, continental Africa was imagined and represented both positively, as sublime and exotic, and negatively, as a space of degeneration (Kennedy, 1990; Naraindas, 1996; Driver & Yeoh, 2000; Driver, 2004).…”