Fieldwork and Tropicality in French Indochina

Reflections on Pierre Gourou's Les Paysans Du Delta Tonkinois , 1936

Dados Bibliográficos

ID20153777
AutoresGavin Bowd (0000-0002-3748-0656, University of St Andrews), D Clayton (0000-0003-2557-5495, University of St Andrews)
Ano2003
Volume24
Fascículo2
Páginas147-168
Data de publicação2003-07-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoSingapore Journal of Tropical Geography (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0129-7619 • E-ISSN: 1467-9493
EditoraWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/1467-9493.00149
OpenAlexW1551212694
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas17
Referências citadas35

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

Archaeology · Cartography · Colonialism · Context (archaeology) · Ethnology · Geographer · Geography · Overpopulation · Population · Sociology · Anthropology · Demography · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Pacific and Southeast Asian Studies · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies