Book Review

Methods/Theory

Studies of the ways in which the tropics have been constructed have become a major publishing passion of late. We have had works dealing with travel accounts, art, tropical medicine, botanical transfers, and exotic gardens, as well as nineteenth-century anthropology and its related photographic and anatomical activities. The reason for all this activity is, of course, partly related to the burgeoning of postcolonial studies. The tropics were constructed by scholars, travelers, artists, doctors, and botanists from the temperate regions. They were thus the tropical "other," the environmental touchstone by which the temperate self could be defined. Tropical environments were also seen as reflecting the human temperaments of those who lived in them, embracing unbridled passions, a prolific human biodiversity, dark groves of mysterious psychological states, hidden horrors of disease that reflected frightening zoological and entomological phenomena, as well as a seemingly paradoxical lassitude, a fatalism that precluded the energetic achievements temperate peoples so readily attributed to themselves.

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Of course, such a set of negative images did not arise fully formed from the earliest times when travelers, adventurers, conquerors, and scientists encountered the tropics. At first depicted as El Dorados, they were tropical Edens by the eighteenth century. It was only in the second half of the nineteenth century that the tropics supposedly shifted from glorious garden to region of gorgeous gloom. Only then did all the more negative characteristics come to be attached to them, culminating in Claude Lévi-Strauss's evocative and untranslatable notion of the tristes tropiques. This darker vision of the tropics coincided with the growth of formal imperial rule, the deepening of "informal" influence on South America, and the emergence of disciplines like anthropology, geography, and tropical medicine.

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