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- Tropical Landscapes and Nature-Culture Entanglements: Reading Tropicality
via Avatar
Authors: Anita Lundberg, Hannah Regis, John Agbonifo
Pages: 1 - 27
Abstract: Landscape integrates both natural and cultural aspects of a particular geographical area. Environmental elements include geological landforms, waterscapes, seascapes, climate and weather, flora and fauna. They also necessarily involve human perception and inscription which reflect histories of extraction and excavation, of planting and settlement, of design and pollution. Natural elements and cultural shaping by humans – past, present, and future – means landscapes reflect living entanglements involving people, materiality, space and place. A landscape’s physicality is entwined with layers of human meaning and value – and tropical landscapes have particular significance. The Tropics is far more than geographic and needs to be understood through the notion of tropicality. Tropicality refers to how the tropics are construed as the exoticised Other of the temperate Western world as this is informed by cultural, imperial, and scientific practices. In this imaginary – in which the tropics are depicted through nature tropes as either fecund paradise or fetid hell – the temperate is portrayed as civilised and the tropical as requiring cultivation. In order to frame this Special Issue through an example that evokes tropicality we undertake an ethnographic and ecocritical reading of Avatar. The film Avatar is redolent with images of tropical landscapes and their nature-culture entanglements. It furthermore reveals classic pictorial tropes of exoticism, which are in turn informed by colonialism and its underlying notions of technologism verses primitivism. Furthermore, Avatar calls to mind the theories of rhizomatics and archipelagic consciousness.
PubDate: 2022-03-30
DOI: 10.25120/etropic.21.1.2022.3877
Issue No: Vol. 21, No. 1 (2022)
- Earth(ing) Kashmir: Geo-Tropicality as a Means of Thinking beyond
Stratified Geopolitics
Authors: Saswat Samay Das, Abhisek Ghosal, Ananya Roy Pratihar
Pages: 28 - 50
Abstract: This article places the spotlight on remarkably differential nuances of Kashmir’s geo-tropicality only to subject them to a decolonial ethics. It seeks to disengage from colonial representational grammatology that approaches these nuances as alienatingly exotic and spectacular. It furthermore, argues that mutually disjunctive co-becomings of these nuances not only provide Kashmir’s geo-tropicality with a kind of a-humanist orientation, but also makes this tropicality an immanent zone of natural ethical violence. We go on to argue that it is only a kind of ‘smooth politics’ based on decolonial a-humanist ethics of earthing that can end the conflict arising out of governmental attempts at overcoding the chaosophical immanentism of Kashmir’s geo-tropicality.
PubDate: 2022-03-30
DOI: 10.25120/etropic.21.1.2022.3844
Issue No: Vol. 21, No. 1 (2022)
- Ivhu rinotsamwa: Landscape Memory and Cultural Landscapes in Zimbabwe and
Tropical Africa
Authors: Ashton Sinamai
Pages: 51 - 69
Abstract: Perceptions of the various cultural landscapes of tropical Africa continue to be overdetermined by western philosophies. This is, of course, a legacy of colonialism and the neo-colonial global politics that dictate types of knowledge, and direct flows of knowledge. Knowledges of the communities of former colonised countries are seen as ancillary at best, and at worst, irrational. However, such ‘indigenous knowledge’ systems contain information that could transform how we think about cultural landscapes, cultural heritage, and the conception of 'intangible heritage’. In many non-western societies, the landscape shapes culture; rather than human culture shaping the landscape – which is the notion that continues to inform heritage. Such a human-centric experience of landscape and heritage displaces the ability to experience the sensorial landscape. This paper outlines how landscapes are perceived in tropical Africa, with an example from Zimbabwe, and how this perception can be used to enrich mainstream archaeology, anthropology, and cultural heritage studies. Landscapes have a memory of their own, which plays a part in creating the ‘ruins’ we research or visit. Such landscape memory determines the preservation of heritage as well as human memory. The paper thus advocates for the inclusion of ‘indigenous knowledge’ systems in the widening of the theoretical base of archaeology, anthropology, and heritage studies.
PubDate: 2022-03-30
DOI: 10.25120/etropic.21.1.2022.3836
Issue No: Vol. 21, No. 1 (2022)
- Staging Eden; Staging Power: Landscaping the Royal Garden of the Kingdom
of Haiti
Authors: LeGrace Benson
Pages: 70 - 82
Abstract: A uniquely successful slave revolt enabled King Henry (Christophe) I to lead an engagement with native plants, animals including humans, built structures, and landscaped gardens in The Kingdom of Haiti, a tropical country liberated from colonial rule. The new ruler’s political and economic exigencies and hopes had points of both collaboration and contention with the expectations of the new citizens. He would make full use of both local traditional knowledge and the latest for-profit agricultural management techniques. The engagement resulted in general prosperity, especially for the new proprietors of the largest landholdings. He set aside a portion of royal property that preserved the original flora and fauna, but most of the kingdom maintained the former plantations. There were schools and medical clinics for everyone. Yet the peasants worked even harder than they had as slaves and held little political power. Beyond the Royal Garden and the preserved forest, exploitation of the tropical ecosystem continued and even increased.
PubDate: 2022-03-30
DOI: 10.25120/etropic.21.1.2022.3855
Issue No: Vol. 21, No. 1 (2022)
- Of Nutmeg and Forts: Indonesian Pride in the Banda Islands’ Unique
Natural and Cultural Landscape
Authors: Frank Dhont
Pages: 83 - 98
Abstract: This paper discusses the natural and cultural uniqueness of the Banda Islands in Indonesia, with a particular focus on the tiny islands' historical role as the sole source of nutmeg. Taking as its point of departure the Indonesian government's 2015 proposal to recognize the Banda Islands as a UNESCO World Heritage site, this article investigates the islands' features and their historical meanings, and explains the entanglement of the islands' tropical geography and Bandanese cultural heritage. Particular focus is given to the way in which the Bandanese people, and later the Dutch colonials, used and exploited the Banda Islands' natural resource of nutmeg, and how the Bandanese culture was shaped and reshaped through this process. The paper maps the transformation of this nature-culture landscape involving natural resources and their cultivation over the centuries; it additionally explores the various Dutch forts that were erected to defend the colonial spice trade and how these structures later became heritage treasures of the Banda Islands in the 21st century. The paper argues that the process through which Banda’s natural uniqueness created Bandanese culture also nearly caused its downfall, and the resurrection of indigenous Bandanese civilization necessitated an inclusive identity that incorporated Dutch colonial fortresses as reminders of the dark era of colonialism. The natural and cultural entanglement of the Bandanese landscape has created a sense of cultural pride.
PubDate: 2022-03-30
DOI: 10.25120/etropic.21.1.2022.3864
Issue No: Vol. 21, No. 1 (2022)
- Toraja Cultural Landscape: Tongkonan Vernacular Architecture and Toraja
Coffee Culture
Authors: Octaviana Sylvia Caroline Rombe, Hong Ching Goh, Zuraini Md. Ali
Pages: 99 - 142
Abstract: Tongkonan is a style of vernacular architecture famous in Toraja, a mountainous region in Sulawesi, Indonesia. The Tongkonan traditional house is a symbol of the Toraja people, representing the ancestors and the entire cosmos of life – from birth to death. The houses and their arrangement within a settlement form a social and cultural space that gathers the extended family of the Tongkonan. This article explores the landscape of Tongkonan architecture and coffee cultivation, showing how Tongkonan is essential to Toraja's cultural landscape and a foundation of Toraja coffee culture. The study draws together literature reviews, interviews, photographic and video observation, as well as photo-elicitation interviews. The research reveals that although the existence of Tongkonan architecture precedes the introduction of coffee cultivation, the Tongkonan's geographical closeness to the coffee farms, the historic economic importance of coffee, and the social and cultural relevance of Tongkonan creates a cultural landscape entangling Tongkonan settlements and forests, coffee farms and coffee culture activities. Tongkonan and coffee form Toraja's unique cultural landscape. The space of the Tongkonan, which includes coffee community activities, serves as a basis of Toraja coffee culture.
PubDate: 2022-03-30
DOI: 10.25120/etropic.21.1.2022.3822
Issue No: Vol. 21, No. 1 (2022)
- Women’s Grievances and Land Dispossession: Reading Landscapes
through Papuan Independent Films
Authors: Hatib Abdul Kadir
Pages: 143 - 164
Abstract: Papuan indigenous women depend on forests and gardens. Through forests, women play an important social-economic role in the community; through gardens, women practice care and reciprocity. Tropical forests, plant species, and animals are also their kin relations (Chao, 2018). Nature and culture are deeply intertwined. However, the role of women is disappearing along with deforestation and the large-scale expansion of oil palm plantations. Selecting independent documentary films mostly produced by Papuan Voices, a community network of indigenous Papuan filmmakers, this article describes women’s frustration at being separated from their lands and their discontent at being considered second-class citizens according to customary law. Women's lowly position in the Papuan patrilineal structure is utilized by the plantation industry to dispossess women from their forests and gardens, and thereby threaten their social-economic roles. This article concludes that land dispossession does not serve as a guarantee for development, but is deeply impoverishing.
PubDate: 2022-03-30
DOI: 10.25120/etropic.21.1.2022.3843
Issue No: Vol. 21, No. 1 (2022)
- (Un)Worlding the Plantationocene: Extraction, Extinction, Emergence
Authors: Sophie Chao
Pages: 165 - 191
Abstract: This article explores how tropical plantation lifeworlds are made and unmade through more-than-human forms of extraction, extinction, and emergence. Taking the palm oil sector as my primary focus of inquiry, I trace the extractions of substance, land, and labour undergirding the historical transformation of oil palm from West African subsistence plant to pan-tropical cash crop and controversial global commodity. I then examine how the presents, futures, and relations of multispecies communities are pushed to the edge of extinction under the plantation logic of ecological simplification, reorganization, and instrumentalization. Finally, I explore oil palm landscapes as zones of ecological emergence, where diverse plants, animals, and fungi are learning to co-exist with oil palm in new forms of symbiosis. Thinking-with processes of more-than-human extraction, extinction, and emergence foregrounds the sequential and synchronous ways in which plantations are worlded, unworlded, and reworlded across time, space, and species. Such an approach points to the importance of reconciling theoretical conceptualizations of plantations as ideology with ethnographically grounded examinations of plantations as patches. It also invites difficult but important ethical, political, and methodological questions on how to story the lively facets of plantation lifeworlds without doing (further) violence to the human and other-than-human beings who experience plantations as lethal undoings and endings.
PubDate: 2022-03-30
DOI: 10.25120/etropic.21.1.2022.3838
Issue No: Vol. 21, No. 1 (2022)
- Dai in the “Land of Tropical Miasma”: Encounters of Early
Chinese Anthropology in Yunnan
Authors: Qieyi Liu
Pages: 192 - 217
Abstract: In early- to mid-twentieth century China, the tropical landscapes and indigenous peoples of southern Yunnan entered public consciousness in two different modes of representation: as a desolate and unfamiliar frontier fraught with the peril of diseases and in desperate need of environmental and social engineering; or, as a haven of fertile land with an ideal of harmonious society. In the process of making new senses of this tropical border region, anthropology played a major role as Chinese anthropologists working in this newly institutionalized discipline turned the Dai, traditionally regarded by Han people as a marginal group living within a dangerous land of zhangqi (tropical miasma), into an ethnographic subject. From Ling Chunsheng’s vision of environmental modification and medical advancement as a twofold project to engineer a new landscape and a new people, to Tian Rukang’s cultural critique that imagined the way of life of Dai people as an antidote for modernity, this article examines early Chinese anthropological discourses on the Dai people and their lived environment. I investigate how technological and epistemological changes fundamentally reshaped the meaning of tropical landscapes in China, a multi-ethnic country of a vast and diverse territory struggling to rejuvenate within a new global order, and I ponder the symbolic and material consequences of this recent history.
PubDate: 2022-03-30
DOI: 10.25120/etropic.21.1.2022.3834
Issue No: Vol. 21, No. 1 (2022)
- Portraits-in-Place from the Sotavento: A Photo-Dialogue between Abraham
Bosque and J.A. Strub
Authors: J.A. Strub, Abraham Ávila Quintero
Pages: 218 - 238
Abstract: Resulting from a series of conversations between its co-contributors, this photo-dialogue considers themes of nature-culture entanglements through the photographic work of Abraham Bosque, a documentary filmmaker and photojournalist who has lived in the Sotavento region of Mexico since 2017. Bosque’s work deals with the challenges implicit in portraying a tropical landscape whose vitality is the impetus for its extractivistic plunder. Through their conversations, Strub and Bosque consider eleven portraits-in-place that highlight, explore, and challenge ways of thinking about the relationships between humankind and nature, parochiality and globalization, tradition and modernity, beauty and violence, and the documentarian and their subject, all considered within the context of the Sotavento’s storied tropicality.
PubDate: 2022-03-30
DOI: 10.25120/etropic.21.1.2022.3860
Issue No: Vol. 21, No. 1 (2022)
- Darkness in the Seasonal Savannah: The Brazilian Cerrado in Stories by
Hugo de Carvalho Ramos
Authors: André Vasques Vital, Sandro Dutra e Silva
Pages: 239 - 258
Abstract: This article analyzes the feelings that emerge in savannah landscapes, specifically in the Brazilian savannah (Cerrado), through the short stories Dias de Chuva and Gente da Gleba, by the writer Hugo de Carvalho Ramos (1895—1921). The two stories, which are part of the collection Tropas e Boiadas (1917), contain traces of Tropical Gothic literature. The Cerrado landscape is marked by climatic seasonality that manifests itself in two well-defined seasons: humid summers (where there is plenty of rain) and dry winters (with no rain and the incidence of large fires). In the analyzed works, blue and red are considered fundamental colours that help us understand the sentiments that mark the landscape in each season. It is suggested that yearnings and expectations about the future are feelings strongly manifested in the wet season and are associated with the processes of gestation and dissolution of life promoted by water. Fears and regrets, on the other hand, emerge with more force in the face of the destructiveness of fire in the dry season, under the red that dominates the landscape. Loneliness and indifference are two feelings that are omnipresent in both seasons and manifest as blue and red indifference.
PubDate: 2022-03-30
DOI: 10.25120/etropic.21.1.2022.3849
Issue No: Vol. 21, No. 1 (2022)
- Wilderness in 19th Century South Seas Literature: An Ecocritical Search
for Seascapes
Authors: Denise Dillon
Pages: 248 - 372
Abstract: In Western thought and literature, a terrestrial bias is considered a phenomenological primacy for notions such as wilderness. This ecocritical review draws on nineteenth-century South Seas literature with its influences from frontierism and the literary movements of romanticism, realism and naturism to consider a more fluid appreciation and reconceptualisation of wilderness as non-terrestrial and an oceanic touchstone for freedom. American terrestrial frontierism, that drove colonial settlement of the North American continent, is used as both counterpoint and important embarkation point for ventures into the Pacific Ocean following ‘fulfilment’ of the ‘manifest destiny’ to overspread the continent. For American, British and Australian writers, the Pacific represented an opportunity to apply literary techniques to capture new encounters. South Seas works by Melville, Stevenson, Becke and Conrad offer glimpses of seascapes that provide perceptions of heterotopias, archetypes and depictions of dispossessed itinerants at a moral frontier and wilderness that is both sublime and liberating, liminal and phenomenological.
PubDate: 2022-03-30
DOI: 10.25120/etropic.21.1.2022.3823
Issue No: Vol. 21, No. 1 (2022)
- Maria Graham’s Tropical Landscaping of Brazilian Independence
Authors: Nicolle Jordan
Pages: 259 - 284
Abstract: This article argues that landscape is an instrument that travel writer and amateur artist and botanist Maria Graham uses to accentuate the momentous changes she witnesses during and after the Brazilian independence movement. Rather than being a background, landscape is a tool with which she inscribes the scene of Brazilian independence. Her self-awareness as a privileged British citizen leads her to champion a political movement that valorizes the mythology of innate British liberty, and landscape serves as an ideal medium through which to channel this conviction. Her 1824 Journal of a Voyage to Brazil demonstrates a way of looking at South American land that articulates a harmony between its natural and political structures; her construction of the Brazilian landscape orders it so as to align the natural and political environments. At the same time, her work bears witness to the discursive processes that forge the ever-unstable binary oppositions of nature and culture, aesthetics and politics.
PubDate: 2022-03-30
Issue No: Vol. 21, No. 1 (2022)
- Tropical Topographies: Mapping the Malarial in The Calcutta Chromosome
Authors: Priscilla Jolly
Pages: 285 - 305
Abstract: This paper reads colonial archives of malaria in conjunction with Amitav Ghosh’s futuristic medical thriller The Calcutta Chromosome (1995) and contends that the novel, loosely based on Sir Roland Ross, ruptures narratives of colonial expertise. The colonial expertise on malaria is embodied by Ross, an officer in the Indian Medical Service; this is in contrast with the model of expertise proposed by the novel. While Ross’s expertise is predicated on the domination of nature and controlling diseased tropical landscapes, the novel resists imperial strategies of mapping and disease control. This paper argues that The Calcutta Chromosome presents an alternative attempt to map the malarial, rewriting history by displacing actors such as Ross and instead placing two colonial subjects, Murugan and Mangala, at the centre of new mapping practices. The novel further questions the notion of ‘colonial improvement’ which malaria facilitated in imperial regimes. Deviating from the colonial history of improving the native body and landscape as a cure for malaria, the novel foregrounds subjugated subjects working at the peripheries of laboratories and scientific practices and thus subverts the notion of the ‘improved subject’ by proposing the idea of the mutational, transformational ‘Calcutta chromosome.’
PubDate: 2022-03-30
DOI: 10.25120/etropic.21.1.2022.3837
Issue No: Vol. 21, No. 1 (2022)
- Ecofeminist Landscapes in Anita Desai’s Cry, The Peacock and Where
Shall We Go This Summer
Authors: Prachi Priyanka
Pages: 306 - 325
Abstract: In modern parlance, landscape can be understood in various contexts that range from urban and rural, to emotional and repressive, to revolutionary. The concept of landscape is thus an entanglement of nature and culture. It is simultaneously a spatial and mental entity and involves a temporal dimension (Tress & Tress, 2001). Through a close reading of Anita Desai’s novels Cry, The Peacock and Where Shall We Go This Summer, this paper investigates the environmental landscapes of the tropical Indian settings, and the psychological landscapes of the two female protagonists. The novels self-exploratory journeys of the central female characters Maya and Sita, bring forth the anguish of middle-class Indian women who live a life of lack, loss and longing in an oppressive patriarchal system that does not give them space to express themselves or be heard. Through these narratives, the paper examines how landscapes of the feminine psyche, landscapes of tropical India and landscapes of middle-class Hindu women present an ecofeminist quest for integration of self through nature.
PubDate: 2022-03-30
Issue No: Vol. 21, No. 1 (2022)
- Pacific Seascapes of the Anthropocene: Changing Human-Nature Relationships
in Jeff Murray’s Melt
Authors: Trina Bose, Punyashree Panda
Pages: 326 - 347
Abstract: Melt (2019), Jeff Murray’s debut novel is set in the near future of 2048. It depicts how the Anthropocene has wrought massive changes to seascapes, islandscapes, and landscapes, especially those of the tropical Pacific. The novel follows the plight of the people of Independence, a fictional low-lying Pacific island, who, due to rising sea levels and tropical storms, seek to migrate to New Zealand. However, migration is an option for rich countries, and the island community remains climate refugees on their ecologically crumbling island in a new world of mass climate migration. This paper focuses on cultural seascapes and landscapes of the Anthropocene, disruptions in human-nature relationships, and the possibility of human adaptation through climate migration. We read Melt with reference to the ecocritical theories of Cheryll Glotfelty, Lawrence Buell, and M. R. Mazumdar.
PubDate: 2022-03-30
DOI: 10.25120/etropic.21.1.2022.3851
Issue No: Vol. 21, No. 1 (2022)
- Pornotopia
Authors: Jeffrey B. Javier
Pages: 373 - 387
Abstract: The poetry sequence “Pornotopia”—in coupling the words “pornography” and “utopia”, a world infused and suffused with desire—is an attempt to respond to the idea of “porno-tropics” where the white conqueror “feminizes the earth as a cosmic breast, in relation to which the epic male hero is a tiny, lost infant, yearning for the Edenic nipple” (McClintock, 1995, p. 22) and connects the “relationship between pornographic fantasies of the tropics and the brutal, often violent facts of conquest” (Balce, 2016, p. 40). “Pornotopia” continues the legacy of literary resistance that uses the linguistic tools of the master to subvert the insatiable lust of the empire, like in the poem “Land of Our Desire” by the Philippine poet Amador T. Daguio (1934/1989, p. 195), whose early works mark “the turning-point in Filipino poetry from, rather than in, English” (Abad, 1993, p. 23). Borrowing lyrical and stylistic tools from the 1984 poem “Sex Without Love” by Sharon Olds (p. 57), “Pornotopia” also explores the topography of voyeurism and the landscape of loveless sex.
PubDate: 2022-03-30
DOI: 10.25120/etropic.21.1.2022.3842
Issue No: Vol. 21, No. 1 (2022)
- Hrishikesh: A Poem on Corrupted Landscape
Authors: Srinjay Chakravarti
Pages: 388 - 391
Abstract: This poem on the pilgrimage center of Hrishikesh set in a humid subtropical niche of the scenic Uttarakhand state, aims to capture the corruption of its cultural, religious and natural landscapes. Here, modernity — with its concomitant technologism — jostles for space with Hindu leitmotifs and traditions, causing pollution, ecological damage and environmental degradation. These are outcomes not just of distorted economic policies and skewed technological and developmental paradigms, but also the residuum of religious rituals, pollutants and garbage dumped into the holy Ganges. Named after a form of the Hindu deity Vishnu, Hrishikesh, in Sanskrit, means “Lord of the Senses”. Nowadays, the town is more popularly known as Rishikesh (which means “the hair of a sage or ascetic”). This name, though etymologically erroneous, is not grammatically incorrect; it is, however, yet another pointer to the degeneration of the region’s pristinity. Here, not only is the natural environment under threat, but the rich traditions of Hinduism, too, are under assault from popular culture and mass consumerism. Such corruption is partly caused by the global yoga movement and the draw of international tourists who smoke cannabis on sacred riverbanks.
PubDate: 2022-03-30
DOI: 10.25120/etropic.21.1.2022.3845
Issue No: Vol. 21, No. 1 (2022)
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