Tropicality, orientalism, and French colonialism in Indochina: The work of Pierre Gourou, 1927-1982

French Historical Studies

Volumn 28, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 297-326

  Bowd, Gavin ^a   Clayton, Daniel ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ST ANDREWS   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33745282002     PISSN: 00161071     EISSN: 15275493     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00161071-28-2-297     Document Type: Review

References (196)

1. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978), 49.
2. For an overview of postcolonial studies, see Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (London, 1998).
3. See Robert J. C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford, 2001), 383-410;
4. and A. L. Mackie, ed. , Orientalism: A Reader (Edinburgh, 2000).
5. David Arnold, "India's Place in the Tropical World, 1770-1930," Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 26 (1998): 4.
6. More critical attention has been paid to colonial constructions of space - to built environments of power. See David Arnold and Ramachandra Guha, eds. , Nature, Culture, and Imperialism: Essays on the Environmental History of South Asia (New Delhi, 1996);
7. and Roy MacLeod, ed. , "Nature and Empire: Science and the Colonial Enterprise," special issue, Osiris 15, no. 1 (2001).
8. See, e. g. , John Mackenzie, ed. , Imperialism and the Natural World (Manchester, 1990);
9. and John Prest, The Garden of Eden: The Botanic Garden and the Re-creation of Paradise (New Haven, CT, 1991), 1-37.
10. See esp. Richard Drayton, Nature's Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the "Improvement" of the World (New Haven, CT, 2000);
11. and Michael A. Osborne, Nature, the Exotic, and the Science of French Colonialism (Indianapolis, IN, 1994).
12. See David Arnold, The Problem of Nature: Environment, Culture, and European Expansion (Oxford, 1996), 141-68.
13. For critical readings of Said that are tailored to French orientalism, see Madeleine Dobie, Foreign Bodies: Gender, Language, and Culture in French Orientalism (Stanford, CA, 2001);
14. and David O'Brien, "Reproducing Colonies in Nineteenth-Century France," Contemporary French Civilization 26 (2002): 191-204.
15. Scholarship on the genealogy of tropicality is still in its infancy, but for a representative range of emerging approaches see, in addition to Arnold's work, Warwick Anderson, "Climates of Opinion: Acclimatization in Nineteenth-Century France and England," Victorian Studies 35 (1992): 135-58;
16. Alan Bewell, Romanticism and Colonial Disease (Baltimore, 1999);
17. Felix Driver, "Imagining the Tropics: Views and Visions of the Tropical World," Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 25 (2004): 1-17;
18. Nancy Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature (London, 2001);
19. Peter Stott, Tropical Rain Forest: A Political Ecology of Hegemonic Mythmaking (London, 1999);
20. and Alexander Tzonis, Liane Lefaivre, and Bruno Stagno, eds. , Tropical Architecture: Critical Regionalism in the Age of Globalization (London, 2001).
21. For these and further biographical details, see Pierre Gourou, Terres de bonne espérance: Le monde tropical (Paris, 1982), 3-18, 403-8.
22. David N. Livingstone, "Race, Space, and Moral Climatology: Notes Towards a Genealogy," Journal of Historical Geography 28 (2002): 159.
23. Tropical geography also became an area of study in British and North American geography, but it was more marginal institutionally, and arguably less programmatic, than the project overseen by Gourou. See Henri Nicolai, Paul Pélissier, and Jean-Pierre Raison, eds. , Un géographe dans son siècle: Actualité de Pierre Gourou (Paris, 2000);
24. and Marcus Power, Re-thinking Development Geographies (London, 2003), 45-70.
25. Pierre Gourou, Les pays tropicaux: Principes d'une géographie humaine et économique (Paris, 1947), 173.
26. This book went through four editions to 1966, was translated into many other languages, and was a standard university textbook during the 1950s and 1960s. On Gourou's influence within and beyond geography, see Michel Bruneau, "Pierre Gourou (1900-1999): Géographie et civilisations," L'homme, no. 153 (2000): 7-26. While Gourou popularized the term les pays tropicaux, he was not the first French scholar to use it, and others used the term tropicality (or tropicalité in French) in a critical vein, and with reference to Gourou, before Arnold (see the discussion of Aimé Césaire below).
27. David Arnold, "'Illusory Riches': Representations of the Tropical World, 1840-1950," Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 21 (2000): 6-7. Gourou helped explode the myth of tropical exuberance (the idea that the luxuriance of tropical vegetation pointed to unlimited riches) that persisted in British and French colonial thinking into the 1930s.
28. See Jean-Yves Puyo, "Sur le mythe colonial de l'iné puisabilité des ressources forestières (Afrique occidentale française/Afrique équatoriale française), 1900-1940," Cahiers de géographie du Québec 45 (2001): 479-96.
29. Arnold, "'Illusory Riches,'" 10.
30. For a full discussion of this strain of tropicality, see David N. Livingstone, Science, Space, and Hermeneutics (Heidelberg, 2002), 43-76.
31. This is a point made by commentators, and not least by geographers themselves. See, e. g. , Jean Suret-Canale, "Les géographes français face à la colonisation: L'exemple de Pierre Gourou," in Géographies des colonisations, ed. Michel Bruneau and Daniel Dory (Paris, 1994), 155-70.
32. On this point, see Said, Orientalism, xvi, 50-56;
33. and Gyan Prakash, "Orientalism Now," History and Theory 34 (1995): 199-212.
34. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (London, 1996), 116.
35. See also Derek Gregory, "(Post)Colonialism and the Production of Nature," in Social Nature: Theory, Practice, and Politics, ed. Noel Castree and Bruce Braun (Oxford, 2001), 84-111.
36. For an overview, see Hilary Winchester, Lily Kong, and Kevin Dunn, eds. , Landscapes: Ways of Imagining the World (London, 2003).
37. See, e. g. , Charles-Robert Ageron, La décolonisation française (Paris, 1991).
38. Said, Orientalism, 55.
39. See Michel Bruneau and Georges Courade, "Existe-t-il une géographie humaine tropicale? A la recherche du paradigme de Pierre Gourou," L'espace géographique 13 (1984): 306-16;
40. and John Kleinen, "Tropicality and Topicality: Reflections on the Work of Pierre Gourou" (paper presented at the Tropicality Conference, University of Saint Andrews, Sept. 2003).
41. Pierre Gourou, "Itinéraire" interview, with Christian Taillard, Lettre de l'Afrase 29 (1993): 3-11.
42. Lévi-Strauss imagined exotic countries to be the opposite of his own. See Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature, 11-12, 235.
43. Panivong Norindr, Phantasmatic Indochina: French Colonial Ideology in Architecture, Film, and Literature (Durham, NC, 1996), 7.
44. Pierre Gourou, "La géographie comme 'divertissement'? Entretiens de Pierre Gourou avec Jean Malaurie, Paul Pélissier, Gilles Sautter, Yves Lacoste," Hérodote 33 (1984): 50-72.
45. Gourou, Terres de bonne espérance, 14.
46. See Herman Lebovics, True France: The Wars over Cultural Identity, 1900-1950 (Ithaca, NY, 1992);
47. and Fuyuki Kurasawa, "Primitiveness and the Flight from Modernity: Sociology and the Avant-Garde in Inter-War France," Economy and Society 32 (2003): 7-28.
48. Elizabeth Ezra, The Colonial Unconscious: Race and Culture in Interwar France (Ithaca, NY, 2000), 5.
49. See also Philippe Dewitte, Les mouvements nègres en France, 1919-1939 (Paris, 1985).
50. V. Raoul Giradet, L'idée coloniale en France de 1871 à 1962 (Paris, 1972).
51. On the exposition, see Patricia A. Morton, Hybrid Modernities: Architecture and Representation at the 1931 Colonial Exposition, Paris (Brussels, 1991).
52. On the counterexposition, see Jody Blake, "The Truth about the Colonies, 1931: Art Indigène in Service of the Revolution," Oxford Art Journal 25 (2002): 35-58.
53. Pierre Gourou, Le Tonkin (Paris, 1931), 344.
54. Ezra, Colonial Unconscious, 6-17.
55. On Inguimberty, see Nadine Andre-Pallois, L'Indochine un lieu d'echange culturel? Les peintres français et Indochinois (fin XIXe-XXe siècle) (Paris, 1997), 157-62.
56. On the "Algiers school," see Roger Benjamin, Orientalist Aesthetics: Art, Colonialism, and French North Africa, 1880-1930 (Berkeley, CA, 2003).
57. Ambiguity is a prominent theme in recent studies of Indochina. See, e. g. , Pierre Brocheux and Daniel Hemery, Indochine: La colonisation ambiguë, 1858-1954 (Paris, 2001);
58. and Nicola Cooper, France in Indochina: Colonial Encounters (Oxford, 2001), esp. 74-76 on the reconstruction of the temple of Angkor Wat at the 1931 Exposition.
59. See, Morton, Hybrid Modernities, 1-15.
60. Gourou, "Itinéraire," 5.
61. This project yielded an eighty-page report, Esquisse d'une étude de l'habitation annamite dans l'Annam septentrional et central (Paris, 1936), which Gourou submitted as his supplementary doctoral thesis.
62. In 1927 Giáp was condemned to two years' imprisonment for organizing a student strike to mark the funeral of the nationalist leader Phan Chau Trinh. However, teachers, convinced of Giáp's ability, persuaded the Sûreté Générale to have him enrolled in Gourou's lycée in Hanoi, where, it was felt, he might be better "integrated" into the Indo-Chinese elite. But as Gourou recalled, the teenage Communist had other plans for the knowledge imparted to him: "I remember the excellent pupil that was Võ Nguyên Giáp, who had joined the lycée already a revolutionary; he had a burning desire for historical information; I can still see myself explaining on the blackboard the maneuver at Austerlitz, while, along with his fellow pupils, he took meticulous notes. This first-class mind agreed to help me in a research project on the houses of his native Nghe An" (Terres de bonne espérance, 15).
63. Pierre Gourou, Les paysans du delta tonkinois: Etude de géographie humaine (Paris, 1936).
64. All citations refer to this edition except where otherwise noted. See also John Kleinen, "The Village as Pretext: Ethnographic Praxis and the Colonial State in Vietnam," in The Village in Asia Revisited, ed. Jan Breman and Ashwani Saith (Delhi, 1997), 366;
65. Jacques Gallais, "L'évolution de la pensée géographique de Pierre Gourou sur les pays tropicaux (1935-1970)," Annales de géographie, no. 498 (1981): 132. Between the 1940s and 1980s opportunities for research on the Vietnamese countryside were severely restricted by war.
66. Susan Bayly, "French Anthropology and the Durkheimians in Colonial Indochina," Modern Asian Studies 34 (2000): 581-622.
67. On the important connection between French republicanism and colonialism, see Nicolas Bancel, Pascal Blanchard, and François Vergès, La république coloniale (Paris, 2003).
68. Full consideration of the metropolitan and colonial contours of this discourse lies beyond the purview of this article, but for good overviews, see Mark Cleary, "Retour à la terre: Peasantist Discourse in Rural France c. 1930-1950," in Place, Culture, and Identity: Essays in Historical Geography in Honour of Alan R. H. Baker, ed. Iain S. Black and Robin A. Butlin (Quebec City, 2001), 235-54;
69. and Eric Jennings, Vichy in the Tropics: Pétains National Revolution in Madagascar, Guadeloupe, and Indochina, 1940-1944 (Stanford, CA, 2001).
70. On the development of French geography during this period, see Vincent Berdoulay, La formation de l'école française de géographie (1870-1914) (Paris, 1981);
71. and Paul Claval, Histoire de la géographie française de 1870 à nos jours (Paris, 1998).
72. Vidal's wider impact on French ethnography and sociology is amply registered in Emmanuelle Sibeud, Une science impériale pour l'Afrique? La construction des savoirs africanistes en France, 1878-1930 (Paris, 2002).
73. See Paul Vidal dela Blache, Tableau de la géographie de la France (Paris, 1903);
74. and Vidal de la Blache, "Les genres de vie dans la géographie humaine," Annales de géographie 20 (1911): 193-212, 289-304.
75. On the connections between geography and empire in France, see Dominique Lejeune, Les sociétés de géographie en France et l'expansion coloniale au XIXe siècle (Paris, 1993).
76. Gourou, Les paysans, 6.
77. Claval, Histoire de la géographie française, 99-112.
78. See Marcel Dubois, Un siècle d'expansion coloniale (Paris, 1900).
79. Dubois's conception of colonial geography was extended to Indochina through the work of Yves Henry - see Henry, Economie agricole de l'Indochine (Hanoi, 1932).
80. For a good overview of colonial geography, see Olivier Soubeyran, "La géographie coloniale au risque de la modernité," in Bruneau and Dory, Géographies des colonisations, 35-49.
81. Gourou made this formulation most explicit in Pour une géographie humaine (Paris, 1973), but he noted that much of what he meant by the term could be found in his earlier work.
82. On French colonial engagement with the Vietnamese peasantry during this period, see Ngô Viñh Long, Before the Revolution: The Vietnamese Peasants under the French (Cambridge, MA, 1973);
83. and Pham Cao Duong, Vietnamese Peasants under French Domination, 1861-1945 (Lanham, MD, 1985).
84. One of Gourou's close colleagues, Charles Robequain, who worked on the southern Tonkin province of Thanh Hoa, recalled that in those days one "could move from one end of the country to the other, unarmed and without fear. . . . The Indochinese Union was a reality" ("Réception de M. Pierre Gourou à l'Académie des Sciences Coloniales," Compte-rendu mensuel des séances de l'Académie des Sciences Coloniales 15 [1955]: 66).
85. Gourou, Les paysans, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1965), 2.
86. See Pierre Gourou, L'utilisation du sol en Indochine française (Paris, 1940), 229-55, 272-82. Vichy politicians and many postwar historians interested in the rural capitalist dynamics in Vietnam have used this text as a starting point.
87. On the so-called middle region, see Peter Zinoman, The Colonial Bastille: A History of Vietnamese Imprisonment, 1862-1940 (Berkeley, CA, 2001), 158-99.
88. On the highlands, see Andrew Hardy, Red Hills: Migrants and the State in the Highlands of Vietnam (Copenhagen, 2003).
89. The French banned alcohol distilling, but, as Gourou reported, this activity, into which many peasants were forced by heavy taxes, was "one of the most important occasions for contact and conflict between the peasant and the authorities" (Les paysans, 478).
90. For evidence of Gourou's political influence, see John Buttinger, Vietnam: A Dragon Embattled, 2 vols. (London, 1967), 1:172-78;
91. and Paul Isoart, Le phénomène national vietnamien: De l'indépendance unitaire à l'indépendance fractionnée (Paris, 1961), 178-84, 261-72.
92. For evidence of Gourou's influence on the rice question, see René Bouvier, Richesse et misère du delta tonkinois (Paris, 1937), 21-50.
93. For a wider assessment of French anticolonial literature during this period, see Gino Raymond, "French Culture and the Politics of Self-Esteem: The Vietnam Experience," in America, France, and Vietnam: Cultural History and Ideas of Conflict, ed. Paul Melling and John Roper (Aldershot, 1991), 56-70.
94. Aix-en-Provence, Centre des Archives d'Outre-Mer (CAOM), Fonds Moutet, box 5, dossier 131, "Rapport de Pierre Gourou" (1937).
95. On the influence of the commission, see Oskar Salemink, "Mois and Maquis: The Invention and Appropriation of Vietnam's Montagnards from Sabatier to the CIA," in Colonial Situations: Essays on the Contextualization of Ethnographic Knowledge, ed. George W. Stocking Jr. (Madison, WI, 1991), 243-84.
96. See Paul Bernard, Nouveaux aspects du problème économique Indochinois (Paris, 1937), 113-20, 174-76.
97. See also Andrew Hardy, "The Economies of French Rule in Indochina: A Biography of Paul Bernard (1892-1960)," Modern Asian Studies 32 (1998): 807-49.
98. Charles Robequain, L'évolution économique de l'Indochine française (Paris, 1939), 82-86.
99. See Christophe Bonneuil, Des savants pour l'Empire: La structuration des recherches scientifiques coloniales au temps de "la mise en valeur des colonies françaises," 1917-1945 (Paris, 1991).
100. See, e. g. , Numa Broc, "Les grandes missions scientifiques françaises au XIXe siècle (Morée, Algérie, Mexique) et leurs travaux géographiques," Revue d'histoire des sciences 23 (1981): 319-50;
101. and James E. McClellan III and François Regourd, "The Colonial Machine: French Science and Colonization in the Ancien Régime," Osiris 15 (2001): 31-50.
102. See Daniel Dory, "Géographie et colonisation en France durant laTroisième République (1870-1940)," in Science and Empires: Historical Studies about Scientific Development and European Expansion, ed. Patrick Petitjean, Cathérine Jami, and Anne Marie Moulin (Boston, 1992), 323-29.
103. See Frédéric Thomas, "La forêt mise à nu: Essai anthropologique sur la construction d'un objet scientifique tropical, 'forêts et bois coloniaux d'Indochine,' 1860-1940," 3 vols. (thèse EHESS, Paris, 2003).
104. Pierre Gourou, "La carte et le raisonnement géographique, " Cahiers de l'ORSTOM 9 (1972): 135-36.
105. and Gourou, "Géographie comme 'divertissement'?" 59.
106. On the maps and literature that Gourou viewed as useless, and this geographic error, see Louis Malleret, L'exotisme Indochinois dans la littérature française depuis 1860 (Paris, 1934);
107. and John F. Cady, The Roots of French Imperialism in Eastern Asia (Ithaca, NY, 1954).
108. Paul Vidal de la Blache, Principes de géographie humaine (Paris, 1922), 3-14.
109. For the balloon metaphor, see, e. g. , Jean Bruhnes, La géographie humaine (Paris, 1925), 60.
110. See Milton Osborne, "Fear and Fascination in the Tropics: A Reader's Guide to French Fiction in Indochina," in Asia in Western Fiction, ed. Robin Winks and James Rush (Honolulu, HI, 1990), 24-49.
111. On the place of the tropics in nonliterary systems of French colonial representation, see Christophe Bonneuil, Mettre en ordre et discipliner les tropiques: Les sciences du végétal dans l'Empire français, 1870-1970 (Paris, 2001).
112. Bernard Philippe Groslier, Indochine, carrefour des arts (Paris, 1961), 6.
113. Gourou also paid scant attention to Vietnamese maps or to their influence on Vietnamese conceptions of space, which in important areas overlapped French conceptions of its colonial territory. On this key point, see Christopher E. Goscha, "Annam and Vietnam in the New Indochinese Space, 1887-1945," in Asian Forms of the Nation, ed. Stein Tønnesson and Hans Antlov (Copenhagen, 1996), 131-50.
114. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London, 1992).
115. On French narratives of conquest and pacification, see Pierre Franchini, Les guerres d'Indochine (Paris, 1988).
116. Doumer presided over the creation of the Service Géographique de l'Indochine, the Mission Archéologique, an Indochinese branch of the Institut Pasteur, as well as the EFEO, which was preceded by the Société Académique Indo-Chinoise. See Thrinh van Thao, L'école française en Indochine (Paris, 1995), 1-21.
117. See David Del Testa, "Imperial Corridor: Association, Transportation, and Power in French Colonial Indochina," Science, Technology, and Society 4 (1999): 179-95.
118. Throughout his career Gourou maintained that the French (and later Vietnamese revolutionaries) set too much store by economic considerations and not enough by geographic and cultural ones. See Bibliothèque Nationale de France (hereafter BNF), Fonds Gottmann, Pierre Gourou to Jean Gottmann, Oct. 9, 1968; and Gourou, "Géographie comme 'divertissement'?" 69.
119. Pierre Singaravélou, L'Ecole française d'extrême- orient ou l'institution des marges (1898-1956) (Paris, 1999), esp. 95-111.
120. See also Catherine Clémentin-Ojha and Pierre-Yves Manguin, Un siècle pour l'Asie (Paris, 2001).
121. See, e. g. , Direction générale de l'instruction publique (DGIP): Le service de l'instruction publique en Indochine (Hanoi, 1930).
122. Pierre Gourou and Jean Loubet, Cours de géographie: Enseignement primaire supérieur francoindigène, 4e année: L'Asie moin, l'Asie russe, l'Indochine (Hanoi, 1934), 42-44.
123. Gourou makes a similar point in Utilisation du sol, 6.
124. On this historiography, see David Marr, Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, 1920-1945 (Berkeley, CA, 1981), 54-100.
125. See Gail P. Kelly, "Colonial Schools in Vietnam: Policy and Practice," in Education and Colonialism, ed. Philip Altbach and Gail P. Kelly (London, 1978), 15-31.
126. See Kate Frieson, "Sentimental Education: Les sages femmes and Colonial Cambodia," Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 1 (2000): 18-33;
127. and Gail P. Kelly, "The Presentation of Indigenous Society in the Schools of French West Africa and Indochina, 1918 to 1938," Comparative Studies in Society and History 26 (1984): 523-42.
128. Patrick Laude, Exotisme Indochinois et poésie (Paris, 1990).
129. For a similar discussion, see Henri Copin, L'Indochine française dans la littérature française des années 20 à 1954: Exotisme et altérité (Paris, 1996).
130. Frédéric Dufaux, "La carte de la densité de population, entre fonction heuristique et émotion esthétique, " in Nicolai, Pélissier, and Raison, Géographe dans son siècle, 129-40.
131. See Gourou, Les pays tropicaux, 7, 172-75.
132. Gourou's most spirited attacks on environmental determinism can be found in his 1961 essay "Le déterminisme physique dans L'esprit des lois," rpt. in Pierre Gourou, Recueil d'articles (Brussels, 1970), 21-33
133. and in Gourou's review of L'homme sur la terre, by Max Sorre, Annales de géographie 56 (1947): 1-12.
134. On the importance of his Tonkin Delta findings for his later comparative project, see Pierre Gourou, "Civilisation et géographie humaine en Asie des moussons," Bulletin de l'Ecole française d'extrême-orient 44 (1954): 467-75;
135. and Pierre Gourou, "Mon orientation tropicaliste," in Leçons de géographie tropicale et subtropicale: Colloque organisé en l'honneur de Pierre Gourou, Nimègue, 27 octobre 1988 (Nijmegen, 1989), 2-50.
136. BNF, Fonds Gottmann, Gourou to Gottmann, Aug. 2, 1984. See also Livingstone, "Race, Space, and Moral Climatology," 159-61;
137. and Pierre Gourou, Leçons de géographie tropicale: Leçons données au Collège de France de 1947 à 1970 (Paris, 1970).
138. Pierre Gourou, La terre et l'homme en Extrême-Orient (Paris, 1940).
139. See Donald K. Emmerson, "Southeast Asia: What's in a Name?" Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 15 (1984): 1-21.
140. An important precursor to Gourou's work is Jules Sion's Asie des moussons, vol. 9 of Géographie universelle, ed. Paul Vidal de la Blache and Lucien Gallois (Paris, 1928), though Gourou eschewed the evolutionist tone of Sion's study.
141. Gourou, La terre et l'homme, 88-89.
142. On the "special" and "peculiar" character of tropical lands, see, e. g. , Les pays tropicaux, 2, 6, 161.
143. Pierre Gourou, La terre et l'homme en Extrême-Orient, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1972), 3, 223-25.
144. The area northeast of Normandy is studied in the famous regional monograph produced by Gourou's doctoral supervisor, Albert Demangeon: La plaine picarde (Paris, 1905).
145. See Gourou, Les pays tropicaux, 2-7, 42-47, 171-78.
146. See also Pierre Gourou, L'Afrique (Paris, 1955).
147. He argued that the ability of the rice-growing peoples of the Far East and South Asia to develop sophisticated civilizations was heavily influenced by the fact that the Red River, the Ganges, the Brahmaputra, and the Irrawady are fed by rivers that originate in temperate lands and carry a considerable amount of alluvial matter, which fertilizes the soil. Pierre Gourou, "Deltas as Population Centres," in Natural Resources of Tropical Asia, vol. 7 of UNESCO Natural Resources Research (Washington, DC, 1974), 439-48.
148. On his misgivings about the idea of "development," see Leçons de géographie tropicale, 25-40.
149. See Pierre Gourou, "Pour une géographie humaine," Finisterra: Revista portuguesa de geografia 1 (1966): 10-32;
150. and Pierre Gourou, La densité de la population au Ruanda-Urundi: Esquisse d'une étude géographique (Brussels, 1953).
151. Robequain, "Réception de M. Pierre Gourou," 67.
152. Robequain, who gained a chair at the Sorbonne, was instrumental in opening up French Africa to state-funded tropical scholarship.
153. See Christophe Bonneuil and Pierre Petitjean, "Recherche scientifique et politique coloniale: Les chemins de la création de l'ORSTOM, 1936-1945," in Les sciences coloniales, vol. 2 of Les sciences hors d'Occident au XXe siècle, ed. Pierre Petitjean (Paris, 1996), 113-61.
154. Apart from Gourou's own work, the principal monographs of French tropical geography, which reached its heyday during the 1960s, include Jean Delvert, Le paysan cambodgien (Paris, 1961);
155. Gilles Sautter, De l'Atlantique au fleuve Congo (Paris, 1966);
156. Paul Pélissier, Les paysans du Sénégal (Paris, 1966);
157. and Jean Gallais, Le delta intérieur du Niger (Dakar, 1967).
158. Pierre Bourdieu, Homo academicus (Paris, 1984), 140. Bourdieu adds that during the 1960s Sorbonne degree students who quoted Lévi-Strauss or Gourou were guaranteed to fail.
159. Mus honored Ho Chi Minh's visit to Paris in 1946 by delivering an explosive lecture at the Sorbonne titled "Le Viet Nam chez lui," in which Gourou was mentioned. See also Paul Mus, "The Role of the Village in Vietnamese Politics," Pacific Affairs 22 (1949): 265-72.
160. In his Le Maghreb entre deux guerres (Paris, 1962), Berque argues that the Algerian War amounted not simply to a political defeat for France but also, and more deeply, to an anthropological failure to understand North Africa.
161. Pierre Gourou, "For a French Indo-Chinese Federation," Pacific Affairs 20 (1947): 18-29;
162. Gourou, Problèmes de l'Indochine contemporaine (Paris, 1947).
163. David N. Livingstone, "Tropical Hermeneutics: Fragments for a Historical Narrative," Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 21 (2000): 96.
164. Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, MA, 1995), 163.
165. Pierre Gourou, Pour une géographie humaine, 9.
166. His reluctance to see revolutionary agency in decolonizing contexts, even when and where it was peasant based, as anything other than epiphenomenal is captured in his essay on the Mau-Mau rebellion in Kenya: Pierre Gourou, "Une paysannerie africaine au milieu du XXe siècle: Les Kikuyu et la crise Mau-Mau," Les cahiers d'Outre-Mer 7 (1954): 322-41.
167. Paul Clay Sorum, Intellectuals and Decolonization in France (Chapel Hill, NC, 1977), 212.
168. See also James D. Le Sueur, "Decolonizing 'French Universalism,'" in The Decolonization Reader, ed. James D. Le Sueur (London, 2003), 115, which argues that the Algerian War put French left intellectuals in the "cruel paradox" of deciding whether to defend "the universal values of their personal, collective, and national identities" or side "with a people who largely denied this universalism. "
169. Pierre Gourou, L'avenir de l'Indochine (Paris, 1947), 54.
170. Likewise, in L'Asie (Paris, 1953), 336, he claims that "the main problem facing Indochina is a political one.
171. If France ceases to exert a moderating and conciliating influence, there is little reason why the political structure it built should survive. " The following year he noted, "Immense in space and time, Asia will be the place for fermentations and evolution that, by themselves, will be of the greatest interest and that strongly influence the evolution of the rest of the planet" (introduction to Roger Lévy, Situations en Extrême-Orient [Paris, 1954], 3).
172. BNF, Fonds Gottmann, Gourou to Gottmann, June 17, 1965. See also Yves Lacoste's exposé of American bombing of the Tonkin Delta, "Bombing the Dikes: A Geographer's On-the-Site Analysis," Nation, no. 215 (1972): 298-301, in which some of the motifs found in Gourou's 1936 work figure centrally.
173. Jacques Marseille, Empire colonial et capitalisme français: Histoire d'un divorce (Paris, 1984).
174. See also Tony Judt, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-56 (Berkeley, CA, 1992).
175. Aimé Césaire, Discours sur le colonialisme (Paris, 1955), 32.
176. Césaire here foreshadows Said's (and Michel Foucault's) concern with how the West has disguised its arts of dominance in "the language of truth, discipline, rationality, utilitarian value, and knowledge. " Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA, 1983), 216.
177. In Orientalism, 240, Said makes passing reference to the contestation of orientalism from within the Orient during the interwar years - of the Orient being pressed into "militant modern life" - though he does not develop the idea of what we might think of as a "militant orientalism. "
178. On Dalat, see Martin Shipway, The Road to War: France and Vietnam, 1944-1947(Oxford, 2003), 177-99.
179. See Yves Lacoste, "Géographie coloniale et géographie académique: Approche epistémologique," in Bruneau and Dory, Géographies des colonisations, 77.
180. CAOM, Papiers Monguillot, annexe 5, "Instructions du ministre des affaires étrangères pour la négociation d'un accord avec le gouvernement provisoire du Vietnam"; and "Instructions politiques pour la délégation française. "
181. CAOM, Papiers Monguillot, annex 5, "Instructions du ministre des affaires étrangères"; Võ Nguyên Giáp, Guerre du peuple, armée du peuple (Paris, 1966), 11.
182. See, e. g. , Robert Guillain, Orient extrême: Une vie en Asie (Paris, 1989);
183. Kim N. B. Ninh, A World Transformed: The Politics of Culture in Revolutionary Vietnam, 1945-1965 (Ann Arbor, MI, 2002). The EFEO became exposed to many reversals of orientalist fortune, not least through Ho Chi Minh's recruitment of EFEO-trained Vietnamese orientalists to his government ranks.
184. A Vietnamese translation of Les paysans was published in 2003.
185. See Truong Chinh and Võ Nguyên Giáp, The Peasant Question (1937-1938), trans. Christine Pelzer White (Ithaca, NY, 1974), 35-37;
186. Nguyen Van Huyen, Introduction à l'étude de l'habitation sur pilotis dans l'Asie du sud-est (Paris, 1934), 179-201;
187. and Paul Mus, Viêtnam, sociologie d'une guerre (Paris, 1952).
188. CAOM, Papiers Monguillot, annex 5, "Note sur la Conférence de Dalat, 18 avril-11 mai 1946," n. p. ;
189. Georges Boudarel, Cent fleurs écloses dans la nuit du Vietnam: Communisme et dissidence, 1954-1956 (Paris, 1991).
190. On Gourou's enduring scholarly influence in Vietnam, see The Tuan Dao, "Pierre Gourou, pionnier des études rurales vietnamiennes," in Le Vietnam à l'aube du XXIe siècle: Bilan et perspectives politiques, économiques et sociales, ed. Christophe Gironde and Jean-Luc Maurer (Paris, 2004), 21-35.
191. On wider processes of Western-Vietnamese conflict and exchange in the realms of politics, education, and land reform, see Mark P. Bradley, Imagining Vietnam and America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam, 1919-1950 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2000);
192. Nguyen Van Huyen, Seize ans d'essor de l'éducation nationale au Viet Nam (1945-1961) (Hanoi, 1961);
193. and Huy Le Phan, Tu Chi, and Nguyen Duc Nghinh, eds. , The Traditional Village in Vietnam (Hanoi, 1993).
194. Võ Nguyên Giáp, The Military Art of People's
195. Richard White, "'Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?' Work and Nature," in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York, 1996), 171.
196. Bayly, "French Anthropology and the Durkheimians. "