Affecting the tropics

Reporting to the Assembly of Professors at the Collège de France on 24 November 1946 and again on 17 February 1947 about the need for a chair devoted to the study of the tropical world, and proposing geographer Pierre Gourou for the position, the Annales historian Lucien Febvre underlined “the growing moral and scientific authority of a scholar who does not think you should close your eyes to the contemporary world,” and explained:

The world has changed completely in the last ten years. A chasm has opened up between 1936 and 1946. Surprising means of destruction and creation, and an uninterrupted series of ‘progressions,’ have transformed the old world and deeply modified the Universe. Twenty years ago, the spotlight shone only on the temperate lands of Europe and North America. Today the spotlight now shines on lands previously neglected. The satellite or annex lands. Some of them frozen, like the Arctic and Antarctic worlds. Others burning: I refer to the inter-tropical lands… . The tropical world is not a label, but a reality. It constitutes, at the centre of the globe, a powerfully individualised zone; it has its own physical geography; relations between man and milieu are not posed in the same terms there as they are in temperate lands.

In his second testimonial Febvre continued:

One man has thought about the problems I have expressed … [and] has spent twenty years working on them … with a singular breadth of vision and insight. Qualities of a man. Qualities of a scholar. I learned to recognise and honour the scholar by reading his remarkable books. As for the man, I recall a memory that is very dear. It was one of the last meetings I had in Paris with Marc Bloch, who then led the hard and heroically simple life of the Resistance. He evoked his time with Gourou in Montpellier – and all the ugliness and nastiness … they had witnessed. But also all the nobility and generosity, the passionate devotion to France… . And Bloch told me: Pierre Gourou is not just a great geographer. He is also a man. Don’t lose sight of that; nor that he does not think that one should close one’s eyes to the contemporary world. ¹

207The spotlight Febvre placed on the tropics and other “lands previously neglected” illuminated a rupture in the order of things. Febvre had written a great deal about the idea of civilisation as a narrative of the development of Western society from a primitive to an advanced state, and how, by the 1930s, civilisation was no longer a historic term denoting the collective life of a human group, or culture, but had become a contentious ethnographic concept used to measure and rank different cultures against European norms. ² Over the previous 100 years the idea had acquired sinister colonialist, racist and nationalist overtones. Potent theses about the determining influence of climate on culture and civilisation were in the air too and Febvre had debunked them in his 1922 La terre et l’évolution humaine, which was subtitled “a geographical introduction to history” and was published in English with that title in 1925. ³ Both Febvre and Gourou acknowledged the impress of physical conditions on human life, particularly in the tropics, but strenuously rejected environmental determinism. Thanking Febvre for his support at the start of his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France nine months later, Gourou argued that the overriding virtue of the Annales historian’s work was that it “keeps us from the traps of determinism.” ⁴