Gourou’s ‘colonial situations’

In this penultimate chapter we take a closer look at the different ‘colonial situations’ in which Pierre Gourou worked and his work was read, and understand this expression in the way it was formulated by the radical French sociologist Georges Balandier. He coined the expression ‘the colonial situation’ in 1951 to capture the need to bring the “ensemble” of economic, geographic, political, psychological and sociological relationships between colonisers and the colonised into a unitary analytical frame in order to understand “the colonial problem in its entirety.” ¹ His formulation was at once holistic and particular in its sense of the direction in which the social sciences should move in response to the rising tide of anti-colonialism after World War II. Significant elements of the style of critical inquiry he pioneered later became incorporated into the disciplinary project of postcolonial studies (although some were also lost). ² There are three basic components to Balandier’s idea, and we find iterations of each of them in Gourou post-war work. First, Balandier argued that “Colonialism, in establishing itself, imposed on subject peoples a very special type of situation” – one of “subjugation” and “dependency,” and one which was variously addressed by coloniser and the colonised through “reconquest,” “liquidation,” “conditional concessions,” the “granting of independence,” and a new “technical phase in colonialism” (or neo-colonialism). Second, he suggested that Western academic engagement with the colonial situation came in two broad forms: researchers were either “obsessed with the pursuit of the ethnologically pure, with the unaltered fact miraculously preserved in its primitive state,” or with “numerous practical investigations of very limited scope, satisfied with a comfortable empiricism scarcely surpassing the level of using a technique.” In Balandier’s view, these two visions, the one concerned with essences and destinies, and the other with “certain concrete situations” in the present, needed to inform one another, and he saw geography as one discipline within which theory and technique, and the archaic and contemporary, usefully met. And third, he recognised that these separations and connections were profoundly ideological, and a matter of intense debate within metropolitan and colonial salons of academia and government. ³