3rd World Congress of Environmental History

Situating tropicality: Finding common ground between the fields of tropical medicine and agroecology

• In Event: Agriculture and Science: Histories of the 20th Century

Abstract

This contribution highlights potentialities and limits for the use of the category of « tropicality » in global environmental history. « Tropicality » is a concept that environmental history appropriated from French colonial geography. It has been increasingly used to frame narratives and conceive research topics, in a context where « tropical » areas are regarded as key regions for problematizing issues such as biodiversity conservation, agricultural transitions and climate change impacts. However, some current uses of « tropicality » have implications that reinforce some earlier, problematic conceptions of this idea, which rely on deterministic underpinnings, carry colonial and racist undertones and reinforce astronomical reductionisms. Our aim is not to proscribe the use of « tropicality » in environmental history, but rather to provide analytical tools to enhance the critical potential of this category. In order to do this, we draw on examples from the intellectual genealogy of two fields of study that have their own autonomous groundings for depicting complexity in « the tropics »: historiography on tropical medicines, and conceptualizations of agroecology, particularly in South America. Environmental history can achieve complex narratives of socioecological formations in « the tropics » by paying attention to those fields and borrowing methodological and theoretical formulations from them without running the risk of endorsing environmental otherness and simplifying ecosystems in its narratives. Our proposal for critical uses of « tropicality » rests on three main elements : thinking in terms of « the consequences of context » (Bell and Bellon, 2018), paying strong attention to human agency and power relations within a given context by engaging with the field of political ecology, and avoiding expectations of universal outcomes.

Authors

• Claire Lagier, Rachel Carson Center, Munich

• Daniel Dutra Coelho Braga, UFRJ