POSTCOLONIAL WORLDS:
THE SOCIAL SCIENCESCritical and theoretically informed studies of
modern European colonialism as a political, eco-
nomic, socio-spatial and cultural process, were
produced in the final decades of, or just after, the
formal ending of colonial rule by metropolitan
sociologists, anthropologists, geographers and
others, whether French (Balandier, 1966), Dutch
(Furnivall, 1948; Wertheim 1964), American
(Cohn, 1987, from the 1950s; Turner, 1971),
British (Langlands 1969; McGee 1967; Smith,
1965) or others. Based on fieldwork in the colo-
nial or postcolonial territory, their audience was
presumed to be in that territory or the metropolis.
Critical writings of Fanon (1967; 1968),
Mannoni (1956) and Memmi (1965) remain the
outstanding texts of the colonized, addressing,
among other issues, the psychological traumas
experienced by the colonially oppressed.
Significant here, however, are those studies
which focused, not on representations of the col-
onized, but on the institutions and cultures of the
colonizers themselves, particularly their forms of
knowledge or particular practiceswhich may, or
may not, have had written texts to accompany
them but which are, as Rabinow (1989) illus-
trates, all part of the system of discursive power:
for example, medicine, cartography, agricul-
ture, urban planning or architectural design.
Subsequent to Said’s use of Foucault’s concept
of discourse in Orientalism(1978), this has been
termed ‘colonial discourse’ and refers to cultural
forms and practices developed in the very specific
context of the colonial situation with its particular
distribution of power.^2 Ashcroft et al., write,
‘Colonial discourse is greatly implicated in ideas
of the centrality of Europe, and thus in assumptions
that have become characteristic of modernity:
assumptions about history, language, literature and
“technology” ... It is the system of knowledge and
beliefs about the world within which acts of colo-
nization take place’ (1998: 41–2).
A prime example of such knowledge, and one
having momentous influence on decisions about
the location of settlements, the appropriation of
space, socio-spatial forms, practices of urban
development and architectural culture was the
so-called ‘miasmic’ theory which perceived the
origins of disease as determined by emanations
from the ground, particularly in the so-called
‘tropics’. Here, ‘the tropics’ are to be understood
as perhaps the most foundational concept in the
‘imagined geographies’ of imperialism, a colo-
nial construct of climate and nature. In this sense,
making colonies was also about remaking nature,not just in terms of assessing and exploiting the
economic value of colonized lands as resource
value, but also in terms of other (scientific)
values and risk (disease). Encountering ‘the trop-
ics’ was about fear and the risk and threat of dis-
ease and madness, signs of not being in control.
From this developed the myths and paranoias of
the tropics, such as the notion of the ‘white
man’s grave’ or, in eighteenth-century India,
‘two monsoons’ as the expectation of life.
Combined at different times with various levels
of racism and policies of colonial social control,
this notion of ‘the tropics’ was to be a dominant
factor influencing colonial social, spatial and
political practices as well as relations.
The European construction of the concept of
‘the tropics’ and the ‘tropical’ has received atten-
tion from both geographers and others (Arnold,
2000; Driver and Yeoh, 2000; Livingstone,
1991; 1999; 2000). As Driver and Yeoh suggest,
there is a need ‘to raise questions about the
multiple practices through which the tropics
were known, by no means all of them articulated
in discursive terms’ (2000: 3). ‘Identification of
the northern temperate regions as the normal and
the tropics as altogether other – climatically,
geographically, and morally other – became an
enduring imaginative geography which contin-
ues to shape the production and consumption of
knowledge’ (Arnold, 2000: 7). In examining the
history of ideas of tropical nature in general and
tropical geography in particular, Arnold empha-
sizes ‘how important scientific ideas and acade-
mic authority were to the construction of the
northern idea of the tropics’ (2000: 3, 7). The dis-
ourse of tropicality, according to Arnold (2000: 7),
is sufficiently important to parallel the idea of
orientalism as a cultural and political construction
of the west, as discussed by Edward Said.
The material implications of these tropical dis-
courses are best registered in relation to practices
of medicine, housing, architecture, planning, dress
and the body (that is, the specific construction of
cultural knowledge and practice oriented to the
habits of behaviour of Europeans in ‘the tropics’).
In an age prior to the understanding of bacterio-
logical theories of infection, or Ross’ 1890s con-
nection of malaria to the anopheles mosquito,
miasmic theories dominated every colonial settle-
ment and daily living decision. As polluted air was
taken as the cause of disease, and ‘native settle-
ments’ and ‘habits’ the origin of this, colonial set-
tlements in India (and elsewhere in ‘the tropics’)
were invariably located windward of, in front of,
at a distance from, and preferably at higher alti-
tudes than, the former. Throughout South and
South East Asia, as well as West Africa, massive
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