4. Worlds in Motion
“Geographies,” said the Geographer, “are the books which, of all books, are most concerned with matters of consequence. They never become old-fashioned. It is very rarely that a mountain changes its position. It is very rarely that an ocean empties itself of its waters. We write of eternal things.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince, 1943
The first time I saw a live Ariane launch was on a battered black-and-white television in Cayenne. As fate or a programmer's joke would have it, the American film version of Papillon (dubbed back into French) was playing on the second of the two official channels then operating in French Guiana. Fascinated by this coincidence I switched back and forth as each story unfolded, the rows of concentrating men in light shirts under the fluorescent light of the present, the lines of marching men in striped clothing beneath the sun of the past. Tension grew in each narrative, but as the countdown neared and the men before the terminals ceased their occasional asides and tightened their smiles, I stayed with the launch, watching the rocket slowly pull itself off the ground and up through the sky. Some twenty minutes (and not a few graphs) later, the satellite successfully separated from the last stage and headed for its lonely revolutions. The screen now filled with general applause and handshaking as the dignitaries and technicians stood up and began to clear off their consoles. As the live excitement died away, I turned to the other program, where a crowd of assembled convicts knelt in an open square before a guillotine. The condemned prisoner struggled; the blade fell. In a flash it sliced a head, spattering the camera with blood.
This fortuitous coincidence between the two poles of my subject—the simulated crossing of their central rituals within the space of one small screen—signifies nothing and yet reflects everything. Like the repeated choice of Guyane as a land of experimentation, it is in essence arbitrary (the result of willful decision) and yet in practice echoes
The following pages compare the penal colony and the space center on three levels. The first takes the task literally, noting structural similarities and differences between the two projects, as well as their respective relations to French Guiana. The second moves beyond each project to examine its relation to a different understanding of place, one caught between universal method and differentiated human profiles, the other between differentiated method and a universal sense of human nature. Finally, in the next chapter, the third level returns us to intersections between nature and technology in labor and the spatial implications of tropical development.
7. Tropics of Nature
They still felt imprisoned, but prisoners now of this strange, dumb forest, where in no direction could they look more than a few feet ahead, this forest where thorns tore the flesh and the clothing of men who would journey through it.
Blair Niles, Condemned to Devil's Island, 1928
The true wealth of Guyane is its nature—protect it.
Kris Wood, “Au delà du Spatial,” 1995
THE PENAL COLONY AND THE SPACE CENTER: A COMPARISON
We cannot help but to compare, mutatis mutandis, the place and role of the penal administration in the Guyanais economy a century ago to that of CSG [the space center at present].
Serge Mam-Lam-Fouck, Histoire de la Guyane contemporane, 1992
From the perspective of the economic history of French Guiana, the comparison of the penal colony and the space center appears inevitable. Unlikely a pair as they may be, the two play similar roles as central state projects, uneasily married to the rest of Guyanais society. As historian Serge Mam-Lam-Fouck points out, each created a settlement to suit its needs, while contributing to the hollow nature of French Guiana's economy.[1] Yet at the same time, there are significant differences in the practical administration of the penal colony and space center, and the rationale behind each project remains strikingly different. Thus a comparison between the two gives us a frame within which to
Figure 18. Convicts surprised by boa, ca. 1876
To start with, let us briefly review the facts of each case. After a number of earlier trials, the penal colony begins operation in the middle of the nineteenth century, partly as a substitute for a system of plantation slavery. It conceives of French Guiana as open land for agricultural settlement, fertile ground for a tropical—and French—Australia, where the action of moral reform can translate into a scheme of colonization. Following a quest for the proper site within the colony, these early hopes are belied by the high mortality of the convicts, particularly those of European extraction. After an interlude where the flow of new bodies
The space center begins operation in the second half of the twentieth century, in the midst of the Space Race and in the aftermath of the Algerian War. It conceives of French Guiana as open land for technical experiments and a gateway into equatorial orbit, an even more tropical—and French—Cape Canaveral. After an initial period of failure, a renewed pan-European launcher program produces a reliable rocket, and a regular stream of technicians and engineers arrives to assemble and guide it into space. The initial mandate to provide France with a launch site expands into a focus on commercial satellites, and although local opposition to the project continues, the effects of the enterprise on French Guiana in both symbolic and material terms only deepen. As the Ariane rocket gains importance, the surrounding landscape transforms from an orphan of history into a handmaiden of the future. At the same time, the department grows accustomed to an increased infusion of consumer goods, technical personnel, and immigrants, acquiring a new island with an artificial environment and a powerfully altered social profile.
At slightly closer range a number of striking structural similarities emerge. Not only do both projects found towns (St. Laurent on the one hand and the new Kourou on the other), but both operate as rival poles of influence and authority relative to the civil administration of French Guiana. Each involves the formation of a separate administrative body (the Administration Pénitentiare and the Centre Spatial Guyanais), with its own hierarchies, its own links to bureaucratic networks in Paris, and its own claims to significant national French interests. Each imports a population associated with its activities and exerts considerable influence over the surrounding economy. Most crucially, each controls and orders a separate territory within the larger political entity; each has a spatial presence, a direct impact on the landscape. And tied to this spatial strategy, each comes to serve as a symbolic nexus in collective Metropolitan imagination.
However, we can also point to strands of difference between the two projects, even within the outlines of their similarity. When the penal administration builds a new settlement at St. Laurent, it does so away from colonial settlements; when the space agency establishes a modern town at Kourou, it does so beside an existing hamlet. The penal colony operates opposite a colonial administration largely directed from Paris, whereas the space center operates opposite a more complex set of local as well as state political administrations. One employs leftover forces of law and order, whereas the other employs highly trained technical personnel; thus while both may have ties to the military, their strongest links lie at opposite ends of the chain of command. The penal colony imports the unwanted of France, whereas the space center imports the selected few. One, if anything, repels foreign immigration and is subject to international protest, whereas the other exerts a powerful attraction on neighboring populations and is subject to significant international cooperation. The penal administration controls a constellation of sites spread throughout French Guiana, whereas the space administration controls a more concentrated and defined domain. And the bagne reflects visions of an ancient underworld, whereas Ariane reflects visions of a new overworld.
One must also consider the difference in the general techniques involved. Penal transportation involves the direct use of human agents—the tools are bodies and populations. Rocket launching involves elaborate and expensive machinery as well as a skilled workforce—the tools are industrial materials ordered by knowledge. Each operation is predicated on a related but distinct spatial logic: the penal colony seeks open land to isolate and moralize convicts through labor, whereas the space center seeks open land to test rockets and maneuver satellites into orbit. Many of the specific additional attributes of a desirable site for penal colonization (distance from the Metropole, possibility of confinement and surveillance, and prevention of local disturbance) find echoes in the specific additional attributes of a desirable site for launching rockets (distance from the Metropole, adequate security, adequate possibility of transport, and political stability). But one final consideration in each case provides the crucial difference. For the penal colony, there remains the question of the appropriateness of climate for the new arrivals—a focus on qualities of place from the perspective of the ground—whereas for the space center, there remains the question of the proximity to the equator and possibility of both polar and equatorial launch—a focus on qualities of place from the perspective of the sky. This distinction warrants further elaboration, for the move between
EUROPEANS IN THE TROPICS
He is, or rather he believes himself to be, cosmopolitan; he dares to brave all the climates where other men can live, and his distant colonies constitute veritable experiments the results of which Science must study.
Paul Broca, cited in J. Orgeas, La pathologie des races humaines et le problème de la colonisation, 1886
In 1885 a French naval doctor by the name of J. Orgeas published a detailed monograph entitled Contribution à l'étude du non-cosmopolitisme de l'homme: La Colonisation de la Guyane par la transportation: Etude historique et démographique (Contribution to the study of the noncosmopolitanism of Man: The colonization of French Guiana by transportation: A historical and demographic study). The lengthy report—which had won the naval medicine prize three years earlier—examined mortality rates among convicts in the French Guiana penal colony, together with birth and infant mortality rates among the offspring of convict marriages. The conclusions to be drawn, Orgeas suggested, were clear and of import for all European efforts to settle in the tropics. The failure of Europeans to multiply in French Guiana was symptomatic of a wider, statistical, authenticated reality: “To pretend that Man is cosmopolitan, as seems to have been generally believed in the four centuries since the question was posed, is to pretend that he can live, work, cultivate the soil, and establish himself at all points on the globe; this thesis is not supportable, unless one categorically denies the authority of the most positive facts.”[2]
Read a century later, Orgeas's statement is strikingly alien; not only does his conclusion fall flat in the face of contemporary international networks, but the very formulation of the problem verges on the absurd. How could humanity—Man, the conqueror of the Moon—be limited by as minor a factor as earthly geography? How could members of a species so dispersed, so mobile, so capable of transforming local
To better understand the distance between French Guiana's penal colony and its space center, one must focus on transformations in the experience of place for Europeans in each context. This shift is both physical and conceptual, the difference of living differently and of thinking differently. Against the image of the space engineer reflected in the tinted glass of an air-conditioned office, one must recall the colonial officer in full dress uniform beneath a midday sun. Against the ready assumptions of contemporary statistics and understandings of disease, one must remember the power of forgotten theories and the significance of former problems. Although the facts of the natural setting may not have altered in a drastic fashion, their human interpretation has, and the buffer of technology between the two (ambient temperature, say, and “heat”) has been strikingly revised. The latter issue of the conceptual divide between nineteenth-century concerns and those of the present day is less intuitive than the transformation in material technology, and consequently I will treat it at length.
CONCEPTS OF CLIMATE AND RACE
Put a man into a close, warm place, and … he will feel a great faintness. If, under this circumstance, you propose a bold enterprise to him, I believe you will find him very little disposed towards it; his present weakness will throw him into despondency; he will be afraid of everything, being in a state of incapacity. The inhabitants of warm countries are, like old men, timorous, the inhabitants of cold countries are, like young men, brave.
Baron Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, 1748
To begin, let us revive Orgeas's problem, that of whether people and their customs have a natural habitat. Can one place human groups, or their ways of living, geographically? Are races or cultures directly tied
Following the phrasing and emphasis of the era, the way we should ask the question is whether or not “The White Man” can live in “The Tropics.” During the great period of European imperial expansion, we encounter strong doubts about the physical limits of European populations, about European bodies and their capacity to endure hot climates. How supple was the human form? Could anyone live anywhere? These questions, in and of themselves, were far from new.[3] However, with the advent of large-scale colonization, these concepts acquired technical importance; the issue of who can live where became a pragmatic as well as a speculative puzzle. Elaborate techniques developed to better acclimatize new arrivals, as well as to protect those already in place, while scientific debates over the effects of migration raged. Already in seventeenth-century New England a period of “seasoning” was identified, during which a debarking colonist required two years to adjust to the new milieu. By the nineteenth century the pith helmet became an essential article within the British colonial material repertoire, followed by the “spine pad,” a quilted device to protect the delicate European nervous system from exposure to sunlight.[4] The colonial experience of place was further colored by geographical conceptions of illness. Many maladies prevalent in the tropics, including malaria, were associated with particular landscapes rather than with mosquitoes or other vectors of infection. In surveying and settling the ground, colonists designated locales as “healthy” or “unhealthy”; swampy lowlands were generally feared. The problem of inserting European settlers into a colony became one of finding a place for them to live—on top of a hill, say, or a location exposed to wholesome breezes. Statistics related to death rates found their interpretation in relation to sites; if a problem developed in a particular setting, the solution was to alter the characteristics of that setting—through draining or other improvements—or to move. When approaching the French Guiana case, we must remember this context: the very ability of Europeans to colonize the tropics was in question, even as Guyane came to represent a pernicious geographical extreme.
As described earlier, considerations of place played an important role in the early penal colony. Even after the selection of French Guiana as a general site of transportation, the issue of where best to establish actual penal settlements remained. When initial placement on the Iles du Salut proved successful, those islands were used as an acclimatization zone to season new arrivals. When the settlement at Montagne d'Argent proved deadly, it was relocated, and then other camps were opened and moved in turn, a process culminating in the creation of St. Laurent. Statistics played a key role in this process; the official reports are full of monthly mortality estimates and comparisons with annual averages. Any fluctuation that seemed favorable was quickly, eagerly reported.[5] However, the overall picture remained grim, and the Guiana penal colony's own statistics were turned against it in arguing for the redirection of European prisoners to New Caledonia. Two decades later, the same low death rate that had beckoned the Second Empire administration to choose New Caledonia as an alternative transportation site reversed significance amid the Third Republic's desire for retribution and urge to rid itself of undesirables. The emerging demographic language articulated old concerns: the fate of white settlers in specific alien environments. However, its evidence could be read in more than one way and used for more than one end.
Throughout the discussions of this period, race remained an essential category. Official tabulations carefully separated convicts on the basis of designated racial classifications and focused analytic attention on variations found between the resulting groups. The treatment of non-European convicts, especially those classified as black, differed from that of Europeans; by and large they received the more onerous labor assignments and were fed according to different dietary standards. In a setting where plantation slavery had been the norm, the laboring black body was taken to represent a certain standard, the tried and true equipment for hard work in hot climes. Unlike the sensitive European, a human of African descent was thought to be physically appropriate for the tropics and quite capable of subsisting on foods eaten by the surrounding population of former slaves (fish and manioc flour as opposed to meat and bread).
This focus on race in the administration of the penal colony has a lengthy genealogy, extending into concern over the fate of Europeans in French Guiana and on into more general accounts and justifications of Atlantic slavery, as well as into scientific debates about the mutability of species. As an entry into that wider frame and its relations to issues of place, let us recall the equivocating terms of that eighteenth-century master of climatic theory, Montesquieu:
There are countries where the heat enervates the body and renders men so slothful and dispirited that nothing but the fear of chastisement can oblige them to perform any laborious duty; slavery is there more reconcilable to reason, and the master being as lazy before his sovereign as his slave is with regard to him, this adds a political to a civil slavery. Aristotle endeavors to prove that there are natural slaves; but what he says is far from proving it. If there be any such, I believe they are those of whom I have been speaking. But, as all men are born equal, slavery must be accounted unnatural, though in some countries it be founded on natural reason; and a wide difference ought to be made between such countries, and those in which even natural reason rejects it, as in Europe where it has been so happily abolished.[6]
Here Montesquieu denies and affirms the logic of natural servitude in one and the same breath: “There are countries where the heat enervates the body … slavery is there more reconcilable to reason.” Yet the key natural category invoked is environmental, not racial, because heat rather than descent per se produces the conditions of slavery. The distinction is important, for in it lies both ends of possibility leading to the penal colony. If the system of slavery in French Guiana is to be replaced, then it should be replaced by functional slaves. On the other hand, if convicts are to replace slaves, then they will—by virtue of the surrounding environment—become like slaves. In either case, Europeans play the role of Africans, and place rather than blood serves as the crucial factor. Humans may change (all are born equal), but for Montesquieu environments remain immutable.
A complex line of environmental reasoning can also be traced through the history of French biology, extending through Buffon and the crucial divide between Cuvier and Lamarck. It was under the influence of the last that the term milieu entered biological vocabulary in an active and plural way, dethroning static conceptions of climate and place. The relationship between organism and environment became decentered; space emerged between places, literally mi-lieu. The stage was set for the scientific investigation of the problem of “acclimatization.”[7] French interests in biological acclimatization coalesced in the activities of a formal organization, the Société zoologique d'acclimatation, during the second half of the nineteenth century. More pragmatic than theoretical in inclination, the experiments of this society promoted interest in exotic animals and plants and helped to promote French colonial expansion, first informally and then formally. However, the activities of the acclimitization enthusiasts ran athwart the interests of a group of anthropologists, the Société d'anthropologie, and a fierce debate erupted in the early 1860s over the viability of acclimatization in a human setting. Led by Paul Broca and Jean Boudin,
Before considering Orgeas's efforts more closely, let us summarize and abstract the general principles involved. In the preceding passage from Montesquieu we have one sense of nature—external forces conditioning the development of internal conditions and customs. In the act of European colonial settlement we have a second understanding—external conditions transformable through the displacement of internal forces. The process of acclimation represents a third, modified view, in which internal mechanisms of an organism adjust over time to a new terrain. Orgeas presents us with a fourth possibility—the incompatibility of particular internal conditions with particular external conditions. In between these four natures we find the history of the penal colony.
ORGEAS AND THE NONCOSMOPOLITAN POSITION
Cosmopolitan: 3. Nat. Hist. Widely diffused over the globe; found in all or many countries.
Oxford English Dictionary, 1989[10]
Having established an initial context for Orgeas's Contribution to the Study of Noncosmopolitanism, let us examine his argument more carefully. The first part of the work includes lengthy historical review of the foundation of the penal experiment. In it Orgeas presents the terrible statistics of the period of the 1850s, calculating that the life expectancy of a convict on the Iles du Salut in 1855 was a meager one year, seven months, and six days, and at Montagne d'Argent in 1856 a mere eight months and fifteen days. Out of a total of 21,906 individuals transported to French Guiana between 1852 and the beginning of 1878 (a
In the second part of his Contribution, Orgeas presents a demographic study of this episode of penal colonization, beginning with marriage. He finds 418 cases of convict marriage, 371 between individuals of European descent.[12] Noting the tendency of convicts to marry members of their own race (which he attributes to a “law of ethnic affinity”), he proceeds to analyze the productivity of these marriages, finding that out of the 403 children born to them, 24 were dead at birth, 238 had expired afterward, 40 had left the colony, and only 101 were still alive and in place. He calculates the mortality rate for children between two and three years of age born at St. Laurent to be three times as high as in France. Thus the statistical evidence of the Guiana case, Orgeas argues, plainly indicates that Europeans fare poorly in such an environment. Male children in particular failed to survive, a pattern he believes to be general to the tropics. He closes with a reference to France's prime colonial rivals: “In India, the English government has attempted, in every way possible, to increase the marriages of its soldiers with English women; despite all these efforts, we know that it has never been possible, to follow the expression of Major-General Bagnold, to raise enough male children to recruit a fife and drum corps.”[13]
In a second work published a year later, La pathologie des races humaines et le problème de la colonisation: Etude anthropologique et économique faite à la Guyane française (The pathology of human races and the problem of colonization: An anthropological and economic study conducted in French Guiana), Orgeas expanded his efforts, comparing the kinds and frequencies of diseases experienced by different racial groups in French Guiana. This time he also made the policy implications of his research clear: colonial efforts to establish settler colonies in the tropics were doomed to failure on scientific grounds. Persisting in this direction would only lead to a costly fiasco or the creation of a parasite colony forever dependent on the motherland, a place “where the metropolitan budget maintains all the officials, and where one is much less exploiter than exploited.”[14]
The general conclusions of La pathologie are worth repeating at length, for they clearly delineate the “noncosmopolitan position.”
- Similar to the vast majority of animals and vegetables, Man, the most complex of beings alive, is not cosmopolitan. He cannot change his latitude and climate with impunity.
- A human collectivity, considered in its totality, cannot subsist without spending a certain sum of muscular activity and without exposing itself, to a certain extent, to the action of elements of the climate.
- A European collectivity passing from temperate climates into torrid climates, by crossing the hot climate zone that represents an isothermic gap of ten degrees, is incapable of providing the sum of necessary muscular activity for its subsistence; it is incapable of confronting life by its own force, or of forming a social organism unto itself. Nature will cause Europeans living under these conditions to disappear rapidly. This fact is irrevocably attested to by experience.
- Europeans living an artificial life in torrid climates, sheltered from the climatic elements, in the position of a privileged minority in the middle of indigenous races, can subsist for a longer or shorter period. But the anthropological character of these Europeans is not in harmony with this milieu, and the action of the climate on their organism is constant, worsening over time for each individual and from generation to generation in descent. Maintained indefinitely in torrid climates, the resistance of the white race would be limited to a very small number of generations, under the best conditions of artificial life. These are exceptional facts that should not be generalized.
- The constant high temperature of the ambient milieu is the main pathological factor of the anemia that the European cannot escape in torrid climates and plays an immense role in general biological phenomena.
- Muscular work is a secondary serious pathological factor of anemia. Consequently, muscular work has considerable influence over the progressive development of this physiological downfall and, as a result, on the duration of the resistance of the European race.
- Negroes and races adapted to torrid climates escape anemia, thanks to anatomo-physiological particularities that are as much ethnic characteristics, and by a physiological mechanism that scientific analysis is not powerless to explain.
- Races from torrid climates are protected by their pathological characters against the invasion of their habitat and the vital competition of races from temperate climates, better armed than they in the struggle for life. In the current state of the world, torrid climate races would be condemned to disappear if laws of nature did not preserve their existence.
- Europeans will ever only be a tiny minority in the midst of indigenous races of torrid climates. The races of these climates cannot disappear, either before Europeans, or before their half-castes. The half-castes can disappear.
― 199 ―They would decrease rapidly if Europeans lost political domination (Haiti). They would disappear surely, by the rules of natural selection and vital competition, if all new contribution of European blood came to cease completely.
- The physical characters of races from torrid climates, from which derive the pathological and physiological characters that are particular to these races, constitute conditions of adaptation to their milieu. The variation that the action of torrid climates imparts to Europeans and their descendants is only a pathological and fleeting variation, ending fatally with the extinction of the race, and not a physiological and permanent variation, deciding the adaptation of the race to the new climatic milieu. As far as the field of our observation spreads through the past of humanity, never has a race, by changing latitude of climate, presented a physiological and permanent variation due to the action of the milieu. Acclimatization does not exist: never has a race acclimatized and, in the current state of the world, never will a race acclimatize.[15]
Here we have a set of clear connections and oppositions between place and race: once adapted to a climatic milieu one is relatively limited. The organism cannot go through radical transformation; selection works relentlessly within a specified milieu. Acclimatization—and hence the possibility of cosmopolitan life, or settler colonization across climatic zones—is revealed as the philosopher's stone of biology.
EVALUATING ORGEAS
It would be easy to dismiss Orgeas's mammoth effort as an odd anachronism, a relic from an openly racist age. Certainly its claims serve to reinforce a European world hierarchy, suggesting that the imperial status quo of its day had all the inevitability of a natural arrangement. Within colonial settings the image of the tropically impotent European, requiring the labor of properly adapted others to survive, echoes arguments used to justify slavery. And yet we should not lose sight of the fact that this is a serious intellectual endeavor. The meticulous nature of Orgeas's evidence is impressive in both his tomes. His is a thorough, not a hurried, attempt to generalize. I emphasize this not to advocate his conclusions but rather to stress that the problem before him is real—that is to say, that the observed phenomena, however constructed, are not fabricated. Whether or not the official numbers he cites are perfectly accurate, there is little question that Europeans in French Guiana, and particularly those in the penal colony, died at impressive rates.
To better articulate the dilemma, let us take a sample set of statistics related to the French Guiana bagne, for the critical period between its founding in 1852 and the decision to send European convicts to New Caledonia in 1867. Here I will adopt the figures given in a document composed by a military officer in 1868, which correspond to those of Orgeas in most respects, differing primarily in that they include the small number of deaths designated as “accidental” as well as those attributed to disease.[16]
Glancing over the figures before us (table 1), we see the average population during a given year, the number of new arrivals, the number of officially recorded deaths, the total loss of population (including escapes and liberations), the official mortality rate, and Orgeas's mortality rate restricted to deaths by disease. Over the initial fifteen-year period, the penal colony produced an average annual death rate of 10.75 percent (Orgeas's restricted figure is 10.37 percent). Every year, approximately one out of ten convicts died.
| Average Population | New Arrivals | Deaths | Total Loss | Mortality in% | Mortality in Orgeas in% | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1852 | 1,500 | 2,033 | 79 | 117 | 5.26 | 4.8 |
| 1853 | 2,703 | 1,017 | 522 | 561 | 19.31 | 19.2 |
| 1854 | 2,689 | 691 | 247 | 292 | 9.14 | 9.1 |
| 1855 | 2,954 | 1,224 | 769 | 849 | 26.06 | 25.5 |
| 1856 | 3,702 | 2,007 | 912 | 1,382 | 24.63 | 24.5 |
| 1857 | 4,139 | 1,040 | 348 | 516 | 8.41 | 8.4 |
| 1858 | 4,400 | 1,001 | 386 | 544 | 8.77 | 8.1 |
| 1859 | 5,177 | 1,245 | 537 | 795 | 10.37 | 9.9 |
| 1860 | 5,597 | 848 | 476 | 671 | 8.50 | 8.3 |
| 1861 | 6,376 | 1,501 | 535 | 770 | 8.39 | 8.0 |
| 1862 | 6,139 | 561 | 486 | 673 | 7.91 | 7.6 |
| 1863 | 6,233 | 1,069 | 394 | 857 | 6.32 | 5.7 |
| 1864 | 6,512 | 1,608 | 300 | 590 | 4.29 | 4.0 |
| 1865 | 7,595 | 1,152 | 428 | 741 | 5.63 | 5.2 |
| 1866 | 7,500 | 1,030 | 616 | 1,100 | 8.21 | 7.2 |
| Total | – | 18,027 | 7,035 | 10,458 | – | – |
| Average | 4,881 | 10.75 | 10.37 |
For comparison's sake, let us turn to other, independent sets of records. The period between 1834 and 1847, the last years of the slave
| Slave Population | Slave Mortality in% | Free Population | Free Mortality in% | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1834 | 17,136 | 3.15 | 4,947 | 3.42 |
| 1835 | 16,898 | 2.62 | 5,058 | 2.75 |
| 1836 | 16,592 | 3.15 | 5,056 | 3.70 |
| 1837 | 16,140 | 3.80 | 5,081 | 3.66 |
| 1838 | 15,751 | 3.22 | 5,189 | 4.99 |
| 1839 | 15,516 | 2.88 | 5,654 | 3.08 |
| 1840 | 15,285 | 3.11 | 5,697 | 3.12 |
| 1841 | 14,883 | 3.62 | 5,746 | 3.74 |
| 1842 | 14,560 | 3.41 | 5,805 | 3.05 |
| 1843 | 14,180 | 4.08 | 5,820 | 3.69 |
| 1844 | 13,988 | 2.62 | 5,902 | 2.69 |
| 1845 | 13,834 | 2.70 | 5,961 | 3.36 |
| 1846 | 13,375 | 2.79 | 6,171 | 2.75 |
| 1847 | 12,943 | 2.70 | 6,432 | 2.41 |
| Average | 3.13 | 3.32 |
Glancing over these figures several patterns immediately emerge. First of all, the recorded rates of death among the slave and free segments of the population are not remarkably different, although the average figure for the free population is higher (3.32 percent as opposed to 3.13 percent). Second, if we take the lowest mortality rate recorded for the early penal colony (4.0 percent), we find it exceeded only twice during the slave era, in 1838 among the free population (4.99 percent) and in 1843 among slaves (4.08 percent). The differences between the averages (10 percent against 3 percent) is even more striking. While one must treat all these statistics with caution, given the circumstances and interests involved, it seems that the death rates common to the bagne probably did represent a significant increase over the norms of slavery, and that earlier European immigrants to French Guiana were dying at a rate equivalent to or slightly higher than that of slaves.[18]
For another pole of comparison we have Philip Curtin's analysis of records of European troops stationed overseas in the early part of the nineteenth century. During the period between 1817 and 1838, mortality
| Nationality | Mortality in% | |
|---|---|---|
| Jamaica | British | 13.00 |
| Windward and Leeward Islands | British | 8.50 |
| Guadeloupe | French | 10.69 |
| Martinique | French | 11.22 |
| French Guiana | French | 3.22 |
Glancing over this initial comparative sample, the most surprising fact is that French Guiana—for all its evil reputation—displays the lowest rate of death, significantly below the equivalent figures for Martinique and Guadeloupe. While the dramatic variation in the mortality rates reported and further issues with the samples reported urge a measure of caution, it nevertheless seems clear that the average rate of 10 percent for the penal colony fits well within the range of early-nineteenth-century death rates for European troops in the Caribbean. An archival tabulation by Richard Price for Moravian missionaries in neighboring Suriname reinforces these findings, calculating an eighteenth-century death rate of 36 percent for arrivals “seasoned” on the coast and an astounding 80 percent for those fresh from Europe.[21] In general, then, it would appear that the penal colony, while deadly by the standards of the early-nineteenth-century slave colony on the same soil, was about par for the course by the standards of concentrated groups of European in the region (and throughout the tropics) during that period. The outlines of Orgeas's work appear to hold.
The noncosmopolitan claim also finds support in the general observation that French immigrants to the northern climes of Canada prospered and reproduced, unlike those arriving in French Guiana.[22] Similarly, the British penal colony in Australia, while perhaps not the “success” imagined by its French admirers, played a role in establishing
And yet something has changed over the century separating us from the anthropology of our naval doctor. A variety of cosmopolitanism, the bane of Orgeas, has become an assumption, if not for all people in the world, then at least for most descendants of Europe, the very parties warned against it. Rather than represent a zone of danger and potential death, the tropics suggest vacations and escape for refugees of northern winters. The pith helmet has been replaced by the lawn chair, as sunlight soothes European nerves rather than destroys them. Properly equipped and inoculated, the modern tourist can go anywhere. In this banal observation lie the quiet ends of a vast spatial reconfiguration.
THE NEW TROPICS
To situate the place surrounding the space center, we must measure its distance from the place surrounding the penal colony. In one sense the two environments are very similar—in that they contain comparable elements—yet in another sense they are worlds apart. This becomes clearer if we continue our simpleminded demographic voyage and look at Philip Curtin's report on mortality rates among European troops overseas in the early twentieth century.[24] The difference is striking; the range falls between such lows as those of Americans in Hawaii (0.13 percent) and the British in Cyprus (0.17 percent) and such highs as those of the French in Morocco (2.20 percent) and Germans in Cameroon (4.11 percent), a significant recalibration from the early nineteenth century. The figures for the Caribbean are as follows:[25]
| Nationality | Mortality in% | |
|---|---|---|
| Jamaica | British | 0.78 |
| French Antilles | French | 0.49 |
| Cuba and Puerto Rico | U.S. | 0.36 |
Within this small sample we notice a remarkable decline in European death rates throughout the area. The mortality given for the French territories (0.49 percent) is a far cry from the figures recorded a century earlier (10.69 percent, 11.22 percent, and 3.22 percent); the frequency of tropical death has shrunk to as little as one-twentieth the former rate.
Between these two sets of statistics lies a crucial divide, one of the major gaps separating European empires of the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. The latter part of the nineteenth century saw numerous changes in the treatment of bodies and populations in the West. We can identify the advent of most modern forms of knowledge and the coalescing of contemporary professional and academic disciplines. Planning begins to reshape the urban landscape, public health measures begin to map and control illness, and numerous legal interventions extend the scope and purview of bureaucratic agencies concerned with welfare. Most crucially for us, Western medical regimes underwent a dramatic transformation, abandoning their long fixation with “climates” and “humors” for a germ theory of disease, even as nutritional norms changed alongside conceptions of proper environments. The emergence of tropical medicine and attention to social welfare in colonial settings created new bureaucratic structures and complex fields of representation within empire. In the process a significant frame of experience changed: general mortality declined, general hygienic conditions improved, and general population figures soared. The tropics had been domesticated.
Lest the picture grow too simple or triumphal, we should note that the impulses driving European modernization did not simply emanate from centers and fan out. The search for solutions to the great diseases threatening colonial populations itself affected medical history. Debates between those who attributed infection to contagion and those who attributed it to environmental conditions raged around such tropical standbys as malaria, cholera, and yellow fever, the first of which, we should not forget, was also endemic to parts of North America and Europe and the second of which could sweep back to Metropolitan centers with frightening speed. Research and experimental measures pursued in the colonies, usually under the direction of military physicians, provided a field against which new medical and public health practices could emerge. Elaborate technical measures developed, including such tactics as the removal of European populations to high elevations (such as hill stations), the draining of swamps, and the avoidance
The dramatic drop in tropical disease and death makes the context of the later penal colony clearer. Although the mortality of convicts fit easily with the death rates of European troops early in the nineteenth century, it stood out in sharp relief against similar rates in the twentieth century. Even in the 1920s, the mortality rate in the bagne hovered between 6 and 11 percent.[27] Thus the penal colony reflected an earlier world of colonization, a ghostly domain in which anachronistic norms held. When one lacked adequate nutrition or medical care and worked in confined and oppressive conditions, the tropics could still be deadly. In this small, circumscribed space, an evil climate prevailed, and with it an archaic, biological hell, artificially maintained as a natural enclosure.
In contrast, the space center lies amid the new, modern tropics of the twentieth century, warm climes of tourism and retirement. The heat and light, the flora and fauna, and the temperature and humidity remain similar to those extant in the nineteenth century, but all are effectively neutralized. Beyond the generalized intervention of sanitation, refrigeration, and mosquito control, an individual traveler has recourse to numerous personal technologies: dark glasses, individually prescribed medicines, and common ointments to ward off insects or protect against sun. The particular landscape remains as exotic as ever to the European visitor, but the sense of dread lies at a remove. After all, the mortality rate in French Guiana clocked in at a mere 0.47 percent in 1991.[28] What was once deadly is now a small thrill or a minor annoyance. The experience of place can—if properly equipped—occur at a slight remove. Recalling the acclimatization debates confronting Orgeas, let us not forget the French term for airconditioning, climatisation. In the cool, refreshing waves of recirculated air, Orgeas's impossible Cosmopolitan Man found a mobile home.
WILD ENVIRONMENT, HUMAN HERITAGE
The forest is a complex spatial ecosystem comparable to a cathedral.
World Wildlife Fund, Panda, 1988
Don't break the feeling you know, 100%.
English motto of a boat on the Maroni River, 1994
To be sure, French Guiana represents an exception to some of the dominant themes of what here goes under the name of the “modern tropics.” Relative to the massive resort systems dominating the Caribbean, tourism in Guyane remains at an inconsequential level, and without the compelling seashore or vistas available elsewhere, the terrain is unlikely to draw the mass market. Rather, it appeals to those seeking a taste of adventure, the wild edge of travel. For the most part these consumers come from Europe, whether for a short tourist visit or a longer stay attached to family or professional occupation. By all accounts the vast majority of those traveling into the interior (beyond those small populations, primarily Amerindian or Maroon, still significantly installed there, and Brazilian and other gold miners) are Metros, not coastal Guyanais. In my own informal survey of three tours I met one older Creole gentleman on a weekend excursion, but he had lived in Paris for some two decades and was married to a Parisian woman. Otherwise the tourists were all authentically “Metro,” being of European extraction and coming from urban areas. Given other accounts of wilderness this pattern is not surprising; however, it merits further examination because it reflects a major shift in Western interactions with nature.[29]
Let us briefly explore two twentieth-century understandings of place: that of the wilderness experience and that of the threatened environment. To call them “twentieth-century understandings” is not to imply that they lack lineages extending well into the past; rather, it is to roughly identify a moment of culmination, a point at which these view-points achieve a currency that establishes a basic framework of debate. The past hundred years have witnessed the emergence and spread of a modern folk sense of ecology, alongside professional investigations based on biological milieu. However partial, however incomplete, this folk sense establishes the conceptual norms of official discussion. Public parks, national forests, hunting regulation, and environmental monitoring no longer represent the unexpected, and while their specific
Figure 19. Tour boat, 1994
This general term linking wilderness and environment—nature—has a long and complicated history.[30] From a sense of birth or essence, the likeness of a thing, its meaning grew, moving to include the set of forces inherent in the world and widening to include everything in it. The identification of an opposing category, culture, distinguished an abstract figure of humanity (the one historically known as Man): a collective being who is of nature and yet thinks nature, who lives in the world and yet defines it. Along the tense outline of this human figure we find the field of anthropology. In motion between nature and culture we find the emergence of a self-consciously modern world, one in which life could be lived outside of seasons, in which gardening could be a form of leisure, in which landscape could become a focus of art and travel, in which bodies and their functions could be clothed in intricate and distant rituals, in which humans could imagine themselves separate from the universe they imagine, and then finally in which humans could desire to free themselves from the very bonds they themselves have created.
So what is wilderness to the adventurous modern? More specifically, what does tropical wilderness offer Europeans who have made their way to French Guiana? In the words of a tourist brochure, a “marvelous adventure,” consisting of “beautiful and diverse landscapes” and “original populations.”[31] The forest and the rivers leading into it promise an escape in the form of leisure coupled with a taste of another world. In addition to freelance operators and occasional group outings, a number of small companies (three in 1992–1994) provide a fairly regular service of organized tours from Cayenne and Kourou, ranging in length from day excursions to nearby sites to extended trips of a week or more to remote areas. The numbers involved are very small, at most a few thousand persons a year. Yet, other than alternative outdoor pleasures such as hunting or waterskiing and trips to the Iles du Salut and other coastal sites of interest, exploration of the interior represents one of the more significant leisure options available in French Guiana. It also carries with it the allure of authenticity: by going into the forest, by leaving civilization behind, one discovers the “real Guyane.”
The place of nature within the field of consumption in contemporary French Guiana comes more sharply into focus when we return to the space center. In addition to other technical matters, CSG must consider the care of its matériel humain, particularly those employees “detached” from Europe, who, when not working, find themselves at loose ends far from the places they consider home. This limbo condition is even worse for the visiting missionnaire working for non-French organizations, who is, in a sense, effectively marooned on an island—far from a familiar language or expected services, languishing night after night in an efficiently dull hotel room. To attend to the needs of the missionnaire, CSG created an organization in 1985 known as Free Lance Service; the service offers translation, improvises solutions to unforeseen individual problems (for example, a change of sheets and towels during a hotel strike), and provides a “bungalow” (the classic colonial fortress) where visitors can relax and socialize.[32]
Free Lance Service also tries to provide entertainment to fill the stretches of “dead time” surrounding working hours. A key component of this enterprise involves excursions to places of local interest and the improvisation of outdoor activities, often involving “local” exotic cuisine and liberal consumption of alcohol. And it is precisely in this domain that the organization has discovered that cultural difference becomes significant and affects daily routine. Groups of visiting engineers and other clients from different countries have different attitudes toward the landscape and the possible pleasures it might provide. The
One of the more popular trips to take—if not the most taxing or daring—is a voyage up or down the Maroni River. The river journey is usually taken in one direction only, with the return trip made via regional airline. On the river a large canoe provides transportation, ably maneuvered by Maroon boatmen, while a guide offers commentary and leads short trips into the encampments of Amerindians and Maroons living along the shore as well as into the primary forest beyond. The tourists are encouraged to buy local artifacts from people and discouraged from photographing anything other than the landscape. An appropriately exotic menu is served, liberally accompanied by alcohol.[34] The voyage forms a tableau of encounters between people in the boat and the natural surroundings and people in the boat and people out of the boat. A landscape that signifies wilderness mingles with a landscape that recalls third-world destitution, all around a vessel of first-world adventurers, who dutifully don life preservers for every set of rapids. Some of the cultural context and human relations grow bare in an evening scene: the
Tours such as these, including less formal excursions and hunting trips, constitute a significant symbol of “being there” for the Europeans in French Guiana. Along with practices like eating exotic game in restaurants or acquiring local artifacts (other popular pastimes), these actions testify to the accumulation of local knowledge, the process of becoming experienced in the local setting. For some they may also echo a deeper longing, a search for purity beyond the bounds of civilization. Certainly the history of the European exploration is far from over, even if maps can now be drawn from space. A number of unusual characters find their way into the nooks and crannies of Guyane's backcountry, living out their frontier dreams.[35] While many tourists view the river and forest merely as backdrops for aesthetic pleasure, a deeper identification with the natural environment and concern for its preservation has begun to emerge in French Guiana, both in areas of the public discourse and particularly within elements of the European population.
Reflecting increased environmental concerns elsewhere, the dominant language used to talk about nature in Guyane has shifted considerably over the past half century. The fierce jungle images of the penal colony have given way to descriptions of a fragile preserve under threat from every direction. The forest itself is now a treasure, part of the official patrimoine (heritage) of Guyane, of France, and of all humanity. It must be carefully studied, tended, and guarded for the future. Like tropical rain forests everywhere, it represents a reservoir of “biodiversity,” a wealth of genetic material crying out for conservation. This reversal of view is most succinctly captured in the 1990 introductory issue of an activist environmental newsletter. Twisting the conflicting myths of French Guiana, it presents two maps of the department, one labeled “L'Enfer Vert” (Green Hell) and the other “L'Eden Vert” (Green Eden). The first depicts a landscape of pollution, hunting, gold mining, and roads, whereas the second offers an alternative vision of solar energy, rivers, and animal preserves. What was once valued becomes a curse; what was once cursed becomes valuable.[36]
The general ecological perspective finds fuller description in a 1988 special issue of a magazine published by the French branch of the international organization WWF (then the World Wildlife Fund and now the Worldwide Fund for Nature). The introductory editorial is by a prominent veterinarian, a leading member of one of the older and more established environmental organizations, who later became Guyane's
What to think of a country, lacking mineral resources or significant agriculture, which squanders the only wealth in its possession without the slightest profit? What to think of those “responsible” officials, who recognize the interest of such an option in the socio-economic conditions of the country, but who continue to think that a vast, untouched forest is a sign of underdevelopment, a blemish to erase?[37]
When, he wonders, will the government explore “realistic and modern possibilities of development, well removed from poorly adapted classic schemes”? When will local officials explain to the populace that a standing tree or a living animal has far more value than some “boards” or “kilos of meat”? And why not “dream of the day when, these economic realities having been admitted, other values can be discussed as well”?
In the years following the publication of this editorial, the environmental movement in French Guiana has met with mixed success. On the one hand, it has managed to establish a degree of official recognition and to disseminate certain general ideas (not only are there annual “environment days,” but even the space center hired an environmental consultant). On the other hand, the major patterns of behavior in the department remain relatively unchanged (emerging hunting regulations lack enforcement, and park plans are mired in controversy, while the population continues to soar), and any focus on ecology rather than development rouses strenuous opposition.[38] While Europeans do not exclusively compose the membership of the several environmental groups active in French Guiana, many of the prominent figures identified with ecological activism are Metro, and part of the impulse to preserve the forest of Guyane comes from Metropolitan France. At certain points, as we shall see, this European cast of ecology runs athwart the interests of Creoles who favor greater political autonomy and economic independence for Guyane.
Ecological activists also have an uneasy relationship with the most prominent pole of European presence in French Guiana, the space center. On the one hand, theirs is not a simple case of opposition, for while rockets and engine tests produce pollutants, and the fuel stockpiles of the base open the possibility of a widespread disaster, overall the Ariane program poses less of a direct environmental threat than most forms of industry. As witnessed earlier, a strain of environmental consciousness has entered the public presentation of the Guiana Space Center, and space officials make much of the work of satellites monitoring the environment. On the other hand, the indirect effects of the space center are significant and—from an ecological perspective—highly destabilizing. The space program bears much responsibility for Guyane's demographic explosion and fosters the spread of artificial environments and a culture of consumption. The entire space enterprise, large, bureaucratic, and perpetually removed from its locale, runs counter to ecological principles of rooting deeply and carefully in place.
The perspective of those concerned about the environment finds succinct expression in the following short review of the significance of space in French Guiana's history:
Natural Guyane, barely threatened before the success of Ariane, is now a victim of this success. The population of 1964 has tripled in large part due to immigration, because of calls for a qualified workforce that did not exist in French Guiana and the rumor of well-paid jobs there. Demographic pressure increases the threat to the natural patrimony—roads, dams, rice paddies, allotments … hunting, harvesting, and garden plots by those who remain beyond the margins of the job market. The cultural patrimony has also suffered, because to ensure the social peace, in order that Ariane leaves on time, the French government, extolling equality, has weakened Creole, Amerindian, and Maroon cultural systems …. We consume and thus become consumers …. So this France, that in thirty years has conquered the space market with its wisdom and its feats of prowess, what does it do in Guyane to protect nature and its inhabitants? These ecosystems that are so well supervised on high by satellites—are they protected here on the ground? Not at all. Or hardly …. Reserves without guardians are not worth the paper on which they are delimited. What a contrast with space! … In French tourist lounges one speaks of protected areas, while species said to be protected are served on the tables of prestigious restaurants in Cayenne. Agreed, Ariane must depart on time … but the time to protect nature has also arrived …. We simply ask that the protection of the environment in Guyane is pursued with the same rigor, competence, and level of seriousness as the space program.[39]
Idealism and realism mix; while acknowledging the weight of the technology of the future, the article presses its hope for the future of nature.
Such ecological writing reflects a cosmopolitan sensibility that is planetary in scope. Within it, the refound Eden of French Guiana emerges as a particularly tender space of environmental longing: the great forest, the tropical sea of trees. Forests have a long history in the symbolic landscape of Europe, their branches sheltering dark possibilities of origin and wild voids that humans must cross to find the safety of each other's hearths.[40] The act of reshaping shadows beyond the firelight, of straightening paths of human action, forms a root metaphor of civilization. Witness the opening of one French history text:
At the dawn of history our country bore large and dense forests …. Our ancestors' first struggle was against the forest. The profoundly man-made and variegated character of our soil is the result of an effort of conquest made upon the forest over thousands of years …. The land that nourishes us has been in a large part created by the hand of man …. Thus different regions were defined, tribes rooted themselves and local customs were born. Ancient frontiers were not lines but sterile areas or those difficult to penetrate. Those parts of primitive forest which took man longest to clear remained the real boundaries of province from province.[41]
European culture in the broadest sense—agriculture, an ordered sentiment of place—was built against the forest. Along the edge of the wild wood lies civilization and the limits of history. Through the trees we glimpse not only human reflections but also the possibilities of other worlds. Fear, hope, and nostalgia beckon, in amid the leaves.
And what of the tropical forest, the natural space of the equator, the exotic climate of certain difference? In a Guyanais schoolbook collection, originally published in 1915, we find a surprising description—neutral, accurate, yet nonetheless steeped in feeling for that other, earlier space, the vast expanse of the forest. For all the additional revolutions of the globe since its writing, for all the shifting of human horizons, the words remind us that wilderness too escapes simple confines of location:
When a painter of Europe wants to represent a virgin forest, he draws immense trees with knotty trunks, covered with parasites; lianas embrace these giants, like snakes in the group of Laocoön, or fall down their fronts, like untied hair. A bizarre vegetation covers a tormented ground, over which the gazelle plays, the snake slips, and the tiger crouches. On branches, monkeys, these perfected Léotards [acrobats], practice gymnastics. Parrots chat in the foliage. All this is most picturesque without a doubt, and offers varied resources to the drawing and its coloring. Too, each artist can, following his taste and imagination, create his own virgin forest. Nature, she has created only one, of the same grandiose monotony as that of the ocean. Imagine: on all sides, as far as the eye can see, spreads an innumerable army of gigantic trunks, smooth and straight as masts of a vessel, rushing up one hundred feet in the air. You walk for entire days, and you forever meet other trunks, so similar to the preceding ones that you cannot tell whether you have advanced a single step, or if you have gone in a circle, returning to your point of departure. Above your head, at a great height, a dome of greenery that never sheds its leaves and that is never pierced by a ray of sunlight; under your feet, a ground without vegetation and as clear as a park alley: here is the virgin forest, that which in Guyane we call the Grand-Bois [Great Wood]. Nothing opposes the step of the traveler who advances as through an endless colonnade. He walks and walks without ceasing, as if intoxicated by the continuity of sensations, and when he stops, alone, lost in this immense solitude, in the middle of this great silence, he experiences that feeling of sadness into which we are thrown by the thought of infinity.[42]
8. The Nature of Work
“Do you see that?” said the Djinn. “That's your very own humph that you've brought upon your very own self by not working. To-day is Thursday, and you've done no work since Monday, when the work began. Now you are going to work.”
“How can I,” said the Camel, “with this humph on my back?”
“That's made a-purpose,” said the Djinn, “all because you missed those three days. You will be able to work without eating, because you can live on your humph; and don't you ever say I never did anything for you.”
Rudyard Kipling, Just So Stories, 1912
THE MORALITY OF WORK, THE ART OF LAZINESS
“Adopt the colonial pace, my friend, and you'll get along all right …. Never run if you can walk, never walk if you can stand, never stand if you can sit, never sit if you can lie down, and never do anything today you can put off until tomorrow. That's the colonial pace. Master it and things won't be so bad.”
Advice to a convict, Francis Lagrange and William Murray, Flag on Devil's Island, 1961
Oh Laziness, mother of the arts and noble virtues, be thou the balm of human anguish!
Paul Lafargue, The Right to Be Lazy, 1880
Returning from nature to culture and the ever-expanding island of civilization amid the forest, we must consider the quality of human action involved in transforming landscapes. The penal colony takes shape at a crucial moment in European colonial understandings of place and
Figure 20. Postcard to Kourou sawmill, ca. 1900.
The axe has lightened these formerly impenetrable forests. It has fashioned the trees that now support elegant structures; precious and useful plantations spread in the midst of these deserts obstructed with unproductive vegetation. Convenient roads divide these newborn fields, dug by industrious hands; canals have received the excess waters and established internal communications; a working population displays its strength in these fertilized places; it fills the arms of the motherland with its trade and provides new food to its industry. Perhaps one day [this population] will be a great people when its Metropolis only offers a spectacle of ruins; and it will make way also, in the continuation of ages, to new nations that rise in their turn from its breast. Such is the work of colonization.[1]
Work represented the route to a better future, to the growth of new, valuable lands. Who, then, would lend backs and hands to the enterprise? If slavery were at an end, then the crucial question facing the colony was that of finding an alternative source of labor.
During the period of the early penal colony we see this search for new slaves, not only in French Guiana, but also throughout colonies built on the plantation model. Thousands of Asian Indians and Chinese found their way to new homes in different corners of the British Empire, serving as contract laborers on plantations. While the French were generally less successful at organizing intercontinental immigration, even in remote Guyane wave after wave of small groups arrived, in response to bureaucratic hopes that their bodies would prove industrious. The penal colony, of course, provided another long stream of captive travelers who were intended to serve both as plantation labor and as an army of industrious, rehabilitated peasants. Yet all these efforts and experiments failed in this particular margin; the plantations, which had been fading anyway, were not reborn, and a productive peasantry failed to materialize. French Guiana remained a land of tropical “deserts obstructed with unproductive vegetation.”
The situation was complicated by the reluctance of the former slaves to stay on the plantations and continue to support the system of largescale agricultural production for export. Indeed, the aversion of the newly freed population to any sort of agriculture or heavy labor beyond subsistence gardening is so striking that the historian Serge Mam-Lam-Fouck underlines it as an origin point for the stereotype of Creole “laziness” and “indolence” common in French Guiana. The fondness of the contemporary Creole population for bureaucratic positions, he argues, must be placed into a historical context, one in which “from the origins of colonial history until departmentalization, slavery, the utilization of overexploited immigrant labor as well as that of convicts, contributed to the devalorization of working the earth, in the eyes of the Creole. It represented, in effect, beyond the humiliation of the slave, the exploitation of the coolie and the downfall of the convict.”[2] The emerging Creole cultural traditions valued freelance gold mining over heavy agriculture and prized administrative positions when the gold rush faded. Even commercial possibilities, such as running a small store, failed to attract many Creoles, which opened the way for Chinese domination of the smallscale retail market.[3] Instead, Creoles in Guyane developed a reputation for idleness and lack of ambition, a stereotype alive among the contemporary Metropolitan population. While the details of this stereotype are particular to Guyane, its general outline conforms to a widespread colonial trope of the “lazy native” and to writings about tropical idleness. This theme, quite popular in its day, merits exploration, because it places that other pole of our concerns—nature—within the field of labor.[4]
CLIMATE, TECHNOLOGY,
AND THEORIES OF INDUSTRY
Whatever may be the cause, it is generally agreed that the native races within the tropics are dull in thought and slow in action.
Ellsworth Huntington, Civilization and Climate, 1915
“These uniforms are too heavy for the tropics, surely,” said the explorer.
Franz Kafka,“In the Penal Colony,” 1919
In addressing climatic theories of action, my purpose is not to revive old prejudices but rather to understand their connection to shifting conceptions of place and development. The worldview expressed in a division of the planet into natural zones of greater and lesser industry is not only an artifact of the politics of imperialism, it is also a statement about the “noncosmopolitanism” of humanity. In this view the social and cultural species would be just as limited as the biological species of our good doctor Orgeas; the human spirit would be held just as captive as the human body by place and milieu.
As an entry into these debates let us look more closely at an American classic of the genre, Ellsworth Huntington's Civilization and Climate, originally published in 1915.[5] Huntington opens his work by comparing races to varieties of trees, each of which brings forth different fruits of civilization. While one does not expect any given species to suddenly produce the fruit of another (a pear on a cherry branch), the quality of the fruit nonetheless depends on factors of the environment. From this point he moves logically to ask whether one can separate the effects of climate from those of race and whether the effects of climate were not more significant than some of his contemporaries thought. Granting strong “racial” differences in levels of ability (and a particularly strong line between white and black—this is America in 1915, ripe with prejudice), he nevertheless suspects that physical environment may be crucial and asks what “five hundred or a thousand years of life in Egypt would do for either Teutons or Negroes if no new blood were introduced?”[6]
Huntington then proceeds to investigate a wide range of topics associated with his environmental position, including “The Effect of the Seasons,” “Work and Weather,” and, of course, “The White Man in the Tropics.” Evaluating climates on the basis of different criteria of work
Although both the methods and the conclusions of Huntington's work merit the most strenuous skepticism, revealing as they do more about the geography of his own biases than of comparative human vitality, nevertheless we should not lose sight of the fact that his is a modified racism, an environmental strain as full of weather as blood.[9] Here again we have a cautionary tale for white men entering the tropics, but this time the caution is more universal than that of our medical guide Orgeas: anyone entering the tropics will lose mental and physical vitality. Evolution recedes in the direction of a refined Montesquieu: the climate of a country dictates the general spirit of its inhabitants, and that spirit shifts over time—rather literally—with changes in the wind. The problem of development becomes one of challenging nature at a deeper level than the soil, of remaking the very air around human beings.
Huntington's call for the conquest of climate found echoes in later arguments linking human energy to the environment. In one of these, S.F. Markham's 1944 work Climate and the Energy of Nations, the point is further refined, fixing the crucial environmental variable on climatic control rather than climate itself.[10] The goal is to achieve an optimum set of atmospheric conditions, but this, the author sensibly points out, can be achieved in a variety of ways, through combinations of clothing and technologies of heating or cooling. The history of relative human energy is then a history of human ability to regulate temperature and humidity, or a general history of “air-conditioning.”[11]
Markham notes that the principle of “conditioning” air appears far earlier than 1907, when the term was first employed, and should include heating and ventilation as well as cooling. Indeed, he imagines a prehistoric man “conditioning” his cave with fire, leading to the impressive
Yet amid this clear triumph of technical space over place, Markham also reminds us that it comes at a price and cautions against assuming too sudden or complete a world transformation: “It should not be forgotten that air conditioning depends almost exclusively at present upon electricity for its motive power, and it is therefore obvious that it will be restricted for many years to those countries which have adequate and economic supplies of electricity.”[13] Control requires power—a point we shall return to in due course. But what about those areas lacking the necessary conditions for the adoption of large-scale artificial cooling? If we accept for the moment Huntington's thesis that a cool climate promotes industry and social growth, and a warm, humid climate sloth and social stagnation, what, we might ask, are the actual techniques of laziness? What do lazy people do? To explore this topic let us return to the penal colony and the issue of its failure to remake the landscape of Guyane.
THE PENAL COLONY AND THE “SYSTÈME D”
débrouiller, se. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, the first word you should learn in French, since without it, you cannot understand the French and their outlook on
― 221 ―life. Se débrouiller and the justly famous Système D (le système de la débrouillardise) express a whole concept, essentially individualistic, which is only very feebly translated by “to manage,” “to get along,” “to muddle through,” “to make out for oneself.” If you call someone très débrouillard(e), you are paying him one of the highest compliments that the list of French adjectives allows for: it means a compound of astucieux, énergetic, indépendent, and volontaire, not to mention imaginatif, in short, resourceful.Michel Levieux and Eleanor Levieux, Cassell's Colloquial French, 1980
One night an English lord came to the hotel and the waiters were in despair, for the lord had asked for peaches, and there were none in stock; it was late at night, and the shops would be shut. “Leave it to me,” said the German. He went out, and in ten minutes he was back with four peaches. He had gone into a neighboring restaurant and stolen them. That is what is meant by a débrouillard. The English lord paid for the peaches at twenty francs each.
George Orwell, Down and Out in London and Paris, 1933
As we noted earlier, it appears that in the first moments of the French system of transportation a degree of enthusiasm reigned. Inmates of the Metropolitan bagnes volunteered to ship to French Guiana, and the initial clearing and construction was accomplished with alacrity. Although the ominous iron sign over another camp lay far in the future, the phrase was already in the air: work could make you free. Released from dreary port confinement and given promises of liberty and small holdings, some of the convicts seem to have briefly embraced the words of penal reformers. However, as disease and despair took their toll, the work ethic rapidly disappeared. The envisioned industrious settlements failed to materialize, and complaints grew over the lack of productivity. By the time of Dreyfus, the meaning of official work had clearly changed, moving further from industry and closer to punishment.
Rather than labor for civil redemption and eventual liberty, the central enterprise of life within the bagne had become a matter of survival, of finding small pleasures in the midst of oppression. In the later penal
Whoever does not work the system [se débrouille] is an imbecile. Even for those who aren't adept with their hands and who don't have a position or job, there is always a way for them to get a hold of a bit of money. They wash laundry for others, replace them in the soup line, help the dealers of the penal colony cut wood, wash containers, go and fetch water. In sum, everybody keeps busy, everybody finds ways to improve the meager fare of the penal colony.[14]
The record is full of examples of minor craft production, petty graft, gambling, and small favors. In and of themselves the examples are sometimes striking—the collecting of butterflies or the carving of miniature guillotines, for example—but not particularly unusual or unexpected. Accounts of prison life in many settings contain parallels.[15] Yet taken together as a part of an entire system, these minor acts acquire wider significance.
The fixation with “getting by” was by no means limited to convicts in the penal colony. The streets of St. Laurent, we are repeatedly told, were among the cleanest in the world: not a single cigarette butt could escape the keen eyes of the libéré, the only creature alive more desperate than the bagnard. The guards, too, often played their own games, extorting money or accepting bribes to look the other way, while beyond the penal colony many in Guyane made money supplying its needs, trimming corners all along the way. In an age of growing industry, of mass, standardized production, this small corner of France thrived on improvisation. Amid the slow heat of tropical days, an impure “Système D” came into being.
In most respects the “Système D” represents a perfect reversal of visions of development. Rather than being productive it is reactive; rather than being planned it is improvised. Here individual action does not build social cohesion or lead to progressive enhancement of life but instead manages to patch things together, to get through one crisis and on to the next. The horizon shrinks to that of immediate situations, retreating from general principles to the day at hand. The nineteenth-century colonial image of the industrious farmer and his teams of laboring servants gives way to that of the traveling tinker and his troop of itinerant handymen. Moreover, the story of the official and the story of the unofficial plainly separate; everyone comes to know that real business takes place in darkness or the shadows of late afternoon, not the full light of day. Rather than simply follow or oppose the system in
The ethos of the “Système D” allows us to reverse our thinking about industry and its absence to consider laziness and its absence, to understand the action of inactivity so stereotypically associated with the tropics. All the accounts agree that while tedious inefficiency lay at the center of the penal colony, between the cracks a great deal took place. Rather than control their surroundings, a possibility largely denied to them, the convicts adapted, finding corners to shave and moments to seize. They negotiated, as only those in a position of structural weakness can. Here we must remember that our construction of the “tropics”— for all that the region may occupy the midriff of the globe—positions it at the side of human affairs. The act of its colonization involved the importation of tools and systems designed elsewhere and left a space between them and their new locale. This gap between a standard structure and a particular milieu creates an area open to negotiation, indeed, an area requiring it. The arts of laziness, then, can be understood as an alternative to the arts of control, as well as another reaction to displacement. Alongside the engineers and architects of colonial policy, we should place the bricoleurs of colonial experience, nimble-fingered amateurs, muddling and adjusting and always making do.
THE MODERN TROPICS, A NEW DEVELOPMENT
In addition it is often said that the French have colonies but no colonists; that even if they had colonists, they would not know how to colonize.
― 224 ―They apply to the jungle the meticulous care of metropolitan bureaucracy. They export nothing into their overseas dominions except damaged officials; and they import nothing from them except the same officials, worse damaged.Albert Guérard, France, 1946
Turning to face the space center, we confront a modified conceptual topography. Kourou is a neutralized, controlled corner of the tropics, with much of its cultural fabric simply imported. Amid the restricted space of artificially cooled buildings and automobiles, in zones free of carrier mosquitoes and amply supplied with wine and cheese airlifted from France, the distance between Paris and Cayenne shortens; the effects of translation between them grow less clear. If the island mimics the mainland successfully, if Crusoe builds a little England—or France—is his task done? What does development mean in this context? To answer this question, let us return to a crucial turning point of Guyane's history: the aftermath of World War II and the period of formal empire. It was during this era that the natural, political, and moral space of French Guiana was neutralized through a combination of DDT spraying, departmentalization, and the final closing of the penal colony.
In 1949, a former teacher at the Lycée Schoelcher in Martinique published an overview of the new overseas departments and territories. His description of French Guiana includes a call to arms for its development, a development still conceived in terms of a need for immigrants, agriculture, and industry:
French Guiana is the most extensive of our possessions in America. It appears the most forsaken, but also the richest in interesting possibilities, in latent resources …. The moment appears favorable. The departure of the bagne liberates the country from a heavy moral mortgage, compensated, it is true, by the disappearance of a labor force that, being penal, accomplished a good part of the most irksome works. Before us is a country practically empty of men, since most of those who are established there live in the town or in large villages and do not always have qualities that would suit pioneers. While respecting the legitimate interests of this population, interests that it knows how to defend with a remarkable energy, it is desirable that the work of reconquest begin, following a methodical plan, rational and above all complete. It would be useless to import the most modern and expensive equipment without at the same time having the specialized personnel to operate it and roads that are indispensable for supply and exploitation. But such personnel, in the current state of things, must inevitably come
The appeal is for an army of Crusoes, advancing ashore to improve their collective island. The questions of race and level of expertise filter through patterns of history and perceived practicality. But the call remains, the call of a wilderness inviting domestication.
Yet even as this schoolteacher's vision takes shape, it has a certain tint of anachronism. For all that these words would find an echo in the official Plan Vert of the mid-1970s, the 1940s were already bringing French Guiana a new kind of immigrant: the specialist bureaucrat. While the presence of these specialists did not completely overwhelm the local population or prevent the arrival of general immigrants (indeed, it would eventually encourage them), it did represent a new element in the administration of things: specificity of purpose. It is this final sharpening of technique that separates different impulses within development and projects of modernization.
The term impulses works better than periods because the watershed of departmentalization constitutes something less than a straight divide. The colonial administration was full of officials, and the penal colony represented a specialized use of the land. But in degree of specialization and training, the officeholders of the postwar era represent a body more actively engaged in the technical process of governing populations; they are Foucault's “specific intellectuals,” detailed practitioners of discrete programs. Let us not forget that one of the first acts of those administering the newly created overseas department was to mount a public health campaign specifically targeting endemic diseases and demographic decline. Similarly, the actual function of the space center is related to the location of French Guiana more intimately than that of the penal colony ever was; the coordinates of rocket launching
In the examples before us we find reflections of two edges of modernization. Writing about urban planning in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century French colonial settings, Paul Rabinow distinguishes between two modern moments: the locally sensitive “techno-cosmopolitanism,” which seeks to administer to the needs of situated groups of humans, and the socially generalizing “middling modernism,” which seeks to satisfy the needs of universal human forms.[19] The structure of the penal colony was neither fully middling nor fully modern. Even in principle, penal colonization is itself a hybrid form bred between punishment and discipline. The material on which the bagne sought to work remained categorically differentiated in administration; the techniques of race balanced those of humanity. Hints of universalism appear in the effort to build an Australia on the equator, but these hints soon vanish into the tropics. Unhealthy spaces and forms consume the debris of Metropolitan modernization, and the impulse is lost in an inversion of progress, a negative techno-cosmopolitanism of spoiled history and spoiled nature, and a noncosmopolitan experience of death. Development collapses into an archaic, stable space of suffering.
In contrast, the architecture of Kourou is both intensely middling and modernist. From the blank concrete of its housing blocks to its list of luminary street names, Kourou is designed for a universal human form, not for a situated group of humans. The space center's representation of purpose is one of relentless purification and transcendence; the gateway created belongs to those who would walk among the stars, leaving the tropics far behind. Indeed, the Space Age can be read as the highest expression of middling modernism, with visions of future colonization of other worlds and galaxies representing the extension of universal human space throughout the universe. From the language of its mission to the gestures of its celebration, the Guiana Space Center enthusiastically embraces such a future, claiming action in the name of science and humanity. Even in its environmental moments, the appeals
THE RHYTHM OF SPACE
At the space center an ethos of efficiency outweighs that of “getting by.” By virtue of its leading position in an international market of importance and its role as a central symbol of French technical prowess, the complex around Ariane assumes a northern work ethic. The system of launch campaigns prevents strict temporal regularization, with activity building over months to the sudden crescendo and dissipation of each launch, and the staggering of responsibilities and projects between different teams and departments keeps tension from being permanently centered. This rhythm is at odds with the leisurely cycle of most local practice, in which an ample siesta dominates the center of the day. But in order to be the leading and “most modern” launch complex in the world, the CSG must operate in synch with many world clocks. The large backlog of satellites awaiting launch accumulated during the late 1980s and early 1990s further increased pressure on the facility to produce quick and regular launches.
Rocket technology as a whole dictates in favor of repeated testing and standardization and against improvisation. Launches are volatile moments; even after a decade of regular launches, the success rate of Ariane—a reliable rocket—hovers just above 90 percent. Every failure represents not only the loss of merchandise but also a costly delay, because the reasons for the malfunction must be determined before operations resume.[20] The possibility of a major disaster (such as an explosion on the launchpad), while remote, hovers unpleasantly in the background, and obsessions over safety are matched by fears about sabotage and industrial espionage. This inherent conservatism and focus on control marks space transport as a strangely static technology, wedded to regulation and structure in an effort to corral its necessary experiments with explosive power.
However, the space center and the engineers who work in it cannot completely escape the tropics. The relative atmospheric stability of Guyane facilitates launching (even if CSG had lost its claim never to have delayed a rocket because of weather). But the local climate, while
The social environment surrounding the space center also creates tensions within its operations. Although European space personnel publicly praise the relaxed sensibility of working in “Mediterranean” Guyane and compare it favorably to European conditions, in private some complain about the lax work habits of Guyanais employees. Beyond the threat of strikes and other protests, which periodically disrupt space activities, they sense a lack of professional commitment to labor, an unwillingness to disrupt patterns of life to achieve greater success. One engineer told me an anecdote about a local automated car wash, which displayed a sign announcing that its hours of operation were limited to the morning. “That,” he said, “sums up Guyane.”
A focus piece on secretaries in the CSG house journal provides a further window into work relations at the space center. Both the content and the form of the article help position the official symbolic location of the local setting relative to the international norms of the project. Tension exists on both sides; against a space official's private complaints about lapsed work ethic, we must place a secretary's complaint about calculating stress. As one such employee commented: “Sometimes CSG makes me think of a jungle where the reason of the strongest is always the best.” A more extended example is found in the story of someone whom, we are told, “many of you know” and her struggles with her immediate superior:
A number of years ago, I had a boss who wouldn't stop persecuting me. He was constantly really unpleasant to me, causing the worst problems, spending his time making unpleasant remarks to me in front of everybody. This went on for a long time, and I'd truly lost all taste for coming to work. Being able to stand it no longer, I went to consult a clairvoyant, and she told me that a very simple method existed to neutralize evil people: I had to obtain some large salt and to sprinkle it on the ground under my boss's seat and everywhere where he was in the habit of passing by, and immediately he would become as sweet as a lamb. Starting the next day, I flooded the place
Placing the anecdote into an interpretive frame, the article concludes with the following comment: “To cast a spell? A very local manner to settle problems with a hierarchical superior. Yes indeed, CSG is also Guyane!” The underlying conflict, already solved in the narrative, is solved again; the action described translates through exoticism into humor. Magic has entered the cathedral of reason, and tradition returns in new and unexpected forms. Its power, however, becomes muted in the presentation; salt is quaintly archaic—even if it reportedly works.
Yet Creole secretaries have no monopoly on tradition or ritual behavior; as we have seen, mythic themes and commemorations weigh heavily in space. Another article, commemorating the tenth anniversary of Ariane's crucial first launch, the moment of the rocket's symbolic and material birth on Christmas Eve of 1979, provides counterbalancing material. An official describes how, once everything “humanly possible” had been done to ensure success, space personnel deposited some eighty ritual candles at the church in Kourou. He continues to claim that this tradition continued for at least the first seventeen launches, with the exception of the second and fifth, both of which were failures. From the sixth launch on, the lighting of a candle became an established protocol. The point is driven home by an accompanying cartoon, which shows a security officer sneaking through the forest to place his candle on an altar, only to arrive and find many already there, grouped around a model Ariane. Here again official publication turns the limits of reason into a joke, though this time without implicating Guyane. Instead, the account covers the tension of imperfection running beneath standardization, the reminder that engineering can fail, and that even a reliable rocket can blow up.[22] Salt or candles, the actions cover similar anxieties over the limits of control, even if one is read down into local superstition and the other out into general humor.
The same founding moment of the initial Ariane provides other interesting details. Because the launch had been delayed into the holiday season, a plane brought relatives from France to join the hardworking rocket crew, a “Charter des Femmes” (charter of wives) to provide solace. Families reconstituted, the pioneers finally delivered. Immediately after the successful launch, we are told, senior officials in the space program engaged in the first snowball fight ever staged in French Guiana, using a frozen pile created by the liquid oxygen of the departed rocket.
In similar fashion, for all the modern rhythms of the space center, everyday life in French Guiana, even in Kourou, remains a matter of partial improvisation amid the structure of grander plans. The barriers defending controlled climates require constant maintenance and power. Heavy rains and steady heat often reveal flaws in buildings designed for other conditions, and some electronic equipment suffers quickly from exposure. Minor crises require bricolage—fiddling, fixing, and making do with the materials at hand. While an impressive and ever-increasing array of consumer goods can be found in French Guiana (mountain bikes, fax machines, Norman cheese, and Algerian wine), not all of them can be found at once, and few are made with the tropics in mind. The world system delivers, but erratically and without guarantees. Similarly, while services up to and including dog grooming are available, they are not cheap, and few operate around the clock. Overall, the pace of life remains relatively slow, as replete with pause as with action. Lacking a landscape reworked by industry, a protective urban cocoon, the urgent line of cars commuting to and fro between the space center and Kourou remains distinctly incongruous.
Deep tensions also lie beneath the surface of imported norms and the translation of modern France to Guyane. An issue of a radical newspaper from 1994 sums up one of these in an article entitled “Il n'y a pas d’été en Guyane” (There is no summer in Guyane). Pointing out that the tropics experience only two seasons, dry and wet, rather than the
A TALE OF TWO ROADS (AND A DAM)
“A road is like the tongue of men; one never knows what it will carry.”
Town official of St. Georges, France-Antilles, September 2, 1994
In the summer of 1994, different threads related to development came together in a set of controversies related to the opening of a dam, the construction of one section of road, and the closing of another. Conflicts over nature, technology, and autonomy that surfaced in debates over the projects illustrate major storm systems blowing through the modern tropics, to and from the rest of the world. In the partial, inconclusive drama of these events we can glimpse the complex ecology of enterprise involved in a technical center like CSG and the manner in which “work” and “development” implicate more than individual action and economic organization.
TROUBLED WATERS AT PETIT SAUT
“Never in the world have so many precautions been taken to master the impact of a development project on the environment.”
Official description of Petit Saut Dam, 1994[25]
Between a demographic explosion and striking shifts in the material habits of its residents, French Guiana confronted an energy dilemma in the mid-1980s. Not only had its population roughly doubled over the preceding decade, but the consumption of energy had risen at an even faster rate and continued to grow at 10 to 12 percent a year. The two largest consumers of power were the system of telecommunications relays operated by TDF (Télé Diffusion France) and the space center, which together accounted for some 30 percent of the total use. CSG required significant energy for both launch operations and general airconditioning, and ambitious plans for the Ariane 5 rocket projected even higher rates of use. But the majority of electricity flowing through Guyane powered smaller enterprises and households replete with a growing range of personnel technologies, including refrigeration and climate control. The result was heavy dependence on imported fossil fuels and ever-rising energy bills.[26]
To diminish the need for fuel imports and to establish a foundation for future growth, the French state utilities company (EDF) decided to invest in a large-scale hydroelectric project. Taking advantage of Guyane's plentiful water, such an installation would simultaneously reduce the cost of electricity production and provide an independent renewable source of energy for the future. The possibility of a dam had been discussed since the 1950s, and an inventory of potential sites begun. After further research in 1987, the final decision was taken to construct a dam across the Sinnamary River at a site known as Petit Saut (Small Rapids). The arguments in favor of this location focused on the relative geography of the department and the relative degree of environmental impact of the project. While a major river such as the Oyapock might generate more in the way of potential power, damming it would also present greater technical problems and, because of its border location, require extensive political negotiation. Petit Saut, in contrast, lay near the center of the department, not far from the coastal areas that consumed the most electricity (Cayenne, Kourou, and St. Laurent). Thus it would be clearly within the jurisdiction
Once the decision had been reached, the dam at Petit Saut materialized quickly. A five-year project of construction began in 1989, employing an average of four hundred workers at a time. In addition to an access road, they cleared the site and built the dam—the largest in “France.” The total cost of the effort ran in the order of 540 million dollars, a significant sum within the context of Guyane.[28] Of this figure, approximately 3.5 percent was directed into a study of the environmental impact of the dam. Experience with major hydroelectric projects in other countries cautioned that flooding a large section of forest could wreck ecological havoc as well as create significant health problems, particularly in malarial areas. However, EDF maintained that the Afobaka Dam constructed in the early 1960s in neighboring Suriname, while causing significant short-term damage, had eventually stabilized in ecological terms and proved greatly beneficial in promoting energy independence.[29] The anticipated impact of Petit Saut was smaller, and EDF promised to support extensive environmental research, including use of SPOT satellite photography. High above, the proud eye of France would watch its hand below.
However, despite these precautions, controversy surrounding the project grew. From a European viewpoint, the impending flood threatened numerous exotic and colorful animals, as well as a segment of tropical rain forest. Perceptions within Guyane were mixed, though they usually took local energy demands more seriously than those positioned at a remove: “Of course, in a Parisian or New York editorial office, it was easy to perceive the subject in quite a different manner, notably from the perspective of the environment—so Amazonian, and above all, so photogenic.”[30] With criticism mounting, the utility company began a rescue operation to save animals within the affected area and heightened its public relations campaign, pointing out that all the activity would actually increase ecological research in the area. In addition to extensively surveying the threatened flora and fauna and working to ensure water quality, EDF sponsored a major archaeological salvage operation, recovering artifacts associated with Amerindian occupations, gold mining, and the camp of Indochinese political prisoners at Saut Tigre.
Environmental activists were not convinced; they continued to express their dismay with Petit Saut, if not actually impede its construction.[32] Support among the Creole population also began to thin, particularly as fears grew over the possibility of accidents, ecological destruction, and decreased water quality. Labor activists organized work stoppages at the site, and political groups favoring increased autonomy for Guyane increasingly identified the project as an imposition of the French state and argued that it had primarily been designed to serve the needs of the space center. By the summer of 1994, with the dam nearly operational, Petit Saut had become a symbol at the center of a range of fault lines in Guyanais politics, a physical reminder of the problems of power in tropical France.
THE FIRST ROAD: CLOSING THE SPACE ROUTE
This reflection led me to put French colonial power into relief. In effect, in the name of colonization, it does what it wants for the development of Guyane, and for that has no limits to its actions, lies, manipulations, repressions, and demagogy.
Reader of a radical paper on the space center, 1994[33]
Even as tension over the dam increased, another source of conflict emerged, this one directly involving the space center. A segment of the major coastal road (named “Route Nationale 1,” or “RN 1,” in honor of its original status as the descendent of the ill-fated penal colony project), crossed directly through the territory of CSG on its way from Kourou to Sinnamary, passing between the major technical installations. Since the success of the Ariane program, concern over security and safety had grown, and particularly with the advent of the Ariane 5 rocket, space officials sought to limit access to their domain. Toward this end they sponsored the construction of a deviation road swinging in a large loop around the space center and neatly hooking up with the access road to Petit Saut. The opening of this alternative route in 1991 facilitated the closing of the crucial segment of RN 1 during launches, as traffic could now be diverted throughout the critical day without major inconvenience. It also allowed CSG to press for complete closure
The public at large, however, resenting the additional length of the new deviation and lack of facilities along it, continued to use the old road whenever possible. Despite an interchange design encouraging the use of the deviation, a steady stream of cars headed straight through the space center on every day it was open. Space officials maneuvered for total closure, urging the state to decommission the road and transfer jurisdiction to them. A number of local politicians had opposed the project since its initiation in 1987, and now a group of the most prominent elected officials staged a preemptive strike. Holding a press conference in early July 1994, they denounced the space center's intentions, warned of increasing estrangement between Guyane and the space program, and called CSG a “state within a state.” Guyane's conservative deputy cautioned that continued strife might lead to a “divorce,” while the socialist president of the regional council proclaimed: “It is unthinkable that a prosperous, rich, and regular activity of such high technology develops, and that less than ten kilometers away there exists the most complete destitution, lacking a minimum of comfort, security, or hygiene.”[34] Reaction was swift. The prefect called a meeting between space officials and the political representatives of Guyane, and on July 13—the eve of the French national holiday—he announced that although the road would close, a new initiative would seek to foster the development of Guyane alongside that of the space program.
Yet the matter was far from closed. A political organization known as “Mouvement de décolonisation et d’émancipation sociale” (Movement for Decolonization and Social Emancipation, or MDES) took up the ball, accusing the space center and the state of colonial practices and the elected officials of betrayal. MDES demanded that the matter be put to a referendum and set about gathering signatures of support. A night rally held in Cayenne drew a crowd of several hundred, with music and speakers who shouted slogans in both Creole and French, decrying the loss of road and the demise of culture and tradition in general. While activists encouraged passing drivers to sign their petition, one woman pointed out that for all the advanced satellites riding up into the sky from Kourou, towns in the interior of Guyane lacked reliable television and phone service. “What use is the space center to us?” she asked, generating applause. Another man reminded the audience that the road had existed prior to CSG's arrival and suggested that it
Meanwhile, the space center went on a counteroffensive. Television news crews from both the state network and its recently legalized competition were given elaborate tours and shown the large stocks of dangerous materials. Space officials granted numerous interviews, citing concerns for public safety and categorically denying any desire on their part to segregate themselves from the rest of French Guiana. Rumors of plans for a separate port and airport were unfounded, they suggested, or misunderstandings of plans for the suspended Hermès spaceplane project. They claimed that the design of the deviation was the best possible, given constraints of safety and the need to meet the access road to Petit Saut. As a gesture of goodwill they even offered to cede land south of the deviation road back to general state control.
The controversy continued, with the Guyanais Socialist Party (PSG) responding angrily to accusations from MDES and Walwari (another relatively radical organization) that they were selling their heritage down the river. While occasionally decrying the racism of the space center, MDES sought to forestall the suggestion that their own crusade smacked of ethnic chauvinism, proclaiming that their movement welcomed members of all groups, not only Creoles but also “Metros and Chinese” who were opposed to CSG. The essential issue, they stressed, was one of popular sovereignty; a decision enforced from outside and above was inherently “colonialist.” In the charged atmosphere of French Guiana, these claims struck a responsive chord, and by August MDES announced they had gathered ten thousand signatures. A letter to the editor of one activist paper decried the actions of the “CSE [Centre Spatial Européen]” and compared the social atmosphere in Kourou to that of a South African town under apartheid, suggesting that it was equally difficult to be black in either place.[35] But by that point, the space section of RN 1 was not the only road to controversy.
THE SECOND ROAD: BUILDING TO BRAZIL
The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what is smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them.
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, 1969
“By itself, French Guiana cannot compensate for the destruction of the Brazilian Forest.”
Statement of business organization, France Guyane, August 2, 1994
Even as the storm over the space road broke, clouds gathered over another end of the coastal route begun by the convicts. A second section of roadway extending south and east of Cayenne and designated “RN 2” ended at the town of Régina, well before reaching St. Georges and the Brazilian border. Despite repeated plans and promises, construction had long showed little signs of life, but in the summer of 1994 crews began clearing the way for further work. On July 19 a group of activists associated with the ecological group WWF decided to block the project, protesting destruction of the forest. In a press release they decried the expenditure of nearly one hundred million dollars and the elimination of an estimated 450,000 trees, all to allow the passage of what they argued would amount to a mere five to ten cars a day. A further petition to French president François Mitterand reminded him that this was a French department and part of the “last primary forest of the Atlantic” and “natural Amazonian heritage”; the expanse of Guyane represented the only “tropical forest of importance” under the administration of a “rich country.” Surely while advising third-world countries to attend to their environmental responsibilities, France could hardly ignore its own.[36]
The response was swift and vitriolic, as the ranks of local opinion joined. The syndicate of Socio-Professionals of Guyane (headed by the primary contractor for the road) accused the WWF of being a “tiny group of French ecological fundamentalists” engaged in “neocolonial practices” under the cover of ecology. Ecology came naturally to the Guyanais, the syndicate argued, and they were in no need of schooling, particularly by outsiders: “All the communities of French Guiana have always lived in symbiosis with their environment, from which they draw essential resources indispensable for their subsistence, except for the European community …. The great majority of the Guyanais people do not want Guyane to be transformed into a nature reserve for pseudo-scientists and French researchers of all sorts.”[37] In any event, they suggested, international opinion was clear that ecology and development concerns could be joined in “eco-development,” and Guyane had so little in the way of roads (420 kilometers in four hundred years, went the slogan) that the whole debate was ridiculous.
The PSG also broadcast a protest against the WWF action, albeit a shorter one expressed in less extreme terms. The conservative deputy of French Guiana sent a letter to the conservative French prime minister, Edouard Balladour, further denouncing the ecologists, suggesting that the WWF's real motives were political and subversive and that their tactics were those of misinformation. Why, he wanted to know, had the WWF not protested when the space center built the fifty kilometers of deviation road? Finally, an article in a radical paper tied to the most outspoken workers' organization attacked one of the leading ecologists personally, insinuating that he was an outsider with a European plot and that the real disappearing species was that of the “Guyanais.” Without development, the local population would grow extinct. Furthermore, the real ecological problem lay elsewhere: where local hunters had always shot only enough to feed their families, now French gendarmes staged trophy hunts, depleting the fauna. The article closed with a call for the ecologist to calm himself and allow the Guyanais to develop in peace, because they had a more intimate link to the landscape than he ever could: “He can teach us nothing about Nature, for we are a part of it.”[38]
The second rejoinder of the business community was cool and cutting, charging the WWF of assuming “nature” to be a simple good and of waging a campaign in the name of ecology that was both superficial and self-serving. Key to their misapprehension was the long French tradition of tending gardens:
Since André Le Notre, the French have cultivated the art of beautiful gardens; we link the idea of a successful landscape intimately with the pleasurable frame of agreeable life. It has even become a social necessity. When discussing the policy of a town, better living, or the environment, the creation of parks and gardens is inseparable from our quest for well-being. But going from there to make a reserve of ninety thousand square kilometers out of Guyane is a limit not to be crossed …. In Guyane it is still only the period of the “conquest.” … To transform it into an immense reserve would perhaps provide a clear conscience to France, its forest, and its ecologists, but the choice of whether to construct a road to lessen the isolation of a region only concerns the Guyanais, who will never be able to accept that this department is “only a preferential field of experimentation” for scientists badly in need of a thesis …. Those who wish a national petition to save this forest of Guyane when 90 percent of the French only know this department for the penal colony, Ariane, and butterflies and would not, for the most part, be capable of finding Guyane on a globe, leave us a bit skeptical.[39]
Rather, the business association suggested, environmentalists should stop sipping cocktails at fancy conferences, pretending nature was “paradise” and blocking the interests of local populations. They should
Faced with this wave of reaction, the WWF rallied their ecological allies and sought to retrieve the moral high ground. After all, business interests, not ecologists, they protested, are more likely to be found at hotel conferences. However, the statement they issued was more conciliatory in tone. They were not against development, not against the road if it should prove absolutely necessary. Rather, they sought only to focus attention on the project and to call for the highest possible level of environmental monitoring and care for any species threatened by the advance of the coastal route.[40]
As the summer faded the different conflicts simmered down; in October the state finally closed the space road without inciting riots, while the route to Brazil crept uncertainly eastward. CNES, the parent of CSG, launched a public relations campaign focusing on French astronauts to generate goodwill, while the activist ecology publication included a letter from a reader defending the Brazilian road. However, the acrimony of the disputes was not quick to dissipate, and together they struck an unsettling chord, reverberating against conflicts past and hinting of more to come.[41]
In the gap between the penal colony and the space center we have more than a contrast between failure and success, between active laziness and displaced industry. The work of high technology is partly a matter of bodies, training, and organization. But it is also a spatial disturbance, a reconfiguration of a greater ecology of enterprise. A web of artifice extends into the environment, and natural elements take on new roles in social relations and cultural representation. Between poles of power and vectors of motion lie the internal divides of modern French Guiana. At one pole lies the space center, limiting motion on the ground to ensure it above the sky. At another pole lies the new dam, built to free the department from imported fuel, while powering rockets, refrigerators, and a cooler climate for all. Movements of people and things cross over each other, producing new assemblages of natural and cultural elements. Slowly, rising waters close over the remains of a penal camp for Southeast Asian nationalists, photographed all the while by satellite. Elsewhere on the ground machines carve a path toward the southern border, a project descended from the penal colony and now opposed by inheritors of Columbus. Development and nature ring through the air, while splintered groups of new and old moderns face both forward and backward. Storms of progress blow, but the angels of history no longer fly in a single line.
LOCAL MEETS GLOBAL
At the beginning of August 1994, a remarkable debate took place on French Guiana's third (and just recently legalized) television channel. Between strikingly awkward camera angles and poorly positioned microphones, one of the major figures favoring the completion of the road to Brazil faced off against a prominent local ecologist opposing the project. By most rhetorical standards the exchange was a mess; the positions expressed quickly lost any semblance of subtlety; the participants interrupted each other, and members of the tiny audience intervened. Yet amid the chaotic hyperbole, there emerge complex social and political tensions stretching between tangled issues of development and the environment in French Guiana. In the world of Ariane we are far from our opening vision of ax-wielding industry and tropical sloth, and yet we are still within its shadow; the debate contains traces of old prejudices as new terms of value, and reversed projections of progress and tradition. Here I offer a partial and loosely translated transcription of selected portions of the argument, closing this narrative on the edge of an uncertain present, one much larger than French Guiana.[42] The two protagonists are Monsieur D, a Creole road contractor, and Monsieur F, a Metro ecologist. Rather than offer direct commentary, I will let their words dangle free, like a live wire.
D:To start with, this is not an internal debate in Guyane, but a case of Guyane against outsiders, ideological fundamentalist ecologists.
F:
I feel Guyanais. Monsieur D is originally from Martinique; I'm from Champagne. We're both from other French departments. Furthermore I represent a world organization [WWF] as well as a local coalition of environmental groups [SEPANGUY, Pou d'Agouti, Ibis Vert]. My credentials are not what you make them; I'm Guyanais, and can show you my identity card. But this is an issue of human inheritance [patrimoine], a global issue.
D:
The Antilles [Martinique, Guadeloupe] share a fundamental culture, a Guyane-Antilles culture. The French are from outside. This is a foreign, world group, not a local interest. Why did you not protest against important French projects, like the deviation road around the space center, or that to Petit Saut Dam?
F:
Other groups did go on record against the dam, but here we're discussing this road—
D:
You can consider yourself what you want—a Brazilian even—but this is a business for those it concerns, not for outsiders. Under cover of ecology, you're forwarding a political agenda [of dependence] ….
MAN FROM AUDIENCE:
In Guyane we're all ecologists, and put trash into cans. We've lived four hundred years without development. What has France brought us? The penal colony, the space center. The space center pays no taxes. You pay taxes Monsieur F (I assume you do), I pay taxes, but they—
F:
What about the two hundred million francs for the road?
D:
The European community is paying the largest share—
F:
Do you want roads everywhere, even to Saül [a town in the interior]?
MAN FROM AUDIENCE:
Yes … we need to protect things, but also need to get places. Everyone talks about tourism, but what kind of tourism can you have without access—[cacophony]—This road only represents 0.001 percent of French Guiana's forest!
F:
The road itself—the line through the forest—is not the real problem. But it leads to much more, devastation on either side of the road, deforestation, immigration—
D:
I visited the United States recently—do you know the U.S.?—and I went to Yellowstone Park, a beautiful park—with many roads. And that is in the U.S., a country with serious environmental legislation [not like here].
F:
No, no, France actually has the most restrictive environmental codes—
D:
The road network in the U.S. is fantastic. And the great ecologists come from the U.S.—the WWF is originally an Anglo-Saxon group, isn't it? Yes, well, remember that all the important currents of ecology flow out of Anglo-Saxon logic.
F:
There are many things in the U.S.—
D:
What do we want? We want to establish the means of development, and it's not for outsiders to tell us what to do—
F:
But you're not president of Guyane—
D:
Look, there are slaves and slave owners. Modern supporters of slavery work under the guise of ecology. The problem with this country is that there's no infrastructure. We need to open up the land and redistribute the population. Saül has the best soil in Guyane, perfect for agriculture. If we want to encourage local production we need to have means of transport. And we must industrialize—France doesn't want us to, so that we'll remain dependent. We're in favor of ecology … the Amerindians, the Saramaka [Maroons] know how to live in harmony with nature. What we have here is a colonialist attitude: Grandfather comes in and says, “No, no, stop this.” We think we're old enough to make our own decisions.
Why not regulate hunting and build the road?
F:
These things go together; we must not separate them. I'm not an evil Metro colonialist; I have been here, working for ecology for twentytwo years. I was one of the first [audience interruption]. Once, yes, you could find populations here in harmony with the environment, but we have to use the past tense. Why build a road to Maripasoula [an interior town] when there is a river? This forest is the heritage of the entire world [patrimoine mondial]. This is the least populated country on the planet; that in itself is priceless. Why populate it?
D:
Someone has to pay for it. Brazilians need something to eat.
F:
You were talking of national parks …. Yes, other countries have problems, but it's not for French Guiana to solve all the problems of Brazil or Haiti.
D:
You speak only in your name.
F:
I represent several groups in Guyane, and besides, you have private interests in this matter, I believe. How many Guyanais work in the construction crew?
D:
There are Saramakas [Maroons, with a homeland in Suriname], and young Guyanais [Creole] interns. It's not your role to determine what should be done here. You're from the national territory—I'm from the one under domination.
F:
I am speaking for other organizations—
D:
Look, I won't play the role of the victim; I have respect for what you did for the turtles—
F:
Thank you.
D:
But your work here should be to train young Guyanais, then to go back to France. No need for Grandfather …
F:
I have worked with the turtles because they're specifically Guyanais, and I employ Galibi [Amerindians]—
D:
You're the chief.
F:
It's not so simple, I'm a scientist … besides, you're also the boss [of your crew].
D:
Guyane is artificially part of the North. As in other parts of the North, people from poorer neighbors, Brazil and so forth, are attracted by its wealth. What we must do is stabilize the border. How to do this? By building the road. Yes, and establishing a frontier trade zone [zone d'activité] that will attract serious investment. That way Brazilians can come to the border and work. People in St. Georges want to stay Guyanais, not to become Brazilian. With a stable, working border they can do so—
F:
They worked hard to have French TV and not Brazilian … a bit of imperialism, no?
Guyane will turn to Europe, not France. The policy of decreasing isolation [désenclavement] will help us develop. Yes, you have technical knowledge, but leave it to Guyanais to develop the method.
F:
I'm a professional ecologist—
D:
You're an agitator. No, I'm not against you, I'm against the role you play.
F:
Immigration isn't so simple. How can you limit—
D:
Some of my friends are ecologists—real ecologists—Americans. You sound like the frontier police, not an ecologist. Ecology is to the left, not on the side of the gendarmes. Guyanais don't condemn the Brazilians, it's the French who do that. You're in charge of this place. Could you do such a thing in Brazil, in Suriname? Brazilians come here to try and eat. Immigration is a problem throughout the North, all the rich countries have problems. Look at the U.S. and Mexico, even Brazil— yes at places in Brazil Peruvians and Bolivians cross the border [to work there]. Any time one neighbor is richer and the other poorer, well, then you have migration. Both Guyanais and Brazilians can benefit from a trade zone.
F:
I knew Guyane when it had a population of fifty thousand. People lived in wood houses—nice Creole, wooden houses. They had a quality life. Now, twenty years later with immigration, people live a stressful life, with air-conditioning. An artificial life, excuse me, but as stupid as certain Metropolitans; people imitate Metropolitans. I feel Guyanais, but I'm told I'm not Guyanais by someone who lives like a European. There is a Guyanais identity that has utterly forgotten Creole life. Let's take roads. I don't know if you've seen those nice signs they've put up by the roadsides, but since January—just since January—they're thirteen dead and three hundred injured. What will your road do? Add another ninety or so. It's a Pan-American project, it will link Belém to Caracas—
D:
When I was little, people used to hide from whites, the vieux blancs, the bagnards [from the penal colony] …. Yes, perhaps things were better before. But it was the French who destabilized things by their behavior.
F:
The forest belongs to humanity.
D:
It's the business of those who live there. This concern is a bit—excuse the expression—co-lo-ni-a-list.
F:
What do you want for the Guyane of the future? Roads to Maripasoula and everywhere else? Harmony with nature is past, people have changed how they live. This is a part of a global heritage, not only Guyanais. More population will lead to problems like Brazil and Haiti. What does development mean?
D:
We must link ecology with development. Remember, [the dam at] Petit Saut eliminated four hundred square kilometers [of forest].
That's EDF [the utility company]; we opposed it. People say Petit Saut is all for the space center, but that's not true. CSG only uses 25 percent of the total energy. The rest is Guyane, especially all the airconditioning!
D:
Europe is bigger than France. You want us to return to trees and live like monkeys. Well, we don't want to; we won't. Against these fundamentalists [integretistes], this tiny outside group—
F:
Your “Guyanais” are the elected officials and companies—
D:
Not ecology for ecology's sake—ecology and development!
F:
Agreed, but … we want to redo the ecological impact report, be more careful …. Remember, this is one of the last primary forests in the world. Not in Guyane, not in South America, in the world. It's a richness for all humanity, as well as Guyane—
[general interruptions and chaos]
D:Economic development is for now and for the future. We need to use the space of our territory. The Saramaka, the Amerindians know how to live in harmony with the forest, they don't need lessons from Grandpa.
MODERATOR:
Yes or No to Development, Monsieur F?
F:
You can't put it that way. But no to this version of the road.
MODERATOR:
Yes or No to Ecology, Monsieur D?
D:
Oh yes. I'm an ecologist.
9. The Imperfect Equator
Space and the tropics are both utopian topical figures in western imaginations, and their opposed properties dialectically signify origins and ends for the creature whose mundane life is outside both: civilized man. Space and the tropics are “allotopic”; i.e. they are “elsewhere,” the place to which the traveler goes to find something dangerous and sacred.
Donna Haraway, Primate Visions, 1989
FIRST IMPRESSIONS
Some of the most memorable photographs are those not taken. If I were to choose an emblematic image to accompany the contrasts I seek to capture, it would be one I do not possess, of Rochambeau Airport in the summer of 1990. Lacking the clear, unsettling detail of film, I can only shape the scene from memories of sensations, some singular, some repeated: an airplane, direct from Paris, crosses a flat and muddy edge of the Atlantic, then banks and circles over the low green sea of forest just beyond it, down between rising houses and scattered trees until wheels touch tarmac. At the end of the runway the plane slows, turns, and finally stops before a small, but brightly painted terminal. Leaving the air-conditioned cabin, the passengers step into a world of light, heat, and humidity, a sudden transit to the tropics. And yet, even while registering this most abrupt and unlikely change of environment, their attention moves down the runway to a neighboring plane, beak-nosed and silent. Etched against that thick, undisciplined greenery most commonly associated in English with the word jungle, under a strong midday equatorial sun, stands the unmistakable profile of a Concorde, that supersonic pride of Franco-British aviation. The impressions are both simultaneous and startling, and they lead in quite opposite directions: associations with nature, the uninhabited, and the wild, on the one hand, and with technology, the controlled, and the civilized, on the other. Cool, stale air from an airplane cabin, warm pungent air of the
Figure 21. Path of the Stars, Kourou, 1993
Within the anthropological tradition known as ethnography, arrival scenes have often played a privileged and crucial role, even as first encounters cast a seductive allure over the history of colonialism. What, after all, more surely represents a crossed boundary than a foot meeting shore, the initial and passing wonder of contact? Because the focus of this work is on boundaries, their techniques, and their representation, I have returned here, with an account of my own first arrival in French Guiana. Despite the rhetorical burden of such initial experiences and their fetishization, I am reluctant to abandon the rhetorical power of their sensation, that fleeting yet certain confirmation that life is in motion. Sometimes, by chance and the turmoil of interruption, one can absorb past knowing, even as a child or a stranger uncertainly grasps the raw wholeness of things. Only later, in scattered bits and pieces, would I arrive at the knowledge through which to interpret the image and enlarge it with explanation: that an important satellite launch had taken place the day before at the nearby space center, one
In its pursuit of the Fridays of this world, anthropology has sought knowledge in depth to establish clear, locally ordered patterns of belief and practice. With enough time, the transitory and the incongruent could be filtered out of analysis, and the authentic distilled, revealing the inner heart of society and culture. When reversing the direction of inquiry, however, and bringing anthropology “home from the tropics” to address modern life, it is precisely the incongruent and transitory that become significant. “Science” and “technology” describe vast, busy networks, obviously incomplete at any local scale. The truth of modern power lies in change, in open practice. Surfaces matter, for in them we detect movement and distant links. To include the Crusoes of the world in anthropology, we must not lose sight of the exterior of their islands or the work of their hands in an accounting of their words and thoughts. This is especially clear when looking at the tropics and the structures they left behind.[1]
Although the European Metropoles did not simply acquire empires through technical superiority, an expanding set of imported problems and solutions played a central role in maintaining and transforming those empires. Colonialism reworked nature overseas even as industry did at home, only at a distance and less perfectly. Most crucially, it introduced a magic of scale, one that reworked space in ways simultaneously
WORKING MASTERS, PORTABLE ISLANDS
In a little Time I began to speak to him and teach him to speak to me; and first, I made him know his Name should be Friday, which was the Day I sav'd his Life; I called him so for the Memory of the Time; I likewise taught him to say Master, and then let him know, that was to be my Name.
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 1719
Defoe's castaway defines a lonely individual, and yet he acquires an important shadow, the man he rescues from cannibalism and renames after a day of the week. Friday proves a perfect servant; unshakably loyal in his devotion, he provides his master with the subservient companionship of which he had dreamed. Despite the fact that Friday is native to the region, Crusoe reforms him to fit his improved island, teaching him to abhor cannibal feasts and labor productively. In our colonial myth, then, the displaced hero crosses a middle plane between exile and home, as he transforms from piteous castaway into governor. In that middle plane he
Long before our present story but somewhat after Defoe, a German scholar gave a famous analysis of servitude amid a grand account of the emergence of consciousness. At a crucial point in Georg Hegel's Phenomenology, a recognition of strength and weakness gives birth to the overpowering lord and overpowered bondsman. Hegel's dense description of the aftermath of conquest provides a complex fable of social change. Forced to work by the master, the slave comes to know the world and control it, achieving independent consciousness. At the same time, by forcing the slave to work the master becomes dependent on the service performed and hence is weakened. Servitude is thus inherently unstable, for craft and control of nature provide a remedy for the threat of death. Labor, in this tradition, describes a key to power and eventual freedom.[4]
This moment of the master and slave resonates through much subsequent writing about domination and world history, surfacing memorably in Marxist visions of struggling classes and postcolonial accounts of mutually constituting colonizer and colonized. It is the latter echo that concerns us here, for in it we encounter less perfect masters and slaves.[5] Hegel's power figures live symmetrically in abstraction, unmarked by location or heritage, beyond a vaguely classical agrarian past. The darker shadows of empirical record around Defoe's novel tell less certain stories. More is at stake than violent rule and labor when the Atlantic slave trade leaves a painful vocabulary of color and when the end of European empire witnesses new systems of inequality. As the Martiniquan psychiatrist Franz Fanon notes, the master and slave in a colonial system defined by race are not the same as those in Hegel's dialectic:
For Hegel there is reciprocity; here the master laughs at the consciousness of the slave. What he wants from the slave is not recognition but work. In the same way the slave here is in no way identifiable with the slave who loses himself in the object and finds in his work the source of his liberation …. In Hegel the slave turns away from the master and turns towards the object. Here the slave turns towards the master and abandons the object.[6]
The dynamic of liberation promised in Hegel is thus lost in the colonies; race distorts the opposition of domination, eliminating its symmetry and deferring the reversal of power. The colonial slave works, but without mastering nature or learning craft. In this setting, labor does not produce independent consciousness, but only a complex of dependency.
Fanon leaves us here, but Robinson Crusoe contains a second, related clue, one that will take us deeper into a consideration of the technical fault lines in colonial space. Crusoe, the displaced man, is a ruler who knows nature for himself and refashions the world around him. He has already labored as his own slave and mastered mechanical arts. Despite his gun, he is not simply a warrior; despite his merchant past, he is not simply bourgeois. He is a working, well-equipped master, corrupted by experience and bolstered by far-flung ties. Thus the opposition between lord and bondsman on this tropical island is not between pure command and service but between different, unequal identities within a common project of practice. The field of power between independence and labor is offset not only by race but also by a technical landscape.
How might the work of a master and the work of a slave characterize themselves? Further provocation comes from another citizen of the German language, this one writing not long after Sputnik. In The Human Condition Hannah Arendt distinguishes between three forms of activity: labor (that which is necessary for life), work (that which leaves an imprint on the world), and action (that which changes political conditions). Arendt's larger aim is to chronicle a perceived decline of action and the eventual glorification of labor in modern existence, and as with Hegel, her narrative world contains but a single history, and her terms remain abstract. Here I am not seeking to adopt Arendt's firm and idiosyncratic definitions as given. But her etymologically based distinction between labor and work touches on relevant lines between toil and skill, expended energy and design. Thus Arendt's vocabulary has its uses for this argument, demarcating processes that further living and reproduction (at a minimum, “getting by”) from those that produce objects and transform the world (at a maximum, “technology”). In Crusoe we find both labor, his struggle to adapt to an alien land, and work, his eventual domination of an “improved” island. Only after he has domesticated nature does Defoe's protagonist become a master in the world of human affairs, rescuing other men in violent acts of mercy. This point is crucial: he is not a passive owner of his island but an active governor, the lord of an extended household, manipulator of a modified environment.[7]
It would be a mistake to think of the place that Crusoe washes ashore and the place where Friday lands as the same ground. Between these two narrative points, Defoe's hero has reworked the fabric of the landscape around him, recovering fragments of the ship, fashioning
Our fictional guidebook can only take us so far. Amid the range of imperial experience, few islands were so uninhabited, few landings so uncontested, few servants so willing, and few masters so industrious. But set against Hegel and Arendt, Robinson Crusoe suggests an important principle: in the tropical expanse of empire, universal theory is forced to confront an exposed space of imperfection. Because the colonial lord and bondsman emerge on a frontier between different alignments of nature and technology, their relation is defined in spatial terms. The rule of the latter by the former rests on an imposed order of life, one referenced to elsewhere. The division between them returns to a distinction between work and labor, with expertise reserved for a mastery of the horizon rather than local toil and improvisation. The colonial bondsman thus cannot master nature and play off the lord's dependence, for nature has been reworked in the master's conquest, a conquest born of a voyage as well as violence, of dislocation as well as production. In the colonial drama, action extends ever offstage. So too do plans, techniques, and criteria of improvement. The reasonable story of theory, so clear within a single dimension, becomes an uncertain line across a larger domain of history, ever shifting, flawed, and incomplete. Within this domain, some islands are not only larger than others but also more portable.
FRENCH GUIANA AND THE AFTERLIFE OF ISLANDS
Fancy has depicted men without reflection, others without shadow! But here reality, by the neutralization of attractive forces, produced men in whom nothing had any weight, and who weighed nothing themselves!
Jules Verne, Around the Moon, 1870
Even in Defoe's day, the world around Crusoe's island could be thought to compose a vast, interacting system, knit together by trade and communication across land and sea. At the scale of centuries, this system only accelerates and tightens. Yet within it lie different moments, different configurations of space, time, and power. Returning to French Guiana, we can summarize the projects before us in terms of two such technical regimes of space. The penal colony lies at an intersection of imperial history and racial geography. A shadow of the prison, it operates crudely, in place. The space center lies at an intersection of multinational history and global geography. A shadow of space exploration, it operates efficiently, between places. Neither the penal colony nor the space center is really of Guyane, but both make use of it from the outside. Between the two we shift from a slow, fixed engine of dislocated moral retribution to an active, mobile network of technical service. A comparison between them could include the following opposed constellations of terms, under the imperfect rubrics “Empire” and “Globe”:
| Empire | Globe |
|---|---|
| penal colony | space center |
| punishment | communication |
| improvement | development |
| French Empire | multistate and corporate networks |
| territories | connections |
| maps | planet |
| civilization | technology |
| race | certified skills |
| natural and unnatural | men neutral men |
| place overseas | place from space |
| natural order | technical norms |
| natural threats | fragile nature |
| ground | sky |
The line dividing these rival lists is at once stark and uneven: while clear at a distance it blurs under close inspection. Improvement and development
Whatever names we might give these successive historical orders and however much the divide between them wavers, an anthropological shadow emerges along the divide. Here at last is a universal subject in both material and ideal terms: a being who can go anywhere without regard to local conditions, a being who could conceive of the entire planet as a home, a vast, dispersed ecosystem. In Devil's Island the contradictions of European colonialism came together, with racial categories of whiteness painfully exposed. A sense of nature lies at the center of both experience and understanding. At the Guiana Space Center, whiteness recedes behind the extended artifice of a technological network. A sense of nature remains, but as coordinates of geometry; life itself has moved to different registers of technical consideration, namely the management of exotic flora and fauna. Our second metaphorical island features light men in the tropics, and although their northern lives may cast heavy shadows, what matters is their ability to circulate and function without regard to place. They are “there” but not “really there,” their surroundings distanced enough to be thought of as “nature.” A form of placeless practice can be detected behind the old myth of Man. With sufficient technical insulation the species can indeed become cosmopolitan: scattering plans and buildings across the future, leaving footprints on moondust as well as Caribbean sand.[9]
But in imagining the lineage of Defoe's island through eras of empire and globe, we must remember the shadow of Robinson's servant. Friday hovers always at the edge of Crusoe's story, a reminder that few lands were empty, however far-flung or small. In the language of Empire the divisions are tense and clear (if imperfectly maintained), both colonizer and colonized emerging from colonization, along with a grammar of human typology. Although the penal colony partially inverted relations, a geography of race still runs through its rolls. Alongside fallen Europeans we find groups of colonials, North Africans, West Indians, and Indochinese, laboring with even less sense of work or redemption. Their mutual saga is one of survival more than resistance, of making do and getting by as long as possible with the means at hand.
Amid the reworked coordinates of an active globe, vocabulary grows less secure. Guyanais implies local identity against Metropolitan connections, but between Creoles, Maroons, and Amerindians the term is sometimes unstable. An analysis of class must acknowledge the meaning of citizenship and French education, together with a shifting matrix of origin transformed by migration. There are many possible Fridays in our story now, and often more than one Crusoe. Distinctions of planning and improvisation remain, along with harsh inequalities of life. But behind them patterns of understanding and dream weave differently, sometimes wandering across each other. Modern dreams disrupt other ones and set things in uncertain, glancing motion. Ultimately, they can ricochet and disrupt themselves.
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 1992
“Crusoe,” he said sternly, “take heed of what I say. Beware of purity. It is the acid of the soul.”
Michel Tournier, Friday, 1967
In the heat of late morning, back sweating against the seat, I am driving toward the town of Kourou from Cayenne. The two-lane highway slowly curves along the coast, the red and green land empty to either side. Occasionally the pavement crosses the remains of the old road beside it, partly overgrown and even narrower. Traffic is surprisingly dense, with luxury automobiles impatiently weaving between slower, aging machines and heavy trucks. Along the way, billboards caution drivers about the extraordinary accident rate, while traffic signs remind them—should any doubt remain—that this is indeed the main road. The car I am driving, a product of the same Yugoslavia that, by late 1992, has disintegrated in civil war, whines shrilly. Beside me sits a Brazilian hitchhiker, a short wiry man with dark skin and hair. In a mixture of imperfect French and the remnants of my childhood Portuguese we improvise a conversation. Though I picked him up on the outskirts of Cayenne partly as an act of impulsive, surface ethnography, he surprises me with the readiness with which he tells his story, anticipating questions to present a version of his life.
This life, he says, is hard; he left Salvador years ago when he lost his job as a truck driver, and he cannot find work in Brazil, where the “Mafioso” rule. He claims to have been in French Guiana for just two months (which seems unlikely), currently picking melons in Cayenne and living with other Brazilians doing odd jobs in Kourou. He worries
As I realize this he finishes his beer and casually tosses the can out the window. The action shocks me—I have been living in urban northern California, a most ecologically minded milieu, and the wanton act of littering is unthinkable. I open my mouth, but ethnographic conscience stills my tongue. Given the vast expanse around us, the weight of the action is far greater in symbolic than material terms, and anyway, in this setting from what position do I speak? The thought echoes in my head while he continues with his story. We arrive in Kourou, a sudden suburban expanse amid empty land, and he directs me to his destination, all the while pointing out what he says are houses of prostitution, and the places that he and other Brazilians frequent. “Just ask for Paulo,” he offers as I let him out, “I'll show you a good time.” We wave and go on with our days.
ROMANTIC ROBINSONS, MODERN FRIDAYS
Crusoe thinks he can distinguish between force and reason. As the only being on his island, he weeps from loneliness, while Friday finds himself among rivals,
― 256 ―allies, traitors, friends, confidants, a whole mass of brothers and chums, of whom only one carries the name of man.Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France, 1984
Amid the many divides cut through French Guiana, the central one in human affairs lies between the rental cars and taxis that serve the airport and the collective taxis (taxis collectifs) that run along the dusty roads, giving rides without questions or receipts. This line marks where the world of credit cards ends and the world of collected change and wadded bills begins. In the tropics neither system functions smoothly, and both frequently require improvisation and argument to operate.[10] But a crucial difference remains in the degree of improvisation necessary for survival.
Neither Paulo nor I was in any sense native to the setting of our interaction; both of us arrived in Guyane from elsewhere and lived our lives in relation to frontiers. I never met him again, but statistics on the borders of French Guiana suggest that he was most likely deported only to reappear again a few weeks later. I myself left and returned again several times, under less strained conditions. We represented different migrations: travel born of professional curiosity and travel born of economic need. For me “getting by” was an intellectual experience; for him it was a way of life. Yet we also expressed different understandings of the place and purpose of material culture, different modernities, if you will. Where I gave him a ride, he presented me with a drink and an ethical quandary. In this brief male encounter, references to prostitution and alcohol—nineteenth-century sins, classic colonial vices—failed to startle. But his minor and casual act of littering woke my dormant sense of civilization. The naturalness of this material and symbolic pollution of what I considered to be a natural landscape jarred my moral sensibilities. I felt simultaneously more and less modern than he was. Although both our universes may have contained the same elements, the different ordering of them was suddenly and unmistakably revealed. The material objects between us may have had the same outline, but we felt their edges in unlike ways. We both traveled, both inhabited islands, but we fashioned on them disparate structures, finding dissimilar names for hope and despair. Between us lay a shifting sea of meaning and different conceptual wreckage of industry and civilization.
In a 1967 rewriting of Defoe, the French novelist Michel Tournier imagines an alternative to Crusoe's island, relocated to the Pacific of the historical castaway Selkirk and transported forward in time to the eighteenth century. As indicated by the work's title, Vendredi (Friday), the weight of the experience shifts from Robinson to the man who joins him on his island. In Tournier's version the master still seeks to impose his will on land and servant, but this time the free laughter of his companion emerges triumphant. Robinson loses his hoard of salvaged order, finds love in the soil of the island, and slowly turns to the open sky. When a British ship finally lands on their isolated shore, the world it represents so repulses this Robinson that he decides to remain behind, allowing Friday to depart and taste the life of other shores.[11] Elegant and thoughtful, Tournier's Robinsonade gives us another human figure to consider: a universal subject who, freed from a desire to control space, learns to live in place. Here the very device that brought this Crusoe overseas—the ship—loses its magic hold on him. He denies his civilization at its edge and falls into another nature. His island, in the end, is the one he learns through exile and Friday, not the one he sought to rule. And when this Friday leaves to travel the world, he does so without his master.
Given Tournier's Crusoe and this other island, the image of the universal subject before us grows less sure. Robinson, it turns out, can become a romantic rather than calculating castaway, and Friday, once allowed to speak in something other than fractured English, may displace himself and sail away on other adventures. While Tournier's reworked island still lacks women, it transforms into a land of desire: a place where Robinson consummates his “immense compassion for all living things.”[12] Nature is no longer a wild force to be held at bay but a wild companion to be sought out, admired, and loved. Rather than carve the image of himself on the land, this Robinson unearths the image of the island buried within his soul.
In the reversal of Defoe's tale, the purity rubs off Crusoe, off colonialism, off his island, and also off Friday. This version of the myth depends both on the original and on another displacement between historical precedents and the world of Tournier's present. Rather than one master and servant, one colonizer and colonized, we have a sense of motion over centuries and between categories. Appeals to universality, boundary crossings, and dreams of the future come from several directions. Our universal subject is washed by the waves, and its image blurs
AFTER THE SPACE AGE
The West is now everywhere, within the West and outside; in structures and in minds.
Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy, 1983
When acknowledging a mobile world and impure forms, we must not forget the inertia of inequality or the historical gravity of power. Not all directions were equal in colonial systems, and in the aftermath of empire, residual masses continue to exert attractions. Colonies and empires reinscribe time in space and space in time, defining some places as older and more significant and others as newer, reborn through contact and hence derivative. Progress thus becomes a matter of both geography and history, with implicit comparison to other places as well as eras. The axis between culture and nature plays a particularly acute role in such comparisons, for it runs through economic structure and moral sensibility, separating future and past. Here we should recall that human relations do not occur in a vacuum but across an active landscape and through an ever-shifting field of artifice. Colonialism is not only about domination; it is also about creating and solving problems, modifying the conditions under which life could be lived. The work of modern science and technology continually reinscribes this axis in graphic terms: technical systems extend the landscape of the machine forward, and scientific investigations push the boundary of nature further back. Hence the chronology of ages so prominent in media attempts to define the present, where a moving horizon of technology defines the material and symbolic present around new parameters of possibility.
An “age” revolves around a paradox of identifying change. Surely humans who inhabit the same sphere and who—within the ordered difference of time zones—experience the same year all live in the present. And yet, when certain statements are made about the conditions of that present, it is equally evident that they do not apply to everyone. Even as it claims universality, the modern defines itself against what it thinks it has left behind. Nowhere is this clearer or more poignant than in the term development: an area and its inhabitants are defined in terms of their relation to a shifting body of material culture and patterns of exchange known as “technology” and “economy,” being categorized as “developed,” “underdeveloped,” or, most hopefully, “developing.” Vast
At the end of the century, the age built around outer space is itself aging. The glory of initial exploration now fades into more practical forms of commercial exploitation as new horizons open on a smaller scale of microcircuitry and microbiology. Cultural sensibilities in elite settings within developed centers have shifted away from bolder forms of universal function; the architecture of the future now attends to difference and local variation. Yet the final frontier is less “finished” than reduced to the level of function, for human space now extends into outer space, with the planet itself woven into a vast technical system of satellites. In the Space Age one limit of modernist ambition has been achieved: an island encompassing the globe. The scale of connection opens new possibilities for migration and transmission of information beyond metropolitan networks; it has the potential to produce alternative localities and other kinds of motion. And still patterns of inclusion and exclusion persist. Like trade, knowledge circulates most frequently through centers; like a mobile fortress, technology reinforces the order of political economy. To be of an age it is not simply enough to live during it. One must also inhabit its landscape. Even at a low, quotidian level, with a welter of unintended consequences and secondary systems, the ecology of artifice has reinvented nature. Although experience of this new geography may remain multiple, not all positions are equal.[14] And around earthly networks, developed and undeveloped alike, there now hovers a frame of the fragile planet, a practical representation measuring the extent of all tomorrows.
THE EDGE OF THINGS
Like the man whom it shelters and nourishes, each land has its proper vocation.
There are deserts of sand and fire, deserts of ice and snow, both equally hostile to Man.
There are temperate plains with fertile soil, which, with Man's labor, sprout in abundance.
― 260 ―There are softly enchanting places, which one says are created for his pleasure.
But there are places of grief, where the suffering of Man, rejected by his fellows and overwhelmed by nature, cries out to heaven; places of expiation, places of mercy; a small portion of the earth symbolizing the entire world of men.
Are you not that, oh my dear Guyane?
Beautiful country!
Untouchable!
History of a religious order, circa 1978[15]
In Jules Verne's classic lunar fantasy, From the Earth to the Moon, members of the Baltimore Gun Club shake off post–Civil War lethargy by constructing a giant cannon to lob a projectile toward the Earth's natural satellite. However, they briefly pause to consider another project, carried away by the inspirational speech of the dashing French would-be passenger of their cannonball. Why not, he suggests, use a massive explosion to right the Earth's axis, producing a world without seasons?[16] The vision is breathtaking, mad, and thoroughly modern. It extends the principle of climate control beyond buildings to a planetary scale, creating zones of steady temperature from which humanity can pick and choose. The elimination of the natural cycle of time with one massive technical intervention promises perfection, nineteenth-century style; the hand of Man, in the form of artillery, will correct the work of God. Yet cosmology and practice do not always flow in even lines. In its very triumph, this rash vision of engineering would subtly expand the most somnolent of natural geographies. For the tropics—already seasonless, if not weatherless—would hardly be affected. Rather than represent an aberration of stability, they would constitute just another band of that modified planet, hotter than most but thoroughly normal. In effect, modernization elsewhere would render them modern, without internal change. Verne's enthusiastic cannoneers, focused beyond their world, overlook the real edges of its present.
Amid the giddy early days of the Space Age, a new view of the Earth took shape. Even as outer space framed the globe, capturing its spherical unity and its conceptual perfection, satellites measured its dimensions and found it physically uneven. The world indeed appears one and round, but it is roughly shaped, more pear than orange. The North
Such is also the case with modern categories: examination reveals that the lines defining them fall unevenly, and imperfect oppositions leave historical shadows and scattered anomalies at their side. Here we have followed a series of shadow histories: the penal colony behind the prison, Devil's Island behind Australia, commercial space behind the Space Race, and the Guiana Space Center behind Ariane. Among these shadows we find other lines of tension extending through and beyond empire: local against global, nature against technology, and improvisation against design. These are not restricted phenomena, unique to French Guiana. Rather, they constitute an imperfect framework of history and geography for modern life, around all its replicating, alternating forms. But in French Guiana they are especially apparent, in the absence of larger norms and amid the remnants of old dreams. It is there, only partly by chance, that outer space crosses tropical empire.
In regions where deposition is light, debris rests near the surface and archaeology requires less toil. French Guiana is a particularly good site to search for material and symbolic relics, minor ruins of future and past. Often one hardly has to dig. As every Ariane rises, it passes over Devil's Island. In such contrast lies the heart of motion and “a small portion of the earth symbolizing the entire world of men. Are you not that, oh my dear Guyane?” Modern life becomes most apparent along its horizon, the great, shifting frontier of nature, technology, and small things left behind. A dark roadway, broken trees, an empty can. The West grows sharpest in the evening, against a distant, setting sun.