Space in the Tropics: From Convicts to Rockets in French Guiana (review)

Space in the Tropics: From Convicts to Rockets in French Guiana. By Peter Redfield. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Pp. xvi+345. $55/$22.50.

In this imaginative work, Peter Redfield crosses the boundaries of anthropology, geography, history, and philosophy. He focuses on the two most significant efforts to develop French Guiana: the penal colony where prisoners were kept from 1852 to 1946, and the European space center, which, dominated by the French, originated in the 1960s and still operates today. Redfield assesses these two schemes for colonial development and argues that "modern categories of nature and technology can only be understood in relation to each other" and that "neither can be adequately understood without recourse to spatial terms" (p. 25). According to Redfield, the officials who set in motion the penal colony and the space center took advantage of French Guiana's remote location and political subjection. They transformed the colony's natural landscape while introducing new forms of metropolitan authority and expertise. Space in the Tropics addresses the ways in which colonizers used technologies to impose modernity upon marginal spaces. It also examines the transformation of expertise as it shifted from metropolis to periphery.

Redfield analyzes a broad range of evidence, from the layout of Captain Dreyfus's prison cell to the social geography of the "space city" of Kourou, from the works of Daniel Defoe and Jules Verne to a brochure put out by the European Space Agency. He demonstrates the relationship between location, development, and technology by continually reminding us of how the penal colony and the space station were influenced by a combination of Guyanese, French, and global considerations. And he points out many of the ironies of the ultramodern space station's location in French Guiana, where French aerospace engineers work with so-called lazy Guyanese Creoles and live close to stone-age forest-dwellers. As one of Redfield's French informants says, "where else can you buy wooden arrows one day and watch a satellite launch the next?" (p. 183).

This is not a conventional ethnography or history. Redfield calls it a bricolage, a term first used by Claude Levi-Strauss to mean that an author is "pottering about" amid different kinds of sources and methodologies. As a bricoleur, Redfield covers a host of topics, but in doing so he offers more breadth than depth. He tells us that he conducted ethnographic and archival research in France and French Guiana, but new ethnographic and archival evidence does not feature prominently in the book. Such conventional forms of evidence might have been used more extensively to support and complicate the argument. In fairness, however, it needs be said that Redfield never claims to be providing a detailed study of the penal colony or the European space center and its Ariane rockets. Those tasks will fall to other scholars.