The Nature of Place: Recent Research on Environment and Society in Latin America

The Nature Of Place

Recent Research on Environment and Society in Latin America*

With a shift in social science scholarship from clearly defined or fixed categories to syncretic and hybrid classifications, many researchers studying human-environment interactions have moved beyond traditional investigations of natural resources, export crops, or conservation. The latest studies depict diverse environments, present comparative research, analyze many aspects of human-environment relationships, and probe how people have historically constructed nature, landscapes, and places in their minds.¹ In short, scholars now understand that environments emerge historically from a mix of both nature's agency and cultural constructions.² Researchers of Latin America and elsewhere have, in turn, increasingly focused on cultural analyses to examine science, discourse, and narratives as diverse representations of environments.³

The six books reviewed here follow these trends and represent the diversity of recent scholarship on human-environment interactions in Latin America. Written by scholars of geography, history, literary studies, and urban studies, the books explore how people have related to and interacted with three types of environments: the physical, the imagined, and the built environment. Physical environments include distinct geographical places, agricultural crops, pathogens, and natural resources. Imagined environments involve mental constructions of environments, which emerge through discourse, maps, science, and stories. And the built environment consists of urban spaces such as plazas, buildings, and boulevards. Though these authors generally emphasize one of these environments over the others, they all recognize interplay among them. Most of the books explicitly examine culture by exploring social constructions of city plazas, trees, landscapes, borderlands, and bananas. Additionally, many of the books trace transnational connections or provide comparative histories, linking regions like Guatemala and Louisiana, Honduras and the United States, Bolivia and Mexico, and Latin America and Europe. Authors generally build on ideas from human geography, environmental history, and cultural anthropology.⁴ They offer theoretical, methodological, and thematic innovations for the study of place, environment, and society in Latin America.

Physical Environments

Representing some of the best new environmental history of Latin America, John Soluri's Banana Cultures is a well-written, clearly argued, and engaging history of Honduran bananas. Tracing banana production from the late nineteenth century through the twentieth century, Soluri asks—and answers—a key question about this valuable fruit: What has it meant historically to eat bananas? His question provides a rich point of departure to go beyond previous banana scholarship that tends to focus on political economy, labor, and other socio-economic issues. Soluri scrutinizes all levels of the banana business—from the soil in which bananas grow to plantations, packaging plants, shipping containers, marketing patterns, consumption trends, political decisions, and laboratories where corporate scientists developed plant pesticides. Although banana production and consumption occur worldwide, Soluri focuses...