Picturing Tropical Nature (review)

Picturing Tropical Nature. By NANCY LEYS STEPAN. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001. Photographs. Illustrations. Maps. Notes. Index. 283 pp. Cloth, $36.50.

The "tropics" have haunted the North Atlantic imperial imagination. The foliage, fruits, birds, animals, and peoples of these regions have satiated the appetites for exotica of physicians, naturalists, painters, curiosity seekers, and the sexually shy. The local inhabitants of the tropics, to be sure, have not been passive consumers of the various representations of their lands promiscuously put in circulation by the various European and the United States visitors. Nancy Leys Stepan has written a fascinating account of the history of this parallel (but not dialogical) set of representations, and her focus is Brazil in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Nineteenth-century naturalists, travelers, and painters socialized North Atlantic audiences into a number of conventions about tropical fauna and flora that would later prove very difficult to dislodge. Illustrations crammed widely dispersed fauna and flora into a single habitat, and travelers emphasized adventure, the exotic, and their mastery over events and circumstance. Accounts of failure, contingency, and the mundane did not find a market. When Alfred Russell Wallace published his Narrative of Travels on the Amazon and the Rio Negro (1853), he made the conventions of the genre explicit, complaining of his having to travel long distances to find animals and plants that he had originally thought lived in the same habitat. The account emphasized Wallace's boredom and failures. Moreover, the book lacked illustrations and tales of mastery and adventure. It was a commercial flop. By 1869, however, Wallace had learned his lesson. His TheMalay Archipelago (1869) and Tropical Nature (1878) shamelessly exploited all the pictorial and narrative conventions Wallace had previously scorned. This time the books sold well.

The European market craved images of freaks and sexually promiscuous racial inferiors in the tropics as well. The naturalist Louis Agazzi and the many practitioners of the new discipline of tropical medicine went out their way to satisfy these cravings. Stepan recounts Agazzi's efforts to identify through photography the deleterious effects of mongrelization in Brazil and the various tropical racial types he encountered during his visit. This story of the science of race and imperialism is already well known (partly thanks to Stepan's own previous writings), but the author's account of the rise of tropical medicine as a discipline that managed to transform age-old European diseases into the exclusive pathologies of the tropical world is new and fascinating. Stepan shows how practitioners of the new discipline solely focused on discovering the cycles of "exotic" microscopic pathogens and on developing voyeuristic photographic archives of monstrous bodily parts of the individuals affected by these diseases.

But, Stepan truly breaks new ground when she turns to how the Brazilian intelligentsia reacted to these North Atlantic representations of the tropics. She suggests, for example, that tropical medicine was not warmly received in Brazil, despite all the efforts of the distinguished local physician Carlos Chagas, because Chagas reproduced in his research the same voyeuristic taste for exotic monstrosities that had characterized North Atlantic practitioners. The Brazilian intelligentsia also questioned Agazzi's racial typologies and saw tropical mongrelization as a boon, a source of national strength rather than degeneration. Finally, landscape architects such Roberto Burle Marx playfully and ironically manipulated European conventions of tropical flora to create gardens of great beauty.

I have only one caveat with this book. Stepan overlooks nineteenth-century landscape painting in Brazil on the false premise that it was marginal and unimportant because the local intelligentsia never developed a taste for Natural Theology and thus a view of nature as sacred. Drawing on a single source, she wrongly concludes that only a handful (some 50) paintings and photographs of rural landscapes were produced in Brazil in the nineteenth century (pp. 216-17). Carlos Roberto Maciel Levy identified years ago some 600 extant landscape paintings by Antônio Parrerias (1860-1937) alone. In fact, a complete catalogue of nineteenth-century landscape...