Colonialism and Landscape: Postcolonial Theory and Applications (review)

Andrew Sluyter's approach to colonialism and the landscape is anchored in his study region, the Gulf coastal plain in central Veracruz, Mexico. He critiques theoretical assumptions, mainly in geography, about the relationships of indigenous societies, European colonizers, and the landscape. This discussion is a prelude to a historically organized treatment of precolonial and colonial times. "Landscape" is preferred to "natural environment" because of the many effects of human occupation, both pre- and postcolonial—effects not simply material but also resulting from social and conceptual changes.

Sluyter argues that environmental determinism, cultural determinism (mainly Eurocentric), and ethnohistory have fallen short of a balanced treatment of a "colonial triangle" that apportions significance to native, nonnative, and landscape factors. Sluyter opposes the historical tendency to underplay the versatility and utility of native landscape practices as well as exaggerating either the transformative (progressive) nature of European actions or the pristine nature of New World landscapes. His succinct discussion will be useful for nongeographers to ground them in that discipline's theory concerning colonial to modern encounters.

The second chapter on the precolonial landscape is weaker than those for colonial times, in which Sluyter displays his forte in archival and documentary studies. There are a scattering of inexact statements (only part of the Gulf lowlands were referred to as Totonacapan by the Aztecs) and unfounded ones (Classic period population growth in central Veracruz was not caused by immigration from the Basin of Mexico). The chapter excels in its discussion of central Veracruz evidence of terracing with low stone alignments and wetland fields, which were important indigenous agricultural techniques to produce foods and fibers. Sluyter summarizes literature to which Alfred Siemens and he have contributed importantly, stressing the productivity of native techniques on tropical lands often dismissed as poor for farming.

The heart of Sluyter's analyses comprises two chapters on the early colonial era that focus on the inception and expansion of Spanish livestock grazing, and especially cattle ranching. He links the inception of ranching to cattle arriving in 1521 and to a preadaptation in the experience of one Spaniard with seasonal grazing in Spain using wetlands. Through archival research Sluyter traces the demographic, legal, and practical means by which Spaniards seized lands, and he constructs maps of land grants and the histories of many properties. Dry season movement to wetlands and wet season movement upslope were key for the growth of private ranching in central Veracruz, despite native opposition because of crop damage. Sluyter stresses flexibility in scales of temporal and spatial analyses, putting it to practice in decadal analyses of early colonial land holdings to construct a regional perspective for central Veracruz. Sluyter devotes most of his attention to establishing diachronic patterns through the early 1600s, but he includes comparisons through 1910 to argue that, despite dense herds, environmental degradation is not clearly evident.

In the fifth chapter, he examines early colonial environmental and demographic impacts, with an increase in thorny brush intrusion into grasslands viewed as possibly caused by grazing but more likely involving plant succession in abandoned native fields. The coastal grasslands themselves may have partly owed their existence to earlier native land use. A native population decline of 90 percent was accompanied by increasing occupation by Spaniards and African slaves. However, Sluyter stresses that decadal local analyses show a more complex process than indicated by simple arguments that disease, environmental degradation, and oppression substituted colonial practices and populations for native ones. Overall, the central Veracruz dynamic differed from the Mexican highlands because a significant native population decline preceded the decades of major growth in ranching. Royal efforts to protect Indians foundered in part because of a failure, in Sluyter's argument, by the Spanish to understand native ecologies and agrotechnologies. The Roman legal tradition accorded rights to grazing unused lands and field stubble, actions that conflicted with native field rotations and multicropping. It was, of...