Space in the Tropics – From Convicts to Rockets in French Guiana - Hardcover

Redfield, Peter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520219848 ISBN 13: 9780520219847

Publisher: University of California Press, 2001

Synopsis

Rockets roar into space - bearing roughly half the world's commercial satellites - from the same South American coastal rainforest where convicts once did time on infamous Devil's Island. What makes this book enthralling is anthropologists Peter Redfield's ability to draw from these two disparate European projects in French Guyana a gleaming web of ideas about the intersections of nature and culture. In comparing the Franco-European Ariane rocket program with the earlier penal experiment, Redfield connects the myth of Robinson Crusoe, 19th century prison reform, the Dreyfus Affair, tropical medicine, post-war exploration of outer space, satellite technology, development and ecotourism with a focus on place, and the incorporation of this particular place into greater extended systems. Examining the wider context of the Ariane program, he argues that technology and nature must be understood within a greater ecology of displacement and makes a case for the importance of margins in understanding the trajectories of modern life.

About this title

Review:

"This is anthropological survey in the most traditional sense--the only difference being Peter Redfield is not observing a tribe that lives at the end of a remote river, but us: the consumers and investors of this vast dream we call global capitalism. . . . The book is filled with marvelous details of the 'life-world' of Kourou. . . . With his charming prose style, Peter Redfield is the sort of researcher you would like to meet in a bar on the edge of the Western world."--Charles Mudede, "The Stranger (Seattle)

From the Back Cover:

"Global? Local? Historical? Futuristic? Exotic? Quotidian? Peter Redfield shows us that if you go to the right place, don't stay there, look and listen carefully, and spend years crafting the manuscript and your ideas, it is possible to write a book such as "Space in the Tropics" that shows that there already is an anthropology for the new millennium."--Paul Rabinow, author of "French DNA, Trouble in Purgatory"

""Space in the Tropics" speaks -- often quite brilliantly -- to several domains all at once and makes us take a second look at things we think we know all too well. If traditional anthropology attempted to introduce us to other worlds, Redfield introduces us to ourselves."--John R. Gillis, author of "A World of Their Own Making"

About this edition

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0520219848
• ISBN 13: 9780520219847
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 368