Environmental Orientalisms
Author(s): Suzana Sawyer and Arun Agrawal
Source: Cultural Critique , Spring, 2000, No. 45 (Spring, 2000), pp. 71-108
Published by: University of Minnesota Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1354368
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ENVIRONMENTAL ORIENTALISMS
a I m !!_|wDi U U i
Must it be The Rest against The West?... As population and misery increase,
will the wretched of the earth overwhelm the Western paradise?
-Cover of Atlantic Monthly, December 1994
Sexuality, race, and conservation are words rarely heard in a
single breath. Yet sexuality and race-two constructs steeped in
power relations-form pervasive undercurrents through what is commonly
conceived of as a nonpolitical, neutral realm-environmental
conservation. In this paper, we develop a postcolonial and feminist
critique of a particular trend in conservation discourses that views
Third World overpopulation as the primary threat to the environment.
We maintain that arguments that define population as the
nemesis of global ecological stability and biodiversity possess racist
and imperialist overtones and are buttressed by a peculiarly Western,
gendered perception of Nature. Specifically, we point out that cultural
idioms indicting Third World peoples as ravaging tropical
Nature resonate suggestively with colonial attempts to sexualize,
racialize, and control colonized geographies and bodies. These contemporary
cultural idioms, we propose, are instances of environmental
orientalisms.
Overpopulation is repeatedly underscored by many prominent
conservationists as the primary cause of environmental destruction.
Paul Ehrlich (Ehrlich 1968; Ehrlich and Ehrlich 1990; Ehrlich, Ehrlich,
and Dailey 1997) and E. 0. Wilson (1984; 1988a; 1992), to name two of
the most eminent, openly condemn Third World populations as the
principal threat endangering Nature.' A number of scholars have disputed
the "overpopulation thesis" (Collins; Harvey; Mitchell; Watts
Cultural Critique 45-Spring 2000-Copyright 2000 Regents of the University of Minnesota
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72 I SUZANA SAWYER AND ARUN AGRAWAL
1983a, 1983b). They have highlighted its neo-Malthusian origins and
neglect of political economy. Environmental problems, these opponents
suggest, are essentially social; their origins cannot be deduced
from human numbers. Political economic criticisms have underlined
neo-Malthusian fallacies and demonstrated that a focus on population
diverts attention from issues of distribution and production rel
tions. Given the persuasiveness of their arguments, why, we inquir
in this paper, is the concern with reproduction and overpopulation i
the tropics so prevalent and tenacious? What is the cultural logic th
renders the overpopulation thesis self-evident, even natural, to th
Western eye?2
We do not provide definitive answers. We point, instead, to
provocative parallels and intriguing transpositions. Our aim is to be
suggestive of those processes in a cultural imaginary that conflate
environmental concerns with demographic obsessions. Attention to
colonial roots, we suggest, challenges the neo-Malthusian fervor popular
in much contemporary Western conservationist discourse. Without
claiming determinacy, our analysis seeks to unveil some of the
trappings of a deeply gendered and raced understanding of environmental
realities.3
Our text traces the punctuated genealogy of a cultural logic and
peculiarly Western sensibility that links the overpopulation thesis
with Europe's colonial legacy to claim and manage non-Western
Nature and peoples over the past five hundred years.4 Two salient
themes form the core of our discussion: the West's feminization of
Nature (or unexplored territory) and its concomitant obsession with
the sexuality and reproduction of nonwhites. We note that by "West"
we refer to a conceptual rather than a geographical space.
We begin by showing how an early colonial imagination marked
native topographies and peoples as feminine spaces to be violated
and thereby instantiated a sexual/racial hierarchy between colonizer
and colonized. As colonial powers extended their reach inward,
natural history's classificatory project to delineate identities and differences
furthered Europe's economic aspirations. Natural science
debates over the definition of species-embedded as they were in
idioms of sexuality and gender-intertwined with European notions
of race and interracial intercourse. During periods of colonial entrenchment,
which we demarcate with the advent of a significant
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ENVIRONMENTAL ORIENTALISMS | 73
white female presence in the colonies, the sexual/racial hierarchy
acquired a renewed salience; racial distinction and sexual surveillance
became ever more crucial elements in the maintenance of European
domination. White colonial males vigilantly protected the sexual
purity of white women against a threatening "Black Peril." We
suggest that this colonial legacy insidiously informs the logic behind
that form of environmental conservation that simultaneously seeks to
protect Nature and vilify Third World poor today. Nature is still feminine,
but differently raced. Rather than being savage or untamed,
she is vulnerable and fragile. She requires protection, not conquest
and subjugation.
The use of gender to narrate European advances across new terrain-whether
geographic, philosophic, or scientific-is not unique.
Gender is a trope that, wittingly or not, permeates much of Western
reality.5 Our concern with gender is not to be read, however, as the
deployment of a simplistic Man = Colonizer/Woman = Colonized
metaphorical stamp with which to chart the course of Western conquests.6
The slickness of such dichotomizations elides race and gender
as conjunctural, historically constituted elements and denies the
crosscutting effect of the interactions between raced genders and
gendered races. Our concern with gender is intimately linked with
our concern for race; gender ideologies, we believe, are marbled by
racial, sexual, and class orderings. In an analogous fashion, the neoMalthusian
concern to protect Nature from exploding nonwhite populations7
reflects a latent, yet impassioned, gender/race/sexual complex
that mirrors earlier imperial projects.
MAPPING THE TROPICS FEMININE
Oh zone so hot and glowing,
Queen of the earth art thou;
Sand is thy mantle flowing,
The sun doth crown thy brow.
Of gold, thou queenly woman,
Are all thy clasps and rims,
That fasten with fiery splendour
The garment to thy burning limbs.
-H. F. Freiligrath
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74 | SUZANA SAWYER AND ARUN AGRAWAL
The discourse of conservation we address comes out of a stringently
positivist tradition. Nature within this tradition refers to the physical
world of living organisms and exists separate from and prior to
humans. For the likes of Ehrlich, Myers, Soule, and Wilson (to name
the most famous), nature is comprised of multiple, discrete, objective
entities that exist sui generis, divorced from any sociohistorical lens.8
Population biology, the collection of historical practices that disciplined
the thinking of these experts, strives to isolate, measure, classify,
catalog, and dissect unique organic units and their interrelations
in the living world. Given the precise tools of observation and calibration,
biological techniques can render obvious the mysteries of
biodiversity as the "truths" of organic life.
In contrast, we challenge these certainties. As Donna Haraway
provocatively suggests, "Organisms ... are not pre-existing plants,
animals, potistes, etc., with boundaries already established and awaiting
the right kind of instrument to note them correctly. Organisms
emerge from a discursive process" (1992, 298). Both humans and
their nonhuman instruments construct science's "natural" objects. To
claim something is constructed, however, makes it no less real; it
points rather to its arbitrariness, questions its inevitability, and provokes
historical inquiry.
Following Haraway's (1992) lead, playing off Simone de Beauvoir,
Nature-for us-is not born but made.9 It is a cultural construct
that takes on shape and meaning only within a particular social web
of signification. Nature (as all other social reality) acquires definition
and import within a matrix of competing and often contradictory
social interests. At stake in the struggle to make claims over Nature
are what it means, how it should be used, and who has the power to
decide. Rather than embodying an absolute essence, therefore, Nature
is the effect of particular discursive processes of power/knowledge
that have historically fashioned the domains where distinction, meaning,
and truth are made (Foucault 1970, 1980a, 1980b). Throughout
the history of natural (and social) sciences, classification-the delineation
of identities and differences-has been an essential element in
the establishment of colonial authority and power to assert truths
and rights. It is the seductive power of classification-the authorial
force derived from the violence of "drawing lines" (Derrida 97-118)This
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ENVIRONMENTAL ORIENTALISMS | 75
as applied to both bodies and landscapes that we wish to explore
critically.
Imagine the tropics, that realm labeled for centuries by Western
scientists and novelists alike as the "torrid zone." Torrid, in its strict
sense, refers to that which is intensely hot, scorching. In its more
emotive meaning, it evokes a realm of passion, fervid and sultry in its
expression (OED). As Francis Putz, a prominent botanist, notes:
Reference to "tropical regions" has exotic & wonderful connotations,
but the "torrid zone" (from the Latin torre, to roast, also, to be highly
passionate, ardent, zealous) captures a more vivid image. (Putz and
Holbrook 38)
Alexander von Humboldt designated "the torrid zone" that region
where "an inexhaustible treasure remains still unopened" (in Putz
and Holbrook 51).10 For Henry Morton Stanley, en route to the
Ashantee war of 1873, the "torrid extent" (1874, 5) of the western
Sahara invoked H. F. Freiligrath to write the sensuous poem above.
Yet, Conrad portrayed the torrid "wilderness" in Heart of Darkness as
the fatal temptress seducing man through the "treacherous appeal"
(48) of her "pitiless breast" (82). With its implicit sexual valence, the
double entendre of "torrid" collapses meanings and marks the West's
imputed essence for tropical Nature as unquestionably feminine.
Contact with this female essence generates, however, the promise of
passion and peril.
Throughout Western history, conquerors, writers, philosophers,
and scientists have produced contradictory images and forms of
knowing that create the tropics. The humid tropics, "[more] than any
other geographical" zone, "evokes a landscape & rhetoric of superlatives
& excesses" (Putz and Holbrook 37). The feminization of the
tropics, perhaps alone, stands out as the common theme among depictions.
As the zone of eternal spring and fecundity, European cosmology
linked the tropics to a feminine essence; birth (and by implication
its opposite-death) forms the conceptual frame for thinking of the
tropics. The biblical description of the promised Eden assures that
"in the midst of the paradise of God ... was there the tree of life,
which bears twelve manner of fruits, and yields her fruit every month
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76 | SUZANA SAWYER AND ARUN AGRAWAL
(Rev. 2:7, 22:2). Legendary for mythic treasures, the tropics were the
feminized theater of European discovery, conquest, and penetration.
Crowned with a jewel-like harmony of gentle natives, flora, and fauna,
the tropics represented the antithesis of despotic European (male?)
civilization. Riotous and mysterious, the tropics seduced naturalists
with their chaotic labyrinth and luxuriant wonders. Yet, debauched
through decay and teeming with growth, the torrid zone also embodied
(through licentious, breeding bodies) an ominous specter. The
magnificent black femininity of Conrad's Africa incited erotic allure
and repulsive horror in an impossible mix. The African landscape,
thus, could be imagined simultaneously as fertile and productive but
also poisonous and fear provoking, as sensuous and mysterious but
also treacherous and dangerous (McCarthy 25, 38).
Female fecundity, as symbolized in Europe's Other, provoked anxieties
as well as enticements.11 This ambivalence, we suggest, resulted
from the anarchic ambiguities that could proliferate from the union
of Europe and unknown geographies. While the tropics are gendered
female, they are also raced nonwhite. Encounters between white and
nonwhite aroused marvel but also produced taxonomic confusion.
Categorical purity instantiated gender/racial hierarchies; categorical
ambivalence imperiled colonial power. As we argue below, sexuality
served as a crucible for casting and consolidating colonial power.
Control over sexuality begot disciplined stock; uncontrolled sexuality
bred deviant hybrids. In a different guise, the obsession with
overpopulation and the protection of Nature echoes these colonial
dictates.
EARLY WESTERN IMAGININGS OF EUROPE'S OTHER
License my roaving hands, and let them goe
Behynd, before, betweene, above, belowe.
Oh my America! my Newfoundland!
My kingdom, safest when with one man man'd.
My myne of precious stones! my emperie!
How blest am I, in thus discoveringe thee!
To enter in those bonds is to be free;
That where my hand is sett my seale shalbee.
-John Donne, "Elegies, To His Mistress Going to Bed"
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ENVIRONMENTAL ORIENTALISMS 1 77
In the late sixteenth century, Jan van der Straet's drawing of Vespucci's
discovery of America circulated widely throughout Europe
(de Certeau; Hulme; Montrose; Rabasa). Reproduced through Theoder
Galle's engraving in 1580, the scene represented Europe's nascent discourse
of discovery that gendered "the New World as feminine, and
... sexualiz[ed] ... its exploration, conquest, and settlement" (Montrose
178). Understood allegorically, we use this image as a window
through which to view a particular colonial process (see figure 1). Our
concern is not whether van der Straet's drawing represents the "truth"
of a historical event. Rather, our aim is to angle the frame so as to
refract light upon a particular colonial process: "creative intervention
in making truth" by colonial powers (Cosgrove 345). Read as a text,
this vignette serves as a heuristic device to point to larger patterns.
Vespucci, the symbol of male Europe, fixes his gaze upon a personified,
feminized, unexplored, and unknown (in the biblical sense)
terrain. The engraving's text reads, "Americus rediscovers America;
he called her once and henceforth she was always awake." As Todorov
reminds us, "nomination is equivalent to taking possession" (27).
The sexual subtext lies scarcely veiled: Vespucci, erect, armored, and
clothed, hails a very much dis-covered, half-reclined America. "Awakened"
(or perhaps more correctly irreversibly ripped) from her past,
America-both the terrain and its inhabitants-waits in passive
counterpoint to the masculine agency of European penetration. The
subtext speaks through an implicit, hierarchical dichotomy between
Culture and Nature, historical subjects and passive objects, male and
female. Vespucci stands armed, empowered by the "ideological and
technological instruments of civilization" (Montrose 180). Protected
by a cross, a navigator's astrolabe, and a sword-the colonizer's tools
of religion, empirical science, and violence-Vespucci embodies the
agent of history and purpose. Nakedly dis-empowered, America
appears startled, as if caught off guard, defenseless, and incapable of
intervening in her future. Vespucci's object of knowledge and target
of exploitation, America submits to his advance, apparently without
struggle. America is hailed, claimed, and inserted into a European
teleological order and Judeo-Christian cosmology. "Her" own history
evaporates-inconsequential for European desires.
Sexual fantasies appear in virtually all early accounts of European
advance into foreign lands. During his third voyage to the New
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ENVIRONMENTAL ORIENTALISMS | 79
World, Columbus reportedly had a vision upon his discovery of a
new continent; the globe took the shape of a woman's breast with her
nipple being the site of Paradise (Columbus 30-38). Through imaginative
transposition, the gushing forth of the sweet waters of the Orinoco
River (the proof of terra firma) transformed into a female "teat"
and through the metaphor of sensual pleasure mystified the impending
debauchery of "sucking the wealth of a whole world" dry (Jara
and Spadaccini 16). Other explorers hinted at their erotic fantasies
through more than purely metaphorical tropes. For example, Jean Parmentier,
a French trader, marveled in 1525 at young native females'
sexual expression, proclaiming that when bedded, they were like
"colts who had never experienced a rein" (quoted in Hemming 17).12
The obsession with native female nudity and sexuality was not
a mere innocent male fantasy. The female body, both literally and
metaphorically, was a primary terrain on which European colonialism
asserted its power. Within a nascent colonialist discourse striving
to legitimize and appropriate its fantastic "discoveries," the Western
gender hierarchy served as a template through which to assert domination.
Land gendered feminine and sexed as an inviolate female
body was ripe for exploration and conquest.13 Having returned from
his voyage to the Indies with promises, Sir Walter Ralegh tantalized
his compatriots' manly imagination by intimating that Guiana awaits
"to answer euerie mans longing" (1-2, 6).
Guiana is a Country that hath yet her Maydenhead, neuer sackt, turned,
nor wrought, the face of the earth hath not beene torne, nor the vertue
and salt of the soyle spent ..., the graues haue not beene opened for
gold.... It hath neuer beene entred by any armie of strength, and neuer
conquered or possessed by any Christian Prince. (Ralegh 73)
Vital to European exploits was the symbolic slippage between
land and a woman's body, between colonization and sexual mastery.
America, as with all foreign terrain, was the object of a desire to
know, conquer, and possess a feminized space. With her virginity
"yet" intact, America's deflowering was naturalized (if not made virtually
obligatory) through the European ideology of masculine mastery
of the female. Delaney suggests that the agency imputed in male
seed and the passivity in female soil "has been the predominant folk
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80 I SUZANA SAWYER AND ARUN AGRAWAL
theory of procreation in the West for millennia" (8). Unknown lands
represented, in the words of Baron de Santa-Anna Nery, "the virgin
soil which awaits the seeds of civilization" (quoted in Hecht and
Cockburn 3)-the virgin land which lay idle in anticipation of European
religion, reason, and technology.14
Yet, as many feminist scholars have observed (Nelson; Smith;
Stolcke; Stoler 1991, 1995), what makes sexual liaisons matter is the
race of the genders engaged. Relations between white men and nonwhite
women produce strikingly distinct effects from those between
nonwhite men and white women. Thus, the feminine is not passively
homogeneous: racialized identity imputes substantive difference.
Differently "[r]aced women," as Nelson provocatively illustrates,
"produce different offspring even when inseminated by the same
man" (222). During processes of colonial expansion, European men
displayed superiority by sexually conquering nonwhite women. Yet,
ambivalence and suspicion marked these unions. The ambiguity (pro)created
through the melding of difference also provoked uncertainty
in territorial claims. European intrigue with its feminized/racialized
object was half-conceived through fascination and fear.
Upon closer inspection, Jan van der Straet's engraving of America
portrays Europe's fantastic anxiety with its Other. Upstage center,
along the horizon, three naked females gather around a cannibalistic
feast. Montrose (180) suggests the scene evokes an event Vespucci
related in a later letter, in which he describes witnessing native women
sexually seduce, kill, and subsequently roast and eat a male Spaniard.
Faint, along the backdrop, the chorus of the native females' legendary
sexual cunning and duplicity threatened to render Europe impotent.
America, while alluring, was dangerous. Lasciviousness, treachery,
and cannibalism intermingled in early colonial constructions of the
New World and solidified in what Montrose calls a "crude and anxious
misogynistic fantasy" (181). Through the potent synthesis of the
savage and the feminine, the West ironically condoned its own predatory
project toward newly appropriated territories and authorized
violence upon appropriated lands and peoples.
European expansion entailed the inscription of European will and
order onto foreign bodies and subjectivities. A racial and gendered
hierarchical order was etched through the medium of rape. The rape
of colonized land and the rape of colonized people went hand in
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ENVIRONMENTAL ORIENTALISMS | 81
hand in the "manly rivalry" among incipient European states over
the dominion and proprietorship of feminized, racialized, virgin terrain.
Michele de Cuneo's tale, during Columbus's second voyage to
America, is perhaps emblematic of this process:
While I was in the boat, I captured a very beautiful Carib woman, ... she
being naked as is their custom, I conceived the desire to take my pleasure....
[B]ut she was unwilling ... [whereupon] I took a rope-end and
thrashed her well, following which she produced such screaming and
wailing as would cause you not to believe your ears. Finally we reached
an agreement such that, I can tell you, she seemed to have been raised
in a veritable school of harlots (quoted in Todorov 49).
Thrashed, sexually exploited, and arrogantly conquered, an Indian
woman is turned into a whore.15 Stripped of identity, she symbolically
represents an entire continent whose resistance to European
penetration is glossed as manageable through force and whose true
nature justifies European actions. As Montrose notes, "Whether ...
physical or metaphorical, whether its object is woman, man, or a
'country,"' Europe's "object is always positioned as feminine" (208).
We would add that Europe's object is not merely positioned as feminine,
but also raced as nonwhite.
NATURAL HISTORY'S CLASSIFICATORY PROJECT
A nascent natural history played a critical and enabling role in consolidating
patterns of domination as the agents of empire extended
their reach inland. This fresh "orientation toward interior exploration
and the construction of global-scale meaning through descriptive
apparatuses of natural history" (1992b, 15) inaugurated, Pratt suggests,
a new planetary consciousness. The aperture that enabled "the
(lettered, male, European) eye" (Pratt 1992b, 31) to assimilate and
naturalize exotic Nature into a European order coincided with the
expanded needs of European capitalism. In a turn that rendered
America, Africa, and Asia landscapes upon which to score (both in
the sense to disfigure and to tally) the position of strategic raw material,
this novel vision and sense of purpose buttressed the empire's
rising economic aspirations to possess and control.16
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82 I SUZANA SAWYER AND ARUN AGRAWAL
To assert claim to this sexualized space, both science and commerce
seductively deployed a geography that gendered its splayed
objects as feminine and its spectators as masculine within an economy
of mastery and ownership. Two key practices enabled possession and
control: ordering and display-the practice of inventory and of offering
to the gaze. Inventory conveys the active sense of labor within
relations of production (to invent), and anticipates the commodification
and surplus value of the products of labor. Not only did the systematist
crystallize a peculiarly Western and gendered way of naming,
collecting, itemizing, and possessing Nature, but he likewise inventoried
commercially exploitable knowledge. The detailed description of
Nature's particulars often became blurred with the sighting/citing of
economic prospect. As Pratt reminds us, "the many forms of collection
that were practiced" during the eighteenth century "developed in part
as the image of [European capitalist] accumulation, and as its legitimation"
(1992b, 36). Cataloging the globe's flora and fauna advanced
hand in hand with cataloging potential commodities and profits.
Within studies of the living world, Carl Linnes (Linnaeus in Latin),
the father of modern biological classification, is most credited with
reorienting the optics of Europe's perception of Nature.17 Previously
viewed as an unruly labyrinth, Linnaeus ordered Nature through a
singular, unified, classificatory system: "the Ariadne thread in botany
is classification, without which there is chaos" (Linnaeus in Foucault
1970,136; quoted in Pratt 1992b, 25). Linnaeus's System of Nature (1735)
was a descriptive taxonomic order that could systematically accommodate
and classify every plant on the face of the earth, known or
unknown, according to their reproductive parts (Foucault 1970, 134,
140-41). The Sexual System, as Linnaeus named his most general system
of flora taxonomy, divided all plants according to the number,
form, distribution, and relative magnitude of male sexual organs
(stamen) and female sexual organs (carpel): the origins of scientific
binomial nomenclature.18 According to Haraway, Linnaeus "referred
to himself as a second Adam, the 'eye' of God" whose calling was to
give Nature "true representations, true names, thus transforming or
restoring a purity of names lost by the first Adam's sin" (1989, 9).
Naming was central to Linnaeus's project; for the true name, he
believed, patterned the reality of objects'9-"the possibility of seeing
what one will be able to say" (Foucault 1970, 130). With wide scientific
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ENVIRONMENTAL ORIENTALISMS | 83
and popular appeal, Linnaeus's classificatory system "launched a
European knowledge-building enterprise of unprecedented scale"
(Pratt 1992b, 25). Scholarly and amateur disciples alike roamed the
globe in search of exotic specimens to add to Latin registers and display
in European herbariums.
Yet, as Derrida reminds us, there is a violence in drawing lines
and delineating identities by constructing grids of difference. The
"technicians of the Lines" (116), the arbiters of classification, assumed
the task of establishing Nature's order-identifying the globe's unique
botanical specimens, extracting them from their particular, endemic
surroundings, and locating them in their proper, systematic position
through a "new written, secular European name" (Pratt 1992b, 31).
Appellation, extraction, and possession triangulated the process by
which "[o]ne by one the planet's life forms were to be drawn out
of the tangled threads of their life surroundings and rewoven into
European-based patterns of global unity and order" (Pratt 1992b, 31).
Wittingly or not, systematists were complicit in the colonial erasures
of local contexts and histories and played a productive role in tabulating
and accounting the future worth of colonized spaces.
Throughout the eighteenth century natural history was primarily
concerned with the timeless arrangements of Nature through a rational,
unified, classificatory order. Fundamental to this process was the
definition of species. Notions of species differentiation hinged on the
reproductive capacity of offspring. If the product between two entities
was fertile, they were of a single species; if the product was infertilei.e.,
a hybrid-they constituted two distinct species. Hybrids-that
which could not breed itself-were unnatural.20 The OED's earliest
cited use of "hybrid" (1601) noted that it was the "wilde Boare and
tame Sow" that sired infertile "Hybrides." More commonplace. analogs
are the mule and hinny: a mule is the result of a cross between a
mare and he-ass; a hinny [sic] is the result of a cross between a stallion
and a she-ass. Yet, as the construction of these categories indicate,
the gender of each of the crossbred species (or races) produces
unique progeny. Mimicking natural history, theories of species delineation
had implications for the mixing of races. During colonial
entrenchment, the progeny incapable of furthering descent-indeed,
of undermining imperial power-was that sired by a wilde Boare
(read nonwhite man) and a tame Sow (read white woman). The
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84 I SUZANA SAWYER AND ARUN AGRAWAL
ultimate categorical transgression was one that tainted the purity of a
racial hierarchy delineated along social evolutionary lines.
COLONIAL ENTRENCHMENT: PROTECTING WHITE WOMEN
Apprehensions about the consequences that could follow more sus
tained contact with Europe's Other unleashed concerns among colon
izers that proved momentous in structuring racial and sexual relatio
during later phases of colonization. Their fears were emblematized
the idea of "degeneration." While degeneration could take place
through multiple forms of contact, the most intractable route was
through sexual contact across race lines.21 "Sexual pollution" precipitated
the threat of "social chaos and the fall of the empire" (Smith,
quoted in Hyam 1986b, 48).22
The notion of degeneration was intimately linked to nineteenthcentury
scientific debates on the classification of humans and the consequences
of interracial unions.23 The question of whether humans
represented one or several species "stood or fell over the question of
hybridity" (Young 9). If different races constituted different species,
their union could not produce fertile hybrid offspring.24 But the direct
evidence showing that colonized "halfbreeds" could actually procreate
refuted pseudoscientific claims about the infertility of hybrids.
The notion of degeneration, as it came to displace beliefs about infertile
hybrids proved critical in hierarchical discourses on race mixing.
Between the 1850s and the 1930s, the regnant orthodoxy ruled
that unions between allied races issued fertile offspring, while those
between distant races produced either infertile offspring or tended
toward degeneration. Degenerate mixed races were incapable of
producing stable social organization, creating a high civilization, or
withstanding assaults by more pure racial groups (Spencer, in Young
18-19). Such views had a double virtue: they naturalized the wellknown
fact that even within Europe there had been significant
mixing of races (European races were allied to one another), and they
dictated the erection of taboos against interracial sex and reproduction
in the colonies (colonized races were distant and lower on the
social evolutionary ladder).
The concept of degeneration assisted racist ideologies in two
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ENVIRONMENTAL ORIENTALISMS | 85
ways: by simplistically exaggerating and fixing existing preconceptions
about physical characteristics and behavior, and by shifting
blame and offering reasonable grounds for exploiting and othering
the degenerate.25 The ideology of degeneration served to distance the
Other and to construct bonds of solidarity among the colonizers.26 Scientific
medicine, natural history, sociology, and anthropology legitimized
the search for difference and used constructed difference to
justify socioeconomic distance and exploitation (Gould, 1980, 1981;
Mosse; Gilman, 1985, 1986).27 It mattered little whether those who
were excluded and exploited possessed any of the stigmatized characteristics
posited as their defining features.28
As imperial dominions became more entrenched, large numbers
of white women arrived in the colonies. To breed a pure imperial race
capable of ruling the tropics, white men in the colonies needed to
reproduce with white women. But the presence of white women in
the tropics simultaneously triggered the Black Peril-the danger that
nonwhite males posed to the sexual virtue of white females. European
administrators, travelers, and settlers recurrently described nonwhite
males as lascivious and lustful, prey to primitive and uncontrolled
sexual urges. Sexual intimacies between white women and nonwhite
men, because they could produce nonwhite hybrids, threatened the
security of white control over the tropics. They simultaneously undermined
the twin bases upon which colonial ideologies of hierarchy
were constructed: race and gender.29 By the turn of the century, "sexual
purity emerged as a controlling metaphor for racial, economic,
and political power" (McClintock 1995, 47). Categorical purity instantiated
gender/racial hierarchies; categorical ambivalence imperiled
colonial power.
The words of Malouet from French West Africa epitomize colonial
administrators' fears:
[I]f the black man is assimilated to whites, it is more than probable that
we shall shortly see noble mulattoes, financiers, and traders whose
wealth would procure them wives and mothers from all estates.... [I]t
is thus that individuals, families, nations become altered, degraded and
dissolve. (quoted in Cohen 1980, 112)
Racial "assimilation," erasing categorical distinctions, undermined
political, economic, and racial control. It was essential to cordon off
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86 I SUZANA SAWYER AND ARUN AGRAWAL
white women in order to curtail the chaos ensuing from the overturning
of a presumed natural order.
The racial imagery of sexual control that surfaced across Europe's
empire in later phases of colonization displayed remarkable correspondences.
In the Indies, Africa, South Asia, and the Americas, colonial
governments enacted paranoiac legislation to protect the purity of the
white woman from the uncontrolled sexuality of the colonized male,
the Black Peril. Legislative measures, though not "an all-encompassing
totality" (Spurr 2) regulating the sexual segregation of the races, constituted
the most important rules governing sex across race lines.
Countless illustrations demonstrate the mixture of misperception,
fear, and surveillance that characterized attempts to sequester
the white female from the lustful gaze of the nonwhite male. Lamenting
"the craze of white women for running after black [sic] men," the
English Secretary of State described the visit of some Indian princes
and their soldiers to England in 1902:
The smartest peeresses were only too ready to make a fuss with Bikaner
and other Indian chiefs.... At Hampton Court the great difficulty of the
officers was in keeping the white women away from our Native soldiers.
(Quoted in Ballhatchet 120)
Concern with the sexual purity of the imperial race was imperiled by
the allure of nonwhite men. Their sexuality was feared to arouse
amorous appetites in white women. Since white women, vulnerable
to incitements, were themselves incapable of judging with whom
they should interact, white patriarchs had to assume the role of protecting
and managing the virtue and sexuality of their women.30
In colonial Zimbabwe in 1911, Sam Lewis shot an African who
purportedly made immoral suggestions to his two daughters. During
his trial, Lewis passionately defended his honorable murder, rhetorically
asking the jury:
Is it not absolutely abhorrent and does it not make your blood boil ...
but when beyond that ... the degradation comes from a native, one of
the race, which rightly or wrongly, for generations past, white people
have considered absolutely below them in the human ladder.... I submit
absolutely that human Nature has its limits. (Quoted by Pape 706)
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ENVIRONMENTAL ORIENTALISMS | 87
As the white male patriarch, Lewis defended his natural right
to prevent nonwhite males from access to white females, especially
his own daughters, the progenitrices of his line. To prevent sexual
interactions between nonwhite males and white females, colonial
governments increasingly policed and sanctioned infractions across
racial divisions. They passed stringent rules to police local males
and enforced strict punishments on any native males suspected of
crossing the conspicuously drawn race boundaries.31 As Inglis suggests,
the White Women's Protection Ordinance of 1926 in Papua
[w]as the most significant expression of one aspect of the relations
between black and white in the colony [Papua], the fear of sexual attack
by black men on white women and girls: the "Black Peril." The extent of
this fear is perhaps hard to believe today, but any reading of the papers
of the day will uncover it. (Inglis v)
Threatened transgressions of sexual norms served conveniently
as occasions to deploy metaphors manufactured to preserve hierarchical
orders based on race and sexuality.32 By collapsing the purity
of the white female and the prestige of colonial authority into one,
the threat of the Black Peril rationalized the policing of the allegedly
promiscuous nonwhite male. Yet, the hysteria surrounding Black Peril
had little correlation to actual incidences of rape or sexual molestation
of white women (Cohen 1980; Gartrell; Hyam 1990; Schmidt).
A reactionary press and a hysterical white-settler community impulsively
transformed purported infractions of social distance into stark
charges of rape. Actual incidents of sexual violation by nonwhite
males were rare to the point of nonexistence. Accusations of sexual
assault often served to obliterate differences and unite the numerically
inferior European communities into presenting a common front
against the danger to racial superiority.33 Jordan's observation about
nineteenth-century America is applicable to colonial circumstances:
tensions about the sexual threat nonwhite males posed to white
women bubbled to the surface at times when white control appeared
in jeopardy (153). Indeed, there was little need to increase the numbers
of other races if "the lovely white and red"34 could be promoted
instead.
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88 I SUZANA SAWYER AND ARUN AGRAWAL
EUROPE'S COLONIAL LEGACY: PROTECTING NATURE
FROM THE BLACK PERIL OF OVERPOPULATION
Contemporary claims by many Western environmentalists epitom
a cultural trope we have termed environmental orientalism. Disc
certing parallels emerge between a neo-Malthusian environmental
discourse that seeks to protect a feminized, fragile Nature against
overpopulation and a colonial legacy to protect fragile, white women
against ominous nonwhite men. While still representing the sensuous
labyrinth dis-covered by Europe's explorers, Nature no longer
exudes danger. It is, rather, itself endangered. Still embodying the
feminine, Nature is raced differently. Today she represents the threatened
and vulnerable white woman who needs protection. Third
World populations incarnate her Black Peril.
Upon seeing the tropical forests of coastal Brazil, Charles Darwin
reveled at the "sublimity" of the "great, wild, luxuriant hothouse"
of the "primeval forests undefaced by the hand of man" (quoted in
Carneiro 73). Over a century later, E. 0. Wilson named the tropical
forest "our Eden, progenitrix, and sibyl" (1984,12). The site of creation
and procreation, the spring from which prophecy and promise well,
the "torrid zone" continues to seduce. Like their forebears, the fathers
of conservation biology affirm their classificatory mission through
feminizing and sexualizing tropes. However, more than merely "a
living treasure awaiting assay" (Wilson 1984, 145), Nature in today's
environmental lexicon is the treasure to protect. It is still "exceptionally
rich" and "expectionally unexplored," but also "exceptionally
threatened" (Myers 1988a, 207). "[G]rowing throngs of impoverished
peasants spreading into every last corner of wildlife habitats" (Myers
1988a, 209) pose the peril.
Conservation science deploys the colonizer's tools of naming,
appropriating, and ordering, and seeks "to generalize, predict, and
ultimately control ... the Amazon of input from nature" (Soule 1988,
466; emphasis added). As McClintock reminds us, "The poetics of
male authorship" implicit in the project of naming is not simply "a
poetics of creativity" but simultaneously a politics "of possession and
control over ... posterity" (1990, 103).35 Wilson tells us, "Biological
diversity must be treated as a global resource, to be indexed, used,
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ENVIRONMENTAL ORIENTALISMS | 89
and above all, preserved" (1988, 3). Mimicking colonial predecessors,
biodiversity experts have appropriated Nature as global and simultaneously
appointed themselves her keeper. More insidiously, the
treasures of Nature-whether they are virgin forests or genetic reservoirs-constitute
"mankind's patrimony" (Myers 1976, 200; emphasis
added). Feminized Nature is anointed that possession most cherished
by the pater-the patrimony, the inheritance to be passed through
the masculine line.36 The "principal way to safeguard" (Myers 1976,
199) Wilson's "Eden, progenitrix and sybil" is by excluding nonwhite
Others-by preserving Nature in parks and reserves.37
The feminization of Nature in prominent writings about conservation
is neither accidental nor isolated.38 Images invoking female sexuality
populate biological writings; Nature is the virgin womb "that
spawned humans yet has been vanquished by them" (Janzen 305).
Mythologically gendered as proto-virgins/mothers, Nature becomes
a procreative vessel. The refugia theory of speciation names isolated
refuge zones as "evolutionary nurseries" (Prance 1990, 50), the warm,
moist repositories of reproduction that nurtured speciation when
Pleistocene climate changes became inhospitable. Speciation is referred
to as "birth" and species extinction as "hemorrhaging" (Wilson
1984, 122) or "painful ... termination" (Soule and Wilcox 11). Consistent
with the sexual imagery, "reckless" ecological destruction is "an
orgy of environmental brutality" (Iltis 99). In a seminal text, Soule
and Wilcox launched the manly "call to arms" to protect the "vulnerable,"
"virgin," "green mantle of Earth being ravaged and pillaged in
a frenzy of exploitation" (7). As if they were the sons of the "second
Adam, the 'eye' of God" (Haraway 1989,9), these authors note: "Death
is one thing; an end to birth is something else" (8). The quintessential
conservation scheme, as conceived by UNESCO's "Man and the Biosphere"
programs, is an area of concentric circles of circumscribed use
around an "inviolate virgin core" (Whitmore 317; emphasis added).
The era of conquest is over. Management is the current fetish.
The sleight of hand that constructs a feminized Nature as the
global patrimony is exposed as soon as we pose the questions-protect
Nature from whom? For whom? On neither score do conservationists
such as Ehrlich, Myers, or Wilson leave us in doubt. Myers
claims "growing throngs" (1988a, 209) are the harbingers of doom.
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90 I SUZANA SAWYER AND ARUN AGRAWAL
Ehrlich proselytizes, "The growth of human population must be
halted ... [otherwise] the extinction of much of earth's biota cannot
be avoided" (1988, 25-26). Wilson is even more explicit. Expounding
upon why biodiversity must be saved from overpopulation-"the
raging monster upon the land" (1992, 328)-he tells us:
First, exploding human populations are degrading the environment at
an accelerating rate, especially in tropical countries. Second, science is
discovering new uses for biological diversity... Third, much of the
diversity is being irreversibly lost through extinction caused by the
destruction of natural habitats, again especially in the tropics. (1988b, 3)
To remove all doubt, Wilson reiterates: "The species diversity of
the rainforests borders on the legendary.... [D]espite their extraordinary
richness, tropical rain forests are among the most fragile of all
habitats.... [P]opulation pressures in the Third World will certainly
continue to accelerate deforestation during the coming decades unless
heroic measures are taken in conservation and resource management"
(1988b, 9, 10). Wilson's concern about overpopulation-the effect of
uncontrolled sexual and reproductive behavior among nonwhite
peoples-is shared by many others.39 In popular perception, the links
between environmental degradation and overpopulation are seemingly
so obvious that any discussion on environmental degradation
reverts to an obsession with Third World population.40
The fixation with overpopulation in tropical areas and the reproductive
behavior of nonwhite races parallels, in its form and motivation,
the psychosexual paranoia of the colonial Black Peril. During
periods of imperial entrenchment, colonial legislative norms policed
the sexuality of nonwhite males and managed the wombs of white
females. Today, a fragile Nature must be secluded from the untamed
sexuality of the nonwhites. To ensure long-lasting preservation, many
believe similar norms must be "codified in law and incorporated into
ethics and organized religion" (Iltis 105).
Dennery, a French journalist writing in 1931 on the population of
Europe's Other, expounded graphically, "In the supply of men, Asia
possessed vast reserves, masses that multiplied beyond all reckoning
... teeming races of mankind, more numerous than all the white
peoples of all the other continents" (quoted in Spurr 88). Dennery's
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ENVIRONMENTAL ORIENTALISMS | 91
fixation with the swarming multitudes in the tropics resonates uncannily
with Ehrlich's horror. As he rode a taxi in India, Ehrlich despairs:
The streets seemed alive with people. People eating, people washing,
people sleeping ... people clinging to buses. People herding animals ...
People, people, people, people. As we moved slowly through the mob,
hand horn squawking, the dust, noise, heat and cooking fires gave the
scene a hellish aspect.... [We] were, frankly, frightened.... [S]ince that
night I've known the feel of overpopulation. (Ehrlich 1968, 15-16;
emphasis in original)
Tropical peoples exude palpable danger. Predictably, overpopulation
only exists in the tropics.
Two features linking Nature's degradation to overpopulation
account for the seeming intuitive appeal of the overpopulation thesis
in the West. First, the idea that overpopulation causes Nature's degradation
possesses a very simple, even simplistic, numerical logic.
Resources, after all, are finite. If the numbers of humans keep growing,
per capita availability of resources will decline. One must, therefore,
reduce population levels. The argument seems seamless. But
such accounts ignore any analysis of the distribution of consumption
and waste production, and the socioeconomic causes of population
growth and decline. Not surprisingly, few efforts seek to control the
overpopulation of white populations. Instead, governments in countries
like France feel justified in providing incentives to their citizens
to produce more children, and scholars such as Gina Maranto bemoan
the fact that American women put off having children.41
Second, the overpopulation thesis portrays the problem of resource
depletion and environmental deterioration as apolitical. Overpopulation
threatens the entire world. Unless controlled, it has the
potential to lay waste "our" future by destroying "our" environment.
More apocalyptically, it threatens not just humans but all extant
species. To save Nature, then, "we" must reduce population. Thus
formulated and reified, the overpopulation thesis erases the internal
fissures that the monolithic "we" glosses over. "We" all have a duty
to reduce overpopulation wherever it exists. But it is implicit that
populations are "growing explosively" (Raven 1988, 120) in only a
specific part of the globe-the torrid zone. Conveniently, this shifts
the blame for Nature's degradation on Third World populations.
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92 I SUZANA SAWYER AND ARUN AGRAWAL
Spirited critiques of the overpopulation thesis have failed to dislodge
it from the Western imagination as the prime cause of environmental
degradation. But like the colonial Black Peril, the contemporary
Black Peril reflects a displacement. Environmental degradation
may be real enough, but its causes cannot blithely be located in larger
numbers of poor peoples. Its sources are deeper. Processes of inequitable
overaccumulation and overconsumption lie at its core. Misplacing
and displacing blame on Third World populations distorts
accountability.42
The overpopulation thesis insidiously justifies a colonialist rhetoric
that, during periods of colonial entrenchment, asserted the common
heritage of tropical resources and sought to justify European
control on scientific grounds. Albert Sarraut, former governor-general
of French Indochina around the turn of the century, for example,
found Europeans confronted by a dilemma:43
While in a narrow corner of the world, Nature has concentrated in
white Europe the powers of invention, the means of progress, and the
dynamics of scientific advancement, the greatest accumulation of natural
wealth is locked up in territories occupied by backward races, who
not knowing how to profit by it themselves, are even less capable of
releasing it to the greater circular current that nourishes the ever growing
needs of humanity. (Quoted in Spurr 29)
A similar dilemma today confronts the world, according to the
overpopulation thesis. Treasures of biodiversity or valuable forest
species may lie in the tropics but "can make a significant contribution
to modern agriculture,... medicines and pharmaceuticals, and to industrial
processes ... especially in the advanced world with its greater
capacity to exploit genetic resources" (Myers 1976, 119; emphasis ours).
James Scheuer, former chairman of the Subcommittee on the Environment
in the U.S. House of Representatives, spoke in a similar vein
when he talked about scientific leadership to protect Nature:
The time has come to act before the decline of species becomes crisis
situations. We need to strengthen endangered species laws worldwide,
but we also need to supplement them with equally strong biodiversity
legislation. We need to inventory biological resources and their status,
and to identify species and ecological communities of outstanding
value. With this knowledge we can begin to plan for the sustainable
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ENVIRONMENTAL ORIENTALISMS | 93
management of our resources. We can take measures to protect "hotspots"
containing sensitive species of critical ecosystems. (207; emphasis
ours)
There is a slippage between Third World populations' perceived inability
to control reproduction and their inability to recognize their
long-term interests, let alone protect and preserve Nature.44 Nonwhite
tropical countries are unable to protect Nature even if they
wish to because of their inability to control their reproductive urges
and numbers. Thus the disingenuity of the "we" is clarified to be a
privileged elite. Western expertise guarantees the future security for
a feminized Nature because it is through such expertise that we come
to know what is best.45
Scientific capacity to "generalize and predict, and ultimately control,"
(Soule 1988, 466) becomes the basis on which the West lays
claim to the tropics. As Wilson tells us, "biologists have begun to fill
volumes with concrete proposals for the further exploration and better
use of [bio]diversity, and with increasing emphasis on the still unexplored
portions of the tropical biota" (1988b, 5). Janzen goes a step
further and ordains "[b]iologists, tropical ecology's clergymen," as
"the representatives of the natural world," "in charge of the future of
tropical ecology" (1986,396,306).46 These proposals seek to classify biodiversity
for its utilitarian, commercial value. They display a dynamic
of science progressing hand in hand with commercial profit similar to
that discernible in colonizing Europe's endeavor to classify species in
unknown terrain.47 The rhetoric of global patrimony-of Nature
being "everyone's birthright" (Myers 1985, 333)-is merely a guise. It
is a trope that allows First World elites to dismiss as "geographical
accident" (334) the fact that Nature's wealth resides in the tropics. It
legitimizes conservationist discourses that lay claims to control tropical
nature and displace blame on Third World overpopulation.
CONCLUSION
This paper suggests that the feminization of Nature in Western
thought has played an enabling role in structuring the particular,
though changing, relationship the West imposes between itself and
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94 | SUZANA SAWYER AND ARUN AGRAWAL
its Other. During initial European expansion, early colonial imaginings
of tropical Nature in all her sensuousness and savagery were
crucial components to legitimize the exploitation of raced foreign
lands and bodies. Embedded in a gendered discourse of discovery,
Europe viewed its newly claimed territories as feminine and nonwhite,
sexualizing a mode of exploration and conquest that was
simultaneously erotic and dangerous. In later colonial instantiations,
with the advent of a significant European female population in the
colonies, the uncontrolled and threatening wildness of nonwhites was
explicitly addressed through a concern with European racial purity.
Beliefs about the degeneration that would result if white women
became sexually available to nonwhite males, even when these males
were seen to be effeminate, created anxieties that found expression
in taboos, norms of behavior, and explicit legislation to discourage
such contacts. In much of Asia, Africa, and the Americas, nonwhite
males were labeled the Black Peril while white females embodied
the European trophies to be protected. Such labeling did not o
simultaneously across colonial possessions, but followed a part
chronological rhythm. Although our examination of the sexual
politics during processes of colonization is sweeping, and thes
cesses have their internal inconsistencies, we believe they signa
portant historical patterns of relationships between the West, N
sexuality, and overpopulation.
There are disturbing parallels, we suggest, between the col
focus on the Black Peril and the current conservation debates that p
occupy themselves with overpopulation. Contemporary claims
portray a feminized Nature as under siege from multiplying
white masses unexpectedly mimic earlier colonial attempts to p
white women from the sexual threat of nonwhite males. Nature still
embodies the feminine. But a symbolic transposition has occurred
today, the trophy in need of protection is Nature in all her richnes
and frailty; exploding nonwhite populations in the Third World ar
the new Black Peril. In exploring the echoes of a cultural logic acro
historical periods, this paper has attempted to move a step closer
exposing a rhetoric of environmental orientalism that blames Third
World populations as constituting the major threat to Nature. Suc
a construction of the threat to Nature obfuscates. It deflects attention
from political-economic processes responsible for environmen
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ENVIRONMENTAL ORIENTALISMS | 95
degradation, chief among them capitalist overaccumulation and disparities
in income and consumption.
Notes
We would like to thank Kirsten Fischer, Clark Gibson, Akhil Gupta, Anil K. Gupta,
Sanjay Joshi, Emery Roe, James Scott, Joel Streiker, and most especially Sabine Engel
and Donald S. Moore for their careful comments and critiques. We thank Amitava
Kumar for the inspiration for the title.
1. Although in their most recent work Ehrlich, Ehrlich, and Dailey attempt to
nuance their arguments about solutions to overpopulation, they still see it as the principal
threat to nature.
2. Kennedy and Connolly, authors of the article in the Atlantic Monthly from
whose cover we take the epigraph at the beginning, turn finally to contraception and
Western science to solve the world's problems. As Sugnet (18) points out, the need to
solve problems is not the result of a desire to promote social justice or aid those in distress.
Rather, it is to protect the privileged West against mass immigration.
3. Sandilands (91) points out that population discourse portrays population as
a "problem of the regulation of certain kinds of bodies, specifically exoticized, racialized
bodies that are figured as unruly, uncontrolled, and incapable of submerging their
desires to the common good of sustainability."
4. Our explorations take us across discrete political, economic, and discursive
colonial formations in search of the forces that shape current environmental orientalisms.
The common theme we highlight does not, we insist, erase the internally riven
character and multichromatic aspects of orientalist formations. Such fractures are
important both as sites that inspire new forms of domination and from which innovative
resistance wells. This paper, however, paints in broad strokes a historically persistent
picture: the deployment of (always contested) raced and gendered hierarchies to
control access to desired resources and exclude cultural Others.
David Spurr's The Rhetoric of Empire greatly facilitated our thinking through his
illuminating discussion of "unexpected parallels and common genealogies" (4). For
insightful discussions on divisions and contradictions within orientalism see Lowe;
and Spurr. See Agrawal; Behdad; and Moore for a discussion of how fractures in hegemonic
constructions may be critical both to domination and resistance.
5. We take gender to be a culturally constructed schema that fashions relations
and perceived differences among men and women and a fundamental matrix through
which to enact power. Understood as "a persistent and recurrent way of enabling the
signification of power in the West," the discourse of gender need not always nor necessarily
be "literally about gender itself" (Scott 1069). Rather, it provides a grid of social
reference upon which to chart and stage the exercise of power-that is, it extends a
medium through which to effect differential control over the access to material and
symbolic capital.
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96 | SUZANA SAWYER AND ARUN AGRAWAL
6. For a trenchant critique of universalizing within Western feminism, see
Donaldson; and Mohanty (1987; 1988).
7. We refer here to Paul Ehrlich's two books, The Population Bomb and The Population
Explosion, the latter written with Anne Ehrlich.
8. See Ehrlich and Ehrlich (1991); Myers (1988b); Soule (1995); Soule and
Wilcox; and Wilson (1988b).
9. Historically, Nature has prompted an abundance of conflicting meanings
and visions in the Western imagination; it is an unstable trope fraught with ambiguities.
Williams (219-24) offers a valuable review of the concept of Nature. For a nuanced
discussion on the concept of Nature and the multivalent uses to which it has been historically
employed in both Western and non-Western societies with respect to gender,
see MacCormack and Strathem; Jordanova (1989); and Braun and Castree.
10. Philip H. Gosse, in his nineteenth-century text Romance of Natural History,
mused how in the tropics "the gigantic scale of life strongly excited astonishment" (in
Putz and Holbrook 51). And during his expeditions In Darkest Africa, Stanley suggestively
noted that the moist forest of the torrid zone "with her unknown treasures,
shaded us with her fragrant and loving shades, and whispered to us unspeakable
things sweetly and tenderly" (1: 221).
11. Jean Bodin conflated the relationship between climate, sexuality, and degeneracy
in arguing that the African sun made the Africans inordinately lusty so that once
launched upon debauchery they maintained the most execrable voluptuousness. The
resulting intimate relations between men and beasts were what gave birth to monsters
in Africa (quoted in Cohen 1980, 20).
12. Thevet, a French traveler, noted in 1575, "The women are as voluptuous as
femmes du monde. They are also cunning and highly experienced in whatever could
help attract men to sleep with them. They know herbs which they use on their husbands
and which arouse them so that they are constrained to go to the women or else
suffer pain in their private parts" (quoted in Hemming 17). See also Hemming (3); and
Hyam (1990, 96).
13. Both Kolodny (11); and Parker (140-41) note how similar tropes were used to
describe and feminize newly "discovered" territory across the Americas: John Smith,
in his musings of the New England shore, noted "her treasures having never yet beene
opened, nor her originalls wasted, consumed, nor abused"; Thomas Morton spoke of
New England as "a faire virgin, longing to be sped, And meete her lover in a Nuptiall
bed"; while Robert Mountgomry depicted Carolina as "Paradise with all her Virgin
Beauties."
14. Stanley, on his expedition into the interior of The Darkest Africa, eulogi
Africa as "still a virgin locked in innocent repose" (quoted in Spurr 178).
15. This gave a distinct character to the soil that lay in wait for its seed. Keym
Ralegh's lieutenant, wrote of Guiana in 1596, "[H]ere whole shyeres of fruitfull
groundes, lying now waste for want of people, do prostitutes themselues unto us,
a faire and beautifull woman, in the pride and flower of desired yeares (f2i)." This v
gin land-"Come boys: Virginia longs till we share the rest of her maidenhead" q
the early popular slogan in colonial North America (Carr 49)-embodies not sim
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ENVIRONMENTAL ORIENTALISMS | 97
any woman. It is the explicitly sexed-being-the virgin/whore-whose empty soils
prostitute themselves.
16. See Carr; Kolodny; and Parker.
17. For an understanding of Linnaeus's work in relation to that of his contemporaries,
see Foucault (1970, 125-65).
18. Scientific nomenclature employed a two-part system of ordering: male sexual
parts and their defining characteristics designated the class, followed by the female
sexual parts and their defining characteristics designating the subgroup or order
(Judd). Contemporary botanists consider Linnaeus's Sexual System obsolete, but his
Latin binomial nomenclature of genus and species persists. Interestingly, the genus
(the former placeholder of male sexual parts in the Sexual System) is a capitalized
Latin noun while the species (the former placeholder of female sexual parts) is a
lowercase Latin adjective.
19. For the natural historian, the living world was chaos out of which the scientist
orchestrated order. His goal was to dis-cover, unveil, and display to the eye what
already existed, "reveal ... the sovereign order of Nature" (Linnaeus [1735] 1964, 13),
the hidden truth. But rather than unravel the tangle biologically, Linnaeus viewed
Nature representationally. The practice of purification-divulging true denomination-occurred
first, through the meticulous discrimination of identities and differences
among a select number of visible, privileged characters, and, second, through
the precise juxtaposition of matter (plants) within the "squared and spatialized" blocks
of tabular grids (Foucault 1970, 132). Positioned within multiple tables representing
different levels of ordering, "any species, without having to be described, can be designated
with the greatest accuracy by means of the names of the different groups in
which it is included" (Foucault 1970, 141).
20. As Lee noted in his Introduction to Botany in 1788, "Hybride" was "a Bastard,
a monstrous Production of two Plants of different Species" (OED).
21. As might be imagined, the consequences of contact between the races were
not similar across the gender divide. Despite fears of degeneration and loss of imperial
prestige, colonial officials tolerated sexual relations between white men and native
women. Practical exigencies in the earlier stages of empire building, where large numbers
of white men were present in the tropics without any white women, meant that
white men entered into relationships with local women that ranged from casual sexual
advances to long-term liaisons including concubinage, and, in some cases, even marriage
(Ballhatchet; Gann and Duignan; Hyam 1986a; Stoler 1991, 1995; Van Helten and
Williams 1983). Local women could provide a checkered variety of services to their
white masters-as guides to local languages and customs (Cohen 1971, 122); in easing
the travails of cultural, physical, and psychological adaptation (Butcher 200-202; Callaway
49; Kennedy 1987, 175; Stoler 1985, 31-34); and simply as sexual objects (Ballhatchet
10-16; Bush 11-17; Dadzie 24-26; Hyam 1986b, 51-72; Jordan 144-49; Stoler
1991, 53-60).
22. See also Shaw for a discussion of the racial and sexual discourses in colonial
Kenya.
23. Young presents a detailed discussion of this debate.
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98 I SUZANA SAWYER AND ARUN AGRAWAL
24. One of the points Haraway (1989) makes in this influential work is in relation
to the discursive exclusion of Africans from the human species, an exclusion that was
instrumental in establishing the coherence of the European races.
25. See Ballhatchet; Gilman (1985); Mosse; and White for some of the arguments
explaining the need for creating the Other.
26. See Ballhatchet; Gilman (1985); Mosse; and White for discussions about how
the imagined or concrete existence of an Other serves as an occasion to construct bonds
of solidarity.
27. McClintock (1995,48) provides a similar account of the purposes that fears of
degeneration might help meet. According to her, such fears helped justify state intervention
to protect purity and to cordon off those groups that were seen as the source of
the contagion of degeneration.
28. Proust's nomination of Jews and homosexuals as the "accursed race" (quoted
in Mosse 134), with its powerful biblical resonances, could serve equally efficiently to
designate the peoples of the tropics as the Other. In often blindly transferring to the
nonwhite peoples characteristics such as savagery, barbarism, lustfulness, sensuality,
uncleanliness, indolence, and physical imperfection-characteristics that had been
implicated in defining the Other in many ages and places, racist doctrines demonstrated
an essential bankruptcy. Unfortunately, conceptual or intellectual bankruptcy
of theories does not indicate a commensurate political impotence-often the reverse,
as many contemporary experiences demonstrate.
29. As H. M. Lambert in the colonial office in England said in a similar vein,
"[S]ex with the natives destroys 'the very basis on which the authority of the government
rests"' (quoted in Hyam 1990, 175).
30. For similar dynamics in Latin America, see Martinez-Alier; Seed; and Nelson.
31. Hyam (1990) provides a comprehensive mention of such legislation in southern
and central African colonies and also during the colonization of America.
32. One well-publicized instance of the period was the marriage between Ruth
Williams, a London secretary, and Seretse Khama, heir to the chieftaincy of Bangwoto
in Bechuanaland. Their marriage was condemned as "striking at the roots of white
supremacy" (Hyam 1990, 204). White prostitutes in colonial Zimbabwe who were willing
to sleep with black men, white settlers alleged around the turn of the century, were
directly responsible for increasing the Black Peril (Van Onselen; Pape 703). Around the
same time, the colonial government in Bengal changed the Excise and Licensing Act to
prevent European women from serving as barmaids. That European women could
serve liquor to natives was "profoundly degrading to the prestige of the ruling race"
(Ballhatchet 139). White women who migrated to South Africa could not serve as
domestic servants because of white anxieties about social and sexual contact with
black male servants. Over time most of them married into white settler society. (Van
Helten and Williams 19). In a similar vein, official and unofficial white opinions could
blame white women for acting indecorously and carelessly, for forgetting that the average
male native had strong sexual passions, for being too familiar with servants and
natives, for being single, in short, for anything that could be perceived as "letting the
side down" (Gartrell 168; Stoler 1991, 70; Schmidt 172-73).
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ENVIRONMENTAL ORIENTALISMS | 99
33. A number of writers have also pointed out these characteristics associated
with the mobilization of the metaphor of Black Peril. Pape suggests (699) that fears of
the Black Peril were for the most part a manufactured phenomenon and at times a fully
hysterical obsession among the white populations of colonial Zimbabwe, spawning a
range of exclusionary legislation to help solidify a white and male racist order. Ballhatchet;
and Inglis point out the flimsy and often fake grounds on which accusations
of rape and sexual assault were constructed. In general, these characteristics of the
Black Peril correspond to Gilman's account of "stereotypes" (1985) and Morse's
account of the construction of nationalisms in Europe. Stereotypes usually invest the
Other with features that fall apart under close scrutiny and help increase group cohesion.
Stoler (1991, 68-69) summarizes these features coherently in her discussion of
exclusionary practices and discourses in the East Indies.
34. The words are from Benjamin Franklin (quoted in Jordan 143), but they
reflect widespread colonial concerns that the white population was small and needed
augmentation.
35. In conjuring up a sense of the "naturalist's trance, the hunter's trance" Wilson
writes of his first journey to Surinam in 1961: "I imagined richness and order as an
intensity of light.... I imagined that this place and all its treasures were mine alone and
might be so forever in memory" (1984, 6-7).
36. For further reference to Nature as patrimony see Myers (1985, 333); and
Lynch and Talbott (136).
37. For a review of the concept of national parks and their spread throughout the
tropics, see Keiter.
38. See Sawyer for a discussion of sexualized and feminized tropes in relation to
Ecuador's Amazonia.
39. See, for a small sample of writings that concern themselves with overpo
lation, Abernathy (1991); Fischer; Hardin (1993); Holdren; Meffe, Ehrlich, and Eh
feld; Ness, Drake, and Brechin; and Pimental et al.
40. Concern with overpopulation and the environment seems so obvious that
colonizes seemingly unrelated subjects as well. See, for example, Levi-Strauss sum
rizing his views on race and culture (21), Jack Nicholson talking about solar ene
(165), or Crick and Watson talking about their discovery of the double helix stru
of DNA (Jaroff 59).
41. See Sugnet's (30) critique of Maranto in the New Atlantic.
42. We do not investigate this aspect of the argument. For insightful analyse
the nature of the threat that overaccumulation and material consumption in the
pose to the environment, see Collins; Merchant; and O'Connor.
43. Similar claims are also evident in other pronouncements made during
colonial period. Lugard, the British governor-general of Nigeria between 190
1919, suggested that the tropics were the "heritage of mankind." Nor were thinkers
the left immune to the sentiments that possessed colonial officials like Lugard and S
raut. The French socialist Rouanet suggested there was no reason why "the peopl
the civilized European and American countries (who) find themselves before e
mous expanses ... should not use these expanses to better the economic existen
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100 I SUZANA SAWYER AND ARUN AGRAWAL
their countries" (quoted in Arndt 39). The American writer Richard Davis wondered in
1896 what was to be done to the world's land that was lying unimproved, "[w]hether
it shall go to the great power that is willing to turn it to account or remain with its original
owner, who fails to understand its value" (Spurr 28-31).
44. For a discussion of the links between poverty, overpopulation, and sustainability,
see Redclift; Lele; and Vivian.
45. See Taylor and Buttel for a discussion of links between scientific advances
and the environmental discourse.
46. Agrawal (1997) suggests arguments that tropical resources form a global he
itage, that Westerners possess the scientific knowledge to develop the resources, a
that their capacity justifies their claims over tropical treasures were evident throu
out the colonial period as well.
47. Efforts to systematically document species and specimens for profit be
uncanny resemblances with attempts to catalog indigenous knowledges around
world before indigenous peoples become "extinct" or the pressures of modernizat
change cultures in unknowable ways. The objective in present-day efforts is al
highly utilitarian: to discover practices that are commercially viable or that migh
enable development to take place more efficiently (Agrawal 1995).
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