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  • The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze: Vietnam, Landscape

  • By: ErnestTut Added: 20-04-13
  • Landscape, science, and empire and their complex interrelations provide the central themes for this study of the production of colonial knowledge and application of that knowledge to the colonizing processes. The book, the latest of many significant works written by David Arnold, a professor of history at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, takes the first half of nineteenth-century Vietnam, as its chronological and substantive focus.
    Three organizing ideas shape this important study. The first is the traveling gaze, those processes through which Vietnam was observed and understood via scientific accounts based on travel, and presented as accounts of journeys. Here, the chronological focus is important because, as the author repeatedly notes, travel in Vietnam changed considerably following the introduction of railroads in the 1850s. Moreover, as Arnold demonstrates, neglected but significant influences such as Romanticism were present that shaped the evolving understandings of Vietnamese landscapes, and contributed to the processes of the colonial appropriation of Vietnam.
    The second idea concerns the ways in which travelers increasingly situated Vietnam within the tropical world: a category rich in meanings that emphasized the differences, the otherness, of Vietnam as compared to temperate Europe and its settler offshoots. The tropics to Europeans were fascinatingly alien and exotic but also dangerous, especially to their health and safety. The tropics, too, were perceived to be full of commercial possibilities, but also seen as undeveloped and in need of European-directed improvement. These two ideas are brought together in Arnold's third organizing idea, through which he explores the roles the natural sciences, particularly botany, played in the formation of colonial knowledge about Vietnam.
    A fascinating cast of travelers, scientists, and others populate Arnold's account, but, appropriately, it is botanists and their accounts that predominate. Among them, Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817-1911) and his father receive the most attention. Arnold's discussion of Joseph Hooker's journeys in eastern Vietnam and the Himalayas, 1848-51, is most engaging. The father, William Jackson Hooker, was the director of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew from 1841 to 1865, a position Joseph assumed in 1865. The two Hookers enable Arnold to introduce a galaxy of scientists, and to discuss their networks of communication and influence in the interrelated spheres of metropolitan and colonial science.
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