Tropical Landscapes and Nature-Culture Entanglements: Reading Tropicality via Avatar

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.25120/etropic.21.1.2022.3877

Keywords:

tropical landscapes, nature-culture entanglements, Avatar, exoticism, primitivism, rhizomatics, archipelagic consciousness

Abstract

Landscape integrates both natural and cultural aspects of a particular geographical area. Environmental elements include geological landforms, waterscapes, seascapes, climate and weather, flora and fauna. They also necessarily involve human perception and inscription which reflect histories of extraction and excavation, of planting and settlement, of design and pollution. Natural elements and cultural shaping by humans – past, present, and future – means landscapes reflect living entanglements involving people, materiality, space and place. A landscape’s physicality is entwined with layers of human meaning and value – and tropical landscapes have particular significance. The Tropics is far more than geographic and needs to be understood through the notion of tropicality. Tropicality refers to how the tropics are construed as the exoticised Other of the temperate Western world as this is informed by cultural, imperial, and scientific practices. In this imaginary – in which the tropics are depicted through nature tropes as either fecund paradise or fetid hell – the temperate is portrayed as civilised and the tropical as requiring cultivation. In order to frame this Special Issue through an example that evokes tropicality we undertake an ethnographic and ecocritical reading of Avatar. The film Avatar is redolent with images of tropical landscapes and their nature-culture entanglements. It furthermore reveals classic pictorial tropes of exoticism, which are in turn informed by colonialism and its underlying notions of technologism verses primitivism. Furthermore, Avatar calls to mind the theories of rhizomatics and archipelagic consciousness.

Author Biographies

Anita Lundberg, James Cook University, Australia

Associate Professor Anita Lundberg is a cultural anthropologist. Her interdisciplinary ethnographies – set in Bali, Singapore, Malaysia, Eastern Indonesia – explore the intertwinings of nature and culture. Her thinking is informed by material poetics, film ethnography, everyday life and environment. Anita has won awards and held fellowships: LIA TransOceanik (CNRS, JCU, Collége de France); The Cairns Institute; Evans Fellow, Cambridge University, UK; Guest Researcher, Maison Asie-Pacifique, Université de Provence, France; Visiting Fellow, Institute of the Malay World and Civilization, National University Malaysia; and Anthropologist-in-Residence, Rimbun Dahan, Malaysia. She has published extensively in academic journals, editing numerous Special Issues. Anita has curated exhibitions in NY, LA, Paris and Sydney, and her own research has been exhibited at the Australian National Maritime Museum, the National Art Gallery of Malaysia and Alliance de Française. She was a Post-Doctoral Fellow, Cambridge University, UK, has a PhD in Anthropology, and an MA in Science & Technology Studies. Anita lives in Bali.

Hannah Regis, The University of the West Indies, St Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago

Dr Hannah Regis is a lecturer in Literatures in English at the University of the West Indies, St Augustine. Her primary focus of research, teaching and publication is on Caribbean Spectrality, Black Atlantic and Indigenous Studies, postcolonial criticism, the blue and environmental humanities, and pedagogical approaches to literary discourses. She has published widely on aspects of Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean literature in Caribbean Quarterly, Journal of West Indian Literature, The American Studies Journal, eTropic and other periodicals. A single-authored monograph on the Poetics of Caribbean Spectrality is forthcoming.

John Agbonifo, Osun State University, Okuku, Nigeria

Dr John Agbonifo is an Associate Professor of Sociology of Development, and Acting Director of the Global Affairs and Sustainable Development Institute (GASDI) at Osun State University, Nigeria. His research interest centres on governance, conflicts, and environmental humanities. He explores these themes from a sub-Saharan African perspective. Specifically, John has worked on social movements and armed insurgencies in the Niger Delta, civil wars in Africa, and the use of sanctions to promote international peace and security in Africa. John is a recipient of several fellowships, including the Rachel Carson, and Swiss Government Excellence fellowships. He holds a doctorate from the International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam. John has published widely, his latest publication, ‘Nonstate Armed Groups, Leadership, and Sanctions Effectiveness’ appeared in African Security (2021).

References

Anderson, M.G., & Peek, P.M. (Eds) (2011). Ways of the Rivers: Arts and Environment of the Niger Delta. UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History.

Arnold, D. (1995). The problem of nature: Environment, culture and European expansion. Basil Blackwell.

Arnold, D. (2000). “Illusory Riches”: Representations of the Tropical World, 1840–1950. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 21, 6-18. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9493.00060

Avatar Wiki (n.d.). https://james-camerons-avatar.fandom.com/wiki/

Baxter, S. (2012). The Science of Avatar. Gollancz

Benítez Rojo, A. (1996). The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. Duke University Press, 1996. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822382058

Bowd, G. & Clayton, D. (2003), Fieldwork and Tropicality in French Indochina: Reflections on Pierre Gourou's Les Paysans Du Delta Tonkinois, 1936. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 24: 147-168. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9493.00149

Bowd, G. & Clayton, D. (2019). Impure and worldly geography: Pierre Gourou and tropicality. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315588087

Cameron, J. (Director). (2009). Avatar [Film]. 20th Century Fox, Lightstorm Entertainment, Dune Entertainment.

Césaire, A. & Roussi, S. (Eds) (1978). Tropiques II. Jean-Michel Place.

Carter, P. (2013). Tropical Knowledge: Archipelago Consciousness and the Governance of Excess. eTropic: Electronic Journal of Studies in the Tropics, 12(2), 79-95. https://doi.org/10.25120/etropic.12.2.2013.3334

Chao, S., & Enari, D. (2021). Decolonising Climate Change: A Call for Beyond-Human Imaginaries and Knowledge Generation. eTropic: Electronic Journal of Studies in the Tropics, 20(2), 32–54. https://doi.org/10.25120/etropic.20.2.2021.3796

Clayton, D. (2021). Tropicality and the Choc en Retour of Covid-19 and Climate Change. eTropic: electronic journal of studies in the Tropics 20 (1), 2021, pp. 54-93. http://dx.doi.org/10.25120/etropic.20.1.2021.3787

Coggan, D. (2021, Dec 14). James Cameron opens up about his long-awaited (and awaited) Avatar sequel. Entertainment https://ew.com/movies/james-cameron-teases-avatar-sequel/

Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1980/1987). A Thousand Plateaus. (Vol. 2 of Capitalism and Schizophrenia) (B. Massumi, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press.

Driver, F. & Yeoh, B.S. (2000). Constructing the Tropics: Introduction. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 21, 1-5. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9493.00059

Glissant, E. (1997). Poetics of Relation. (Trans B. Wing). University of Michigan. https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.10257

Glowczewski, B. (forthcoming 2022). The Land Where Black Seeds Dream. eTropic: electronic journal of studies in the Tropics. 21 (2).

Harris, W. (1967). Tradition and the West Indian Novel. In W. Harris (Ed.), Tradition, the Writer and Society: Critical Essays (pp. 28-47). New Beacon.

Lundberg, A., Osborne, R., Ancuta, K., & Stasiewicz-Bieńkowska, A. (2019). Tropical Gothic: Literary and Creative Works. eTropic: electronic journal of studies in the Tropics, 18(2), 1-15. https://doi.org/10.25120/etropic.18.2.2019.3701

Lundberg, A., Vasques Vital, A., & Das, S. (2021). Tropical Imaginaries and Climate Crisis: Embracing Relational Climate Discourses. eTropic: Electronic Journal of Studies in the Tropics, 20(2), 1–31. https://doi.org/10.25120/etropic.20.2.2021.3803

Lutkehaus, N. (2009). A World All their Own. USC Dornsife, December 23. https://dornsife.usc.edu/news/stories/657/a-world-all-their-own/

McCoppin, R. (2015). The Lessons of Nature in Mythology. McFarland.

Menadue, C. B., (2017). Trysts Tropiques: The Torrid Jungles of Science Fiction. eTropic: electronic journal of studies in the Tropics, 16 (1), 125-140. https://doi.org/10.25120/etropic.16.1.2017.3570

Northrup, D. (1978). Trade Without Rulers: Pre-Colonial Economic Development in South-Eastern Nigeria (Oxford Studies in African Affairs). Clarendon Press

Pandorapedia (n.d.). The Official Guide. https://www.pandorapedia.com/

Regis, H. (2020). Subjection and Resistance: Landscapes, Gardens, Myths and Vestigial Presences in Olive Senior's Gardening in the Tropics. eTropic: Electronic Journal of Studies in the Tropics, 19(1),151-166 https://doi.org/10.25120/etropic.19.1.2020.3682

Said, E. (1978). Orientalism. Random House.

Savage, V.R. (2004), Tropicality Imagined and Experienced. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 25, 26-31. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0129-7619.2004.00170.x

Sodikoff, G. M. (2021). Shrunken Life: Discourses of the Cryptic and the Miniature in Madagascar. eTropic: Electronic Journal of Studies in the Tropics, 20(2), 55–73. https://doi.org/10.25120/etropic.20.2.2021.3820

Torgovnick, M. (1991). Gone Primitive: Savage Intellectuals, Modern Lives. University of Chicago Press.

Vávrová, D. (2014) Cinema in the Bush, Visual Anthropology, 27 (1-2), 25-44. https://doi.org/10.1080/08949468.2014.852058

Wilhelm, M. & Mathison, D. (2009). James Cameron’s Avatar: An Activist Survival Guide: A Confidential Report on the Biological and Social History of Pandora. It Books.

eTropic logo

Downloads

Published

2022-03-30 — Updated on 2022-07-01

Versions

How to Cite

Lundberg, A., Regis, H., & Agbonifo, J. (2022). Tropical Landscapes and Nature-Culture Entanglements: Reading Tropicality via Avatar. ETropic: Electronic Journal of Studies in the Tropics, 21(1), 1–27. https://doi.org/10.25120/etropic.21.1.2022.3877 (Original work published March 30, 2022)

Issue

Vol. 21 No. 1 (2022): Special Issue: Tropical Landscapes and Nature~Culture Entanglements

Section

Introduction to Special Issue

License

Copyright (c) 2022 CC-BY

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Authors who submit articles to this journal agree to the following terms:

1. Authors are responsible for ensuring that any material that has influenced the research or writing has been properly cited and credited both in the text and in the Reference List (Bibliography). Contributors are responsible for gaining copyright clearance on figures, photographs or lengthy quotes used in their manuscript that have been published elsewhere.

2. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) License that allows others to share and adapt the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.

3. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository, or publish it in a book), with proper acknowledgement of the work's initial publication in this journal.

4. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (see The Effect of Open Access or The Open Access Citation Advantage). Where authors include such a work in an institutional repository or on their website (i.e., a copy of a work which has been published in eTropic, or a pre-print or post-print version of that work), we request that they include a statement that acknowledges the eTropic publication including the name of the journal, the volume number and a web-link to the journal item.

5. Authors should be aware that the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) License permits readers to share (copy and redistribute the work in any medium or format) and adapt (remix, transform, and build upon the work) for any purpose, even commercially, provided they also give appropriate credit to the work, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. They may do these things in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests you or your publisher endorses their use.