Surrendering to the Tropics: Tristes Tropiques as Antidote to Tourism’s Bland Place Narratives

Abstract

The central idea in this article is that tropical landscapes are not uniform and that reducing such physical worlds to a set of generic material signifiers—as is the case in tropical tourism discourses—impoverishes place narratives. I base my attempt at increasing the multiplicity of tropical landscapes on the discussion of such landscapes in Lévi-Strauss’s famed Tristes Tropiques. The latter combines approaches not often associated with the anthropologist: namely, an autobiographical/confessional mode of writing and a materialist-cum-phenomenological approach to the physical landscapes encountered. I examine how Tristes Tropiques narrates the sensorial qualities of the contrasting “wet” and “dry” tropics of Brazil; and how the book disrupts the wet/dry binary in fascinating ways. The notion of “surrendering to the tropics” advanced here combines Lévi-Strauss’s account with the phenomenology of lesser-known sociologist of knowledge Kurt H. Wolff. In Surrender and Catch, Tristes Tropiques is cited as a forerunner to surrender as “total involvement”; and both books highlight the fusing of time, space, and felt experience in seeing the world afresh. In the last section, I document my own surrender processes to the dry tropics of North Queensland, Australia; and discuss the place narratives of regional organizations that either acknowledge or elide (through a tourist gaze) the “brownness” of the local landscape. The article concludes by highlighting how, what Denis Cosgrove terms the tropics as physical “encounter”, gives the narrating of wet and dry tropical landscapes an ontological and existential edge.