Space in the Tropics: From Convicts to Rockets in French Guiana

Redfield, Peter

ISBN 10: 0520219848 / ISBN 13: 9780520219847

Published by Univ. of California Press (2000), Berkeley, 2000

About this Item

23x15cm, xxii,345 pp Contents: Preface: The Edge of the World; Islands & Disciplines: Robinson Crusoe, Anthropology, & the Horizon of Technology; History on the West Coast; Colonial Ground: Botany Bay to Devil's Island; The Natural Prison; Modern Sky: A Gate to the Heavens; The Margin of the Future; Worlds in Motion: Tropics of Nature; The Nature of Work; The Imperfect Equator.

Seller Inventory # 010033

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Space in the Tropics: From Convicts to Rockets in French Guiana
• Publisher: Univ. of California Press (2000), Berkeley
• Publication Date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0520219848
• ISBN 13: 9780520219847
• Binding: orig.cloth
• Illustrator: Textual photo illustrations
• Condition: Minor rubbing. VG.
• Seller catalogs:
  • French Guiana

About this title

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 Space in the Tropics enthralling is anthropologist Peter Redfield's ability to draw from these two disparate European projects in French Guiana 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, nineteenth-century prison reform, the Dreyfus Affair, tropical medicine, postwar 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 import

About the Author

Peter Redfield is Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina. He is the author of Life in Crisis: The Ethical Journey of Doctors without Borders.