HUMAN GEOGRAPHY OF THE AMERICAN TROPICS: A FORTY‐YEAR REVIEW

• Published in: Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography
• Main Author: Mathewson, Kent
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Wiley 1993
• Subjects: North Atlantic
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9493.1993.tb00045.x; https://api.wiley.com/onlinelibrary/tdm/v1/articles/10.1111%2Fj.1467-9493.1993.tb00045.x; https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1467-9493.1993.tb00045.x

ABSTRACT For a decade or so after World War II, human geographers working in the American tropics found socio‐political conditions and resultant research topics little changed from those before the war. This was in contrast to the Old World tropics where decolonization processes and the demands of economic development and new nation building produced divergent research currents, For the first half of the period under review, the American tropics continued to be the province largely of geographers with culturalhistorical questions grounded in natural historical bases. The legacy is Humboldt's; the practitioners most notably students of Carl Sauer or German counterparts such as Carl Troll. French and British regionalist approaches, strong in the region before World War II, survived less successfully. By the 1980s, however, broad pan‐tropical currents of geographic discourse and debate had become established. New practices and theories were formulated and tested as North Atlantic geographers borrowed from antipodean innovators and others working in the Asian and African tropics. Since the 1980s, there have been greater efforts at dialogue and collaboration with host country colleagues. As might be expected in this era of ‘globalization’, national research styles and agendas have become less evident. This paper offers a highly selective map of research nodes within tropical Americanist geography since the early 1950s. The selection of examples includes qualitative criteria, but more importantly, research that signify stasis or intensification as well as turning points and departures in the overall development of this literature. The contours of this history suggest some highly evolved, even idiosyncratic enterprises, but in the main, it is an unfolding that suggests broad congruencies with human geographic work elsewhere in the tropics.