Space in the Tropics: From Convicts to Rockets in French Guiana - Tapa dura

"This is anthropological survey in the most traditional sense--the only difference being Peter Redfield is not observing a tribe that lives at the end of a remote river, but us: the consumers and investors of this vast dream we call global capitalism. . . . The book is filled with marvelous details of the 'life-world' of Kourou. . . . With his charming prose style, Peter Redfield is the sort of researcher you would like to meet in a bar on the edge of the Western world."--Charles Mudede, "The Stranger (Seattle)

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 this book enthralling is anthropologists Peter Redfield's ability to draw from these two disparate European projects in French Guyana 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, 19th century prison reform, the Dreyfus Affair, tropical medicine, post-war 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 importance of margins in understanding the trajectories of modern life.