What is TROPICAL GEOGRAPHY? What does TROPICAL GEOGRAPHY mean? TROPICAL GEOGRAPHY meaning

SUPPORT The Audiopedia using it from within our Android app - https://ift.tt/2r4nBUo What is TROPICAL GEOGRAPHY? What does TROPICAL GEOGRAPHY mean? TROPICAL GEOGRAPHY meaning - TROPICAL GEOGRAPHY definition - TROPICAL GEOGRAPHY explanation. Source: Wikipedia.org article, adapted under https://ift.tt/yjiNZw license. Tropical geography refers to the study of places and people in the tropics. When it first emerged as a discipline, tropical geography was closely associated with imperialism and colonial expansion of the European empires as contributing scholars tended to portray the tropical places as "primitive" and people "uncivilised" and "inferior". A wide range of subjects has been discussed within the sub-field during late 18th to early 20th century including zoology, climatology, geomorphology, economics and cultural studies. The discipline is now more commonly known as development geography as colonization had been replaced by economic development as the main ideological driver of international and global interactions since the 1950s.:118 Today, many scholars continue to use the term tropical geography to contest the determinism embedded in the term and de-exoticise the tropical countries and their inhabitants. The origins of tropical geography can be traced back to as early as the fifteenth century when Columbus first discovered the Caribbean islands in tropical America. Subsequent writings of European explorers, merchants, naturalists, colonists and settlers who traveled to and lived in the tropics were the main sources of the study. Alexander von Humboldt, Joseph Dalton Hooker, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace are some of the significant contributors. It is argued that it is due to their academic reputation and scientific approaches tropical geography was consolidated into an academic discipline widely studied in Europe in spite of the region's vast differences in vegetation, wild lives, climate, geology and culture. The discourse on the tropics and their inhabitants have evolved over time in response to changing patterns of Europe's engagements in the tropics. A variety of environmental determinism emerged from the sub-field as colonists and naturalists started representing temperate and tropical people with binaries like "progressive vs. backward," "civilised vs. primitive," "hard working vs. lazy" and "superior vs. inferior." Race, an invented concept, was convenient and readily applied in attempts to " climatic variation closely to the supposed division of the human species into different 'races'". As activities of the European empires diversified in the 19th century, travelers and settlers who had experienced deadly tropical diseases and conflicts with the local peoples forged another representation of the tropical world as a place full of "dangers" and "horrors" to mankind. The fertile lands of the tropics were then interpreted as to have obstacles for human morality and physical well-being preventing their inhabitants from technical, philosophical and artistic innovation. This dramatized and pessimistic representation reinforced Europe's superior position and enhanced the depiction of the tropics as an exotic other to the temperate world. Whether tropical geographers found the tropical places and people abundant and dynamic or deadly and barbaric. They understood them as inferior to the temperate and great Western civilizations. As criticized by Edward Said in his famous work Orientalism, the literature of tropical geography served the interests of European scholars who were living in the temperate world to create an exotic other which in turn helped define themselves.....