Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 26(3), 2005, 339-358 © Copyright 2005 Department of Geography, National University of Singapore and Blackwell Publishers Ltd INTRODUCTION Most contemporary scholars of Vietnam are familiar with two famous works by French geographers from the colonial period: Charles- Edouard Robequain’s Le Thanh Hoa (1929) and Pierre Gourou’s Les paysans du delta tonkinois (1936a). These two works continue to work as baseline studies of the relations between “man and milieu” which, together with work by some other geographers (e.g. Henry, 1932; Dumont, 1995), still offer the most comprehensive analysis of Vietnamese rural life under French colonial rule. My personal interest in the work of these geographers, and of Gourou in particular, stems from my PhD work in the late 1970s, which dealt in part with the nature of French knowledge about Indochina. I did long stretches of research in the Centre des Archives d’ Outre-Mer (CAOM) TROPICALITY AND TOPICALITY: PIERRE GOUROU AND THE GENEALOGY OF FRENCH COLONIAL SCHOLARSHIP ON RURAL VIETNAM John Kleinen Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Holland J.G.G.M.kleinen@uva.nl ABSTRACT This article discusses the relevance of the work of Pierre Gourou for Vietnamese and non-Vietnamese scholarship on colonial and postcolonial rural society in Vietnam. The term “tropicality” is used to situate Gourou’s work within the framework of both French and Vietnamese regimes of truth. It is argued that Gourou was aware of the complex human geographies of the tropics and monsoon Asia and the challenges this posed to both Western and “tropical” peoples. Gourou and the issue of tropicality is used to show that Vietnamese scholars did not completely reject French colonial systems of knowledge, and that decolonisation did not herald a complete shift in knowledge about rural Vietnam. Rather, since the 1940s there has been antagonism and accommodation between colonial and postcolonial, French and Vietnamese modes of knowledge production. While Gourou underscored the otherness of the tropics, and there are colonial overtones in his work, he had an immense influence on indigenous ethnography and geography in Vietnam and elsewhere in the formerly colonised world. The article traces this important influence and how it has been both questioned and affirmed since independence in the Vietnamese context. It is suggested that the humanistic approach that Gourou pioneered in his 1936 study of the Red River Delta of northern Vietnam has outlived and been able to overcome the setbacks and drawbacks of both colonial and revolutionary/Vietnamese politico-intellectual projects. Keywords: human geography, tropicality, Vietnam, Red River Delta, village studies