Read an Excerpt

The History of Cartography

University of Chicago Press

Introduction

Maps are seen through many different eyes. As the historical study of maps
has broadened and matured over the past two decades to extend beyond the
idea of maps as ever-improving representations of the geographical world,
at least three approaches have been developed and championed: the map as
cognitive system, the map as material culture, and the map as social
construction. All three are necessary to a full understanding of how maps
function in society. The way these approaches have waxed and waned has
depended not only on the background and predilections of individual
researchers, but also on the differing roles and meanings of maps in the
various cultures that have been studied.

The emphasis on these three approaches has shifted as the History of
Cartography volumes have appeared. In this book, which deals with the
cartography of traditional African, American, Arctic, Australian, and
Pacific cultures, where very few truly indigenous artifacts have been
found or preserved, we would expect the cognitive and social approachesto
have necessarily greater emphasis than in previous books. This
introduction is meant to lay the conceptual groundwork for the chapters
that follow. After addressing definitional questions-what we mean by
various key words in the title of the book, such as "cartography" and
"traditional"-we discuss the differences among what can be called
cognitive, performance, and material cartography and explain the many
instances where these categories overlap. The introduction then turns to a
number of methodological problems and issues, including the problem of
bias inherent in studying the maps in this book from a Western
perspective, the possible omissions deriving from a diversity of
approaches, the feasibility of cross-cultural comparisons, and the ways
the study of maps can be made more central in ethnohistorical studies.

Definitions

In volume 1 of this History, maps were defined as "graphic representations
that facilitate a spatial understanding of things, concepts, conditions,
processes, or events in the human world." The definition, purposely
broad, was intended to set general parameters for the entire six-volume
series. But in this book the very terms "map" and "cartography," with
their strong Western overtones, need some elaboration. There is no
cross-cultural, generally agreed definition of these terms, and none of
the cultures described here apparently had a word for "map," let alone
"cartography," before contact with the West. If the purpose of our
definition is pragmatic rather than semantic, however, using "map" as a
general term can be helpful. Although an Australian aboriginal toa, a
Marshall Islands stick chart, an Inka khipu, and a Luba lukasa memory
board are very different in form and function, they all depict a people's
world in a way that enhances spatial understanding.

The search for "maps" in these cultures, particularly when accompanied by
the idea that maps privilege the societies in which they are found, is
profoundly Eurocentric. But The History of Cartography was born of a
belief that the endeavor to understand the world by depicting it in map
form should be treated in a global way and across the span of human
history. By using the word "map" to cover so many different things, we are
simply extending the logic of earlier volumes that called the Greek pinax,
the Roman forma, the Chinese tu, and the medieval mappamundi and carta da
navigare "maps" and included them in a cartographic history.

Creating a separate volume for "traditional cartography" has been a
pragmatic decision based on a body of anthropological and ethnographic
literature very different from the historical literature underlying volume
1. The danger is that such a division of subject matter might be thought
to imply that there are two fundamentally different ways of spatial
thinking: Western and "other." We prefer to characterize the differences
not in terms of mental capacity or predisposition but according to the
social and cultural need for maps.

The term "traditional" implies continuity, the handing down of skills over
generations, rooted in longevity. Yet given the difficulties of
documentation, it is almost impossible to ascertain how long this
tradition has been maintained in the societies discussed here, or how
continuous it has been. Likewise, if the term is used for the kind of
cartography that was independent of the development of systematic
topographic survey and mapmaking in Europe, it implies that one somehow
"progressed" into the other.

Our motivation for using the term "traditional," despite its problems, is
to convey the idea that we are dealing with a different kind of
cartography that is neither inferior nor superior to that of the West.
Although even "traditional" has sometimes been used pejoratively, we have
preferred it to other terms that are now almost always interpreted as
disparaging, such as "preliterate," "simpler," "primitive," or even
"savage." The problem with such pejorative terms is that they fail to
treat the maps of traditional societies on their own terms and therefore
endorse the idea of traditional "inferior" cartographies "progressing"
into ever more realistic modern maps. Except in the sense of the purely
geometric definition of geographic data, this theory is no more true for
cartography than it is for art. As early as 1937, Sorokin was at pains to
document that what he called ideational culture mentalities that
nineteenth-century writers had associated with primitive art devoid of
skill and technique did not somehow "progress" into sensate (visual) art
forms that art historians associated with the European Renaissance.

Since all cultures have always been in a constant state of change, it is
not possible to draw hard and fast boundaries between "traditional" and
"European" cartographies or to ascertain what is truly "traditional,"
"indigenous," or "original." Describing spatial representation in oral
societies before contact with Westerners is difficult for several reasons.
These include the paucity or virtual absence of extant precontact
artifacts; an unwillingness or inability to recognize as maps certain
types of archaeological evidence such as ceramics, textiles, petroglyphs,
and pictographs, even when datable; the unlikelihood of there being an
evidential record of maps that are part of a performance; and the
difficulty of interpreting oral traditions as history.

The issues raised by the inclusion in this book of maps with forms and
functions very different from those in previous books of the History can
perhaps best be explained by referring to table 1.1. This table
distinguishes between internal spatial concepts or mental constructions of
spatial ideas and the expression or manifestation of these concepts either
in performance or in the construction of a record of spatial knowledge in
the form of material artifacts. We can thus speak in terms of "cognitive
or mental cartography," "performance or ritual cartography," and "material
or artifactual cartography," and the next three sections explain what each
means in the context of this book.

Cognitive Cartography

In volume 1 of this History Brian Harley wrote:

There has probably always been a mapping impulse in human consciousness,
and the mapping experience-involving the cognitive mapping of
space-undoubtedly existed long before the physical artifacts we now
call maps. For many centuries maps have been employed as literary
metaphors and as tools in analogical thinking. There is thus also a
wider history of how concepts and facts about space have been
communicated, and the history of the map itself-the physical
artifact-is but one small part of this general history of communication
about space.

A "general history of communication about space" would be based on the
vast literature of spatial cognition and behavior in psychology,
philosophy, anthropology, geography, and now artificial intelligence.
Spatial constructs are keys to the physical, social, and humanistic
understanding of the world. Human activities relevant to cartography
include reducing the complexity and vastness of nature and space to a
manageable representation; wayfinding or navigating from one point to
another; spatial reckoning of generalized distances and directions (as in
an awareness of the cardinal directions); visualizing the character of
local places; articulating spatial power and control related to
territoriality; and constructing spatial views of real and imagined
worlds. The mental constructions of such spatial ideas are sometimes
selectively described as "mental maps." This is an intuitively attractive
term and has been the subject of many recent studies, but it can mean at
least two quite different things.

On one hand, the term is used to mean an image of the environment held in
the mind to aid wayfinding or spatial orientation. This may be an image
one remembers from having seen a physical map, or it may be constructed
from one's experience of reality (such as one's neighborhood). This type
of mental map is often used to give directions, to rehearse spatial
behavior in the mind, to aid memory, to structure and store knowledge, to
imagine fantasy landscapes and worlds, or of course to make commonplace
material maps. We know, however, that most people do not visualize space
in mental pictures when engaged in everyday wayfinding or giving
directions. Some writers have questioned the value of using terms such as
"image," "pictures in the head," and "mental map" to describe complex
mental processes.

The other main use of the term "mental map" or "cognitive map" is to
denote physical artifacts recording how people perceive places. This
category includes maps researchers draw from data about subjects' place
preferences, as in Gould and White's Mental Maps. Or in some cases
subjects themselves may draw their cognitive or affective view of their
environment. In both instances we are dealing with a physical object, not
a mental image.

Nevertheless, for want of a better phrase, the term "mental cartography"
is sometimes used in this book to refer to the maps that many of these
groups apparently carry in their heads as mnemonic devices. A good example
concerns the Pacific Islanders. In only one island group in Micronesia,
the Marshall Islands, have material artifacts traditionally been made for
the purpose of remembering and teaching navigation skills in the Pacific
Ocean. Clearly, inhabitants of other island groups have had a similar need
to navigate the thousands of miles between the island groups, yet these
needs are met not with graphic artifacts but with a "mental
cartography."

Performance Cartography

If mental constructs can be metaphorically called "maps," there are
occasions in many societies when a performance also fulfills the function
of a map. Referring again to table 1.1, a performance may take the form of
a nonmaterial oral, visual, or kinesthetic social act, such as a gesture,
ritual, chant, procession, dance, poem, story, or other means of
expression or communication whose primary purpose is to define or explain
spatial knowledge or practice. Or the performance may include a more
material, but still ephemeral, demonstration such as a drawing or model in
the sand.

Not all our authors agree on whether oral-kinesthetic expressions qualify
as maps. For example, for Australian Aborigines, Peter Sutton has used
this distinction as a key reason to be cautious about identifying some
icons as kinds of maps, in that they "arise principally as display or
performance rather than as explanation or record." Similarly, for
Mesoamerica, where many more map artifacts survive than from oral
cultures, Barbara Mundy mentions the circumambulation ritual still carried
out in hundreds of Mexican communities, only to point out that this
performance is not a map but "an oral litany of boundary sites committed
to memory." On the other hand, Eric Silverman points out in the chapter
on Melanesian maps that the Iatmul of the middle Sepik River map the
landscape orally through chains of paired, polysyllabic names that are
chanted and sung on ritual occasions. And Neil Whitehead relates how the
dances of the Barasana in the Vaupes region of Colombia enact the
interconnection between persons and the cosmos in which the path of
celestial bodies is replicated through the annual cycle of ritual and
dance in a longhouse representing the celestial vault.

Material Cartography

A spatial representation may also be a permanent or at least nonephemeral
record created or placed in situ, as in rock art, maps posted as signs, or
maps embodied in shrines or buildings. Or the representation may take the
form of a mobile, portable, archivable record. This category of material
cartography, which comprises most artifacts we normally think of as
"maps," includes models, ceramics, drawings, paintings, textiles,
descriptions or depictions of performances, and in situ records.

Despite the frequent image of the history of cartography as an antiquarian
field, the study of maps as physical artifacts-as material culture-has
been astonishingly neglected, perhaps on the mistaken grounds that
technical studies do not illuminate the wider social history of
cartography. This is unfortunate, since technology is rooted in society,
cannot be separated from its influences, and often sheds light on broader
social issues. One of the fundamental purposes of this book is to present
the material evidence of traditional cartography-to describe the map
corpus in a way that approaches the maturity of other fields that address
issues of material culture, such as art history, ethnography, and
industrial history. Wherever the evidence has permitted, we have attempted
to reconstruct the fabric and format of maps and the methods of their
creation. We hope that in some cases we have also been able to move beyond
the bare statement of how maps were made. This approach of course is fully
compatible with recent studies of material culture, which go beyond
explaining process.

Overlaps and Inconsistencies

There are several instances where the categories of cognitive,
performance, and material cartography overlap. This overlap is most
obvious where map artifacts are used during a performance. For example,
Thomas Bassett describes how memory boards known as lukasa, covered with
beads and cowrie shells, are used to teach initiates about the origins of
Luba kingship in the Kabongo region of the Democratic Republic of the
Congo. The lukasa is read or sung to remember the journeys of a king, the
location of sacred lakes, trees, spirit capitals, and migration routes.

Continues...

---

Excerpted from The History of Cartography

Copyright © 2003
by University of Chicago.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---