radical geography

part six: breaking out of

grid-consciousness

the grid
Everything we've mentioned before
GPS, GIS, modern cartography & modeling
contains the basic assumption of
Euclidean space. One dataset is
commensurate to another. You can layer
datasets upon this grid and get a
description of space.
What are the implications of dividing the
world into a grid?
Is it a neutral act?

the grid
Does it
change how
we perceive
reality?
"gridconsciousnes
s"?

the grid
The grid encourages the idea of an ordered,
mathematically understood, positivistic
universe.
Is there a radically different way to experience
space beyond this Euclidean grid?
("Inhabited space transcends geometric
space," writes Gaston Bachelard in The
Poetics of Space, and perhaps the best way to
experience space beyond the grid is simply to
inhabit it.)

grid-space
What makes a map good?

imagination
We have been taught that good maps are scientific, objective, accurate,
etc. because of binaries like those of art / science, objective / subjective,
and scientific / ideological
What could a postmodern cartography look like?
Post-structuralist geographer Marcus Doel asks us to imagine a
cartography that shimmers...
"What we need is 'a delirious cartography of thousands of plateaus, each
one a shifting ice flow' (Fuller, 1992). Post-structuralist geography is a
driftwork, a wanton abandonment, an active nihilism."
"Streaming. Braiding. Becoming. Schizophrenia. Deterritorialization. This
is indeed a beautiful milieu for geographers, engendering remarkable
events for those prepared to launch themselves into the flux. Learning to
let go, to become alert to difference and differentiation, is the task of
critical human geography." (Doel, Post-structuralist Geographies)

imagination
No-one really seems to know what a non-Cartesian
cartography would actually look like;
though two theorists who have thought about the issue at
length are Henri Lefebvre (see Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time
and Everyday Life, and The Production of Space) and Gilles
Deleuze. While these French philosophers weren't
geographers per se, they've heavily influenced geographers.
David Harvey: While I accept the general argument that
process, flux, and flow should be given a certain ontological
priority in understanding the world, I also want to insist that
this is precisely the reason why we should pay so much more
careful attention to ... the 'permanences' that surround us
and which we also construct to help solidify and give
meaning to our lives. (1996)

indigenous cartography
There is an Indigenous Geography in the
making a new approach to land
consciousness involving map reading and
map-making that is leading to the
establishment of an encompassing, innovative
and pragmatic new discipline.
Jos Barreiro (2004), qtd. by Johnson, Lewis, & Pramono

indigenous cartography

Did indigenous people make maps?

maps actually didn't exist much in the ancient world
people rarely made what we would think of as maps before
500 years ago, though they did make cosmological models
Krygier & Wood caution against postulating "mapmaking
traditions where instead there were probably traditions of
cosmological speculation
property control
centralized management
military mapping,
and perhaps others, including, for instance, the discourse
function fulfilled by geomantic site location; but none
precipitating the idea of the map

indigenous cartography
during the last two or three millennia BC, larger, more complicated
societies including Babylonia, Egypt, perhaps the Indic societies
centered on Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa, and China began to articulate,
sporadically and apparently independently, but among and continuous
with other indigenous textual productions
memorial inscriptions, memory aids, almanacs, genealogies, inventories,
histories, and descriptions of routes and territory (in mixtures of
sculptural, pictorial, pictographic, syllabic, ductions on this ground. ...
It is critical to accept, as already intimated, that these graphics were not
emitted as maps by those who made them. To imagine this would be to
see them through the conceptual filter created by modern mapmaking.
Until modern times no society distinguished or made such maps as
distinct from religious icons, mandalas, landscape painting,
construction drawings, itineraries, and so on; and current scholarship
stresses the continuity between religious iconography and that which
materialized on the earliest maps

indigenous cartography
during the last two or three millennia BC, larger, more complicated
societies including Babylonia, Egypt, perhaps the Indic societies
centered on Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa, and China began to articulate,
sporadically and apparently independently, but among and continuous
with other indigenous textual productions
memorial inscriptions, memory aids, almanacs, genealogies, inventories,
histories, and descriptions of routes and territory (in mixtures of
sculptural, pictorial, pictographic, syllabic, ductions on this ground. ...
It is critical to accept, as already intimated, that these graphics were not
emitted as maps by those who made them. To imagine this would be to
see them through the conceptual filter created by modern mapmaking.
Until modern times no society distinguished or made such maps as
distinct from religious icons, mandalas, landscape painting,
construction drawings, itineraries, and so on; and current scholarship
stresses the continuity between religious iconography and that which
materialized on the earliest maps

indigenous cartography
What is a map?
Part of opening the map to non-Western cartographies
lies in opening the standard definition of "map."
Crampton & Krygier explain that emphasizing the role
of maps in human experience, rather than the look or
form of them, open the door to many non-tradition and
non-western mapping traditions; they site a definition
that maps are graphic representations that facilitate a
spatial understanding of things, concepts, conditions,
processes, or events in the human world (Harley and
Woodward, 1987).

indigenous cartography

indigenous cosmology

Pacific islander stick chart (top)

Ojibway birchbark map (right)

indigenous
cartography
Should indigenous
communities engage
Western cartographic
traditions, or not? Many
academics & NGO workers
believe that Indigenous
communities must engage in
Western cartographic
endeavors or face the the
alternative futures, of not
being on the map, as it were,
being obscured from view
and having local claims
obscured (Johnson et al,

indigenous cartography
What we are labeling here as Western
cartography is not only founded within a
Cartesian-Newtonian epistemology but is also
connected with and has been
informed/transformed within both historical and
current contact zones(Pratt, 1992) of the
colonial projects of the West.
To engage the technologies of Western
cartography is to involve our communities and
their knowledge systems with a science
implicated in the European colonial endeavor
(Harley, 1992b) and is a decision which should
be made only after examining not only our past

indigenous cartography
They continue to list the dangers of adopting
Western cartographic techniques uncritically:
putting indigenous knowledge into a GIS may
diminish it, because it is no longer contextually
defined
storing information with a GIS makes it easier
to be used beyond its original intent & context
the source & recipient of information is
disconnected in space and time, so it is more
difficult to impose moral restraint on its use