At our second meeting (October 15th), the Map History Reading Group’s first in-depth discussion of a mutual text treated Paul Laxton’s collection of selected essays by historical geographer and iconoclast J.B. Harley: The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2001). Members of the group acknowledged the value of reading maps as cultural texts that are ideologically encoded, from the margins to the center. We found the greatest interest in his treatment of particular maps or periods in map history, among them discussions of differences in early modern European regimes’ containment of new territorial discoveries, eighteenth century English domestic and international cartography, and the earliest maps (17th century) of North American colonies (later, New England).
We noted the limitation of Harley’s view in reading map history entirely through the lens of professional cartography and its print products. Harley is mum on the question of maps in manuscript. He has little to say about maps produced by non-professionals, except insofar as native guides provided European surveyors with oral reports or temporary sketches in the dirt. Moreover, the range of Harley’s discussion was limited almost entirely to European cartography from the early modern period forward, with few cross-cultural comparisons of cartographic products.
This produced, for some of our readers, a tautology in which Harley finds the interests of the landed, wealthy, and powerful of a society largely determine the messages of maps, both explicit and implicit, and those interpreting the ideology of maps are then left to tease out just what those messages might be for that segment of European society at a given historical moment. The interests of cultural elites is presented as more unified, we thought, than was actual or probable — we found no attempt to view maps as a site of tensions within the upper ranks or with those on the ascent. This tautology, moreover, was attached in discussion to Harley’s reliance on Foucauldian technique, which tends to consider institutional power and top-down distributions of social power, however cryptically encoded. I found myself that Harley throws over Derridean method in favor of Foulcaut’s when working to the telos of his readings, finding a conclusion about the instability of texts and their systems of signfication dissatisfying in the face of the potential to touch upon broader, and actual, social impacts of discursive formations.
However, I was skeptical of some challenges to a top-down reading of map history in the broad. I’ll grant that scholars ought not to accept generalized claims easily, but I am inclined by my own studies and anthropological hobbiest’s interests in cultures Western and non, to consider comprehensive and authoritative maps very likely to have been the product of cultural elites, either directly through their order or indirectly through an appeal to their patronage or interests in hopes of currying favor and representing the world as it is most accepted as being (which itself reinforces a status quo). Perhaps such maps are the work of imperial projects, from whatever people or region they spring. That much tautology I will acknowledge.
When the example of indigenous cultures having sophisticated cartographic knowledge was raised as a specific means of challenging Harley’s top-down readings of map history, I wanted to acknowledge that sophistication, especially with respect to inhabited and explored territories, but also to suggest that indigenous cultures such as those in Meso-America (Aztec in particular) were also capable of domestic imperialism and likely used the cartographic methods they had developed to secure and announce territory. I claimed the Aztecs were a society founded on a pronounced hierarchy (nobles on top, with priest and warriors, then a small merchant segment, with a foundation of slaves), and that their tactics in managing knowledge and territory both were likely to be as markedly unpleasant as the Europeans’. There is some evidence, for example, that Aztecs of one city-state sent around the skinned palms and faces of human sacrificial offerings to allied neighboring settlements as a forewarning against dissent as well as a notice of spiritual obeyance. I am certainly no expert in Aztec society (my understanding is based on the time of the Triple Alliance and its encounter with Cortez), but I have found further discussion and a native narrative map since that seem to support my argument. For example, the small merchant class of this period was often used by the ruling class (royals, nobles) to spy in neighboring territories, and one Aztec map I viewed showed a plan of attack against neighbors.
At least one reader reacted to the politicization of historical map study, saying that with the advent of GIS and other quantitative methods, it would be a shame if we now only limited ourselves to such considerations. We need not regress to a time when these issues were ignored or did not matter, but we need to consider, too, what questions we can now explore through newly available technologies. Our next meeting will be held November 11 from 5:30-8:30 (contact Max Edelson for location and registration details); we will gather for an introduction to GIS offered by ATLAS (Maryalice Wu leads the section of interest to us, as supervisor of graduate statistical and GIS consultants) and generously funded through IPRH’s reading group stipend.
Kelly Searsmith
