NEG

1nc
The affirmative operates against the backdrop of a
cartographic politics designed to map the world as an
exploitable, calculable resource for US domination.
Harley J.B (John Brian Harley (24 July 1932 20 December 1991) was a
geographer, cartographer, and map historian at the universities of Birmingham,
Liverpool, Exeter and WisconsinMilwaukee. He helped found the History of
Cartography Project and is the founding co-editor of the resulting The History of
Cartography. In recent years, Harley's work has gained broad prominence among
geographers and social theorists, and it has contributed greatly to the emerging
discipline of critical cartography
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/p/passages/4761530.0003.008/--deconstructing-the-map?
rgn=main;view=fulltext Accessed 7/29/2015 Published 1992
For the final stage in the argument I return to Foucault. In doing so I am mindful of Foucault's criticism of Derrida that he attempted
"to restrict interpretation to a purely syntactic and textual level," [71] a world where political realities no longer exist. Foucault, on
the other hand, sought to uncover "the social practices that the text itself both reflects and employs" and to "reconstruct the
technical and material framework in which it arose." [72] Though deconstruction is useful in helping to change the epistemological

my final concern is with its social and

political dimensions, and with understanding how the map works in
society as a form of power-knowledge. This closes the circle to a context-dependent form of
cartographic history. We have already seen how it is possible to view cartography
as a discoursea system which provides a set of rules for the
representation of knowledge embodied in the images we define as maps
and atlases. It is not difficult to find for mapsespecially those produced and manipulated by the statea niche in the
climate, and in encouraging a rhetorical reading of cartography,

"power/knowledge matrix of the modern order." [73] Especially where maps are ordered by government (or are derived from such

it can be seen how they extend and reinforce the legal statutes,
territorial imperatives, and values stemming from the exercise of political
power. Yet to understand how power works through cartographic discourse and the effects of that power in society further
maps)

dissection is needed. A simple model of domination and subversion is inadequate and I propose to draw a distinction between
external and internal power in cartography. This ultimately derives from Foucault's ideas about power-knowledge, but this particular
formulation is owed to Joseph Rouse's recent book on Knowledge and Power [74], where a theory of the internal power of science is
in turn based on his reading of Foucault. The most familiar sense of power in cartography is that of power external to maps and

This serves to link maps to the centers of political power . Power is

exerted on cartography. Behind most cartographers there is a patron; in innumerable instances the makers of
cartographic texts were responding to external needs. Power is also exercised with cartography .
Monarchs, ministers, state institutions, the Church, have all initiated
programs of mapping for their own ends. In modern Western society maps
quickly became crucial to the maintenance of state power to its boundaries, to its
commerce, to its internal administration, to control of populations, and to its military strength. Mapping soon
became the business of the state: cartography is early nationalized . The
state guards its knowledge carefully: maps have been universally
censored, kept secret and falsified. In all these cases maps are linked to
what Foucault called the exercise of 'juridical power. ' [75] The map becomes a 'juridical
territory': it facilitates surveillance and control. Maps are still used to control our lives in
innumerable ways. A mapless society, though we may take the map for
granted, would now be politically unimaginable . All this is power with the help of maps. It is an
mapping.

external power, often centralized and exercised bureaucratically, imposed from above, and manifest in particular acts or phases of

What is also central to the effects of

maps in society is what may be defined as the power internal to
cartography. The focus of inquiry therefore shifts from the place of cartography in a juridical system of power to the
political effects of what cartographers do when they make maps. Cartographers manufacture power:
they create a spatial panopticon. It is a power embedded in the map text.
We can talk about the power of the map just as we already talk about the
power of the word or about the book as a force for change . In this sense maps have
deliberate policy. I come now to the important distinction.

politics. [76] It is a power that intersects and is embedded in knowledge. It is universal. Foucault writes of The omnipresence of
power: not because it has the privilege of consolidating everything under its invincible unity, but because it is produced from one
moment to the next, at every point, or rather in every relation from one point to another. Power is everywhere; not because it
embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere. [77] Power comes from the map and it traverses the way maps are
made. The key to this internal power is thus cartographic process. By this I mean the way maps are compiled and the categories of
information selected; the way they are generalized, a set of rules for the abstraction of the landscape; the way the elements in the
landscape are formed into hierarchies; and the way various rhetorical styles that also reproduce power are employed to represent

To catalogue the world is to appropriate it so that all these

technical processes represent acts of control over its image which extend
beyond the professed uses of cartography. The world is disciplined. The world is normalized. We
are prisoners in its spatial matrix. For cartography as much as other forms of knowledge, "All social action
the landscape.

flows through boundaries determined by classification schemes." [79] An analogy is to what happens to data in the cartographer's
workshop and what happens to people in the disciplinary institutionsprisons, schools, armies, factoriesdescribed by Foucault:
[80] in both cases a process of normalization occurs. Or similarly, just as in factories we standardize our manufactured goods so in
our cartographic workshops we standardize our images of the world. Just as in the laboratory we create formulaic understandings of
the processes of the physical world so too, in the map, nature is reduced to a graphic formula. [81] The power of the map-maker was

Yet this is
not consciously done and it transcends the simple categories of 'intended'
and 'unintended' altogether. I am not suggesting that power is deliberately or centrally exercised. It is a local
knowledge which at the same time is universal. It usually passes unnoticed. The map is a silent
arbiter of power. What have been the effects of this 'logic of the map' upon human consciousness, if I may adapt
not generally exercised over individuals but over the knowledge of the world made available to people in general.

Marshall McLuhan's phrase ("logic of print")? [82] Like him I believe we have to consider for maps the effects of abstraction,
uniformity, repeatability, and visuality in shaping mental structures, and in imparting a sense of the places of the world .

It is
the disjunction between those senses of place, and many alternative
visions of what the world is, or what it might be, that has raised questions
about the effect of cartography in society. Thus, Theodore Roszak writes The cartographers are
talking about their maps and not landscapes. That is why what they say frequently becomes so paradoxical when translated into

When they forget the difference between map and landscape

and when they permit or persuade us to forget that differenceall sorts of
liabilities ensue. [83] One of these 'liabilities' is that maps, by articulating the world in mass-produced and stereotyped
ordinary language.

images, express an embedded social vision. Consider, for example, the fact that the ordinary road atlas is among the best selling
paperback books in the United States [84] and then try to gauge how this may have affected ordinary Americans' perception of their
country. What sort of an image of America do these atlases promote ? On the one
hand, there is a patina of gross simplicity. Once off the interstate highways the landscape dissolves into a generic world of bare
essentials that invites no exploration. Context is stripped away and place is no longer important. On the other hand, the maps reveal

Their silences are also inscribed on the page: where,

on the page, is the variety of nature, where is the history of the
landscape, and where is the space-time of human experience in such
anonymized maps? [85] The question has now become: do such empty images have their consequences in the way we
the ambivalence of all stereotypes.

think about the world? Because all the world is designed to look the same, is it easier to act upon it without realizing the social
effects? It is in the posing of such questions that the strategies of Derrida and Foucault appear to clash. For Derrida, if meaning is
undecidable so must be, pari passu, the measurement of the force of the map as a discourse of symbolic action. In ending, I prefer
to align myself with Foucault in seeing all knowledge [86]and hence cartographyas thoroughly enmeshed with the larger battles

Maps are not external to these struggles to alter power

relations. The history of map use suggests that this may be so and that
maps embody specific forms of power and authority. Since the Renaissance they have
changed the way in which power was exercised. In colonial North America, for example, it was
easy for Europeans to draw lines across the territories of Indian nations
which constitute our world.

without sensing the reality of their political identity. [87] The map allowed
them to say, "This is mine; these are the boundaries." [88] Similarly, in innumerable wars
since the sixteenth century it has been equally easy for the generals to fight battles with colored pins and dividers rather than
sensing the slaughter of the battlefield. [89] Or again, in our own society, it is still easy for bureaucrats, developers and 'planners' to
operate on the bodies of unique places without measuring the social dislocations of 'progress.' While the map is never the reality, in
such ways it helps to create a different reality. Once embedded in the published text the lines on the map acquire an authority that

Maps are authoritarian images. Without our being aware of

it maps can reinforce and legitimate the status quo. Sometimes agents of
change, they can equally become conservative documents. But in either
case the map is never neutral. Where it seems to be neutral it is the sly
"rhetoric of neutrality" [90] that is trying to persuade us.
may be hard to dislodge.

<Insert Specific Link(s)>

These cartographies calculate the usefulness of political
knowledge in terms of its justifications for violence the other
forms of knowledge are forced to the periphery
Sundberg, University of Helsinki political science professor, 9
(Jan, Published 2009, Eurocentrism, International Encyclopedia of Human
Geography, Volume 3, Pg. 638, JB)
Eurocentrism has been variously defined as an attitude, conceptual apparatus,
or set of empirical beliefs that frame Europe as the primary engine and
architect of world history, the bearer of universal values and reason, and
the pinnacle and therefore model of progress and development. In Eurocentric
narratives, the superiority of Europe is evident in its achievements in economic and
political systems, technologies, and the high quality of life enjoyed by its societies.
Eurocentrism is more than banal ethnocentric prejudice, however, as it is
intimately tied to and indeed constituted in the violence and asymmetry of
colonial and imperial encounters. Eurocentrism is what makes this
violence not only possible, but also acceptable or justifiable. As such,
Eurocentrism is the condition of possibility for Orientalism, the discursive and
institutional grid of power/knowledge integral to the production and domination of
the Orient as Other. Significant critiques of Eurocentrism emerged in the context of
post-World War II shifts in geopolitical power, including anticolonial and anti-imperial
revolutionary movements. Even so, Eurocentric epistemologies continue to
haunt the production of knowledge in geography in significant and
disturbing ways. In conventional Eurocentric tellings, Europe is the engineer
and architect of modern agricultural, cultural, economic, political, and
scientific innovations, including capitalism, democracy, and industrial,
medical, and green revolutions. Concepts like the rise of Europe and the
European miracle exemplify Eurocentric models of history and development.
Europes so-called rise is explained in terms of superior social and environmental
qualities deemed internal to it: inventiveness, rationality, capacity for abstract
thought, outward looking, freedom loving, along with advantageous climate and
geographies. Many of these cultural traits are said to be inherited from the
Bible lands and ancient Greece and Rome framed as Europes ancestral
hearths though their highest development is said to have been achieved
first in imperial England and then the United States of America hence the

term Euro-Americanism. In these narratives, progress and development ride what

James Blaut calls the westbound Orient Express. As a consequence of the
perceived historical movement of the westbound express, Europe has morphed
into the West and now the Global North. These uid geographic
imaginaries may refer to not only Europe and white settler societies like
the United States, Canada, and Australia, but also Japan and any other region
or group that envisions itself as the possessor or inheritor of European culture,
values, and academic, political, and economic systems. At the same time, however,
particular places within the West such as the United States are privileged
as the source of universal theory, while others like New Zealand are
framed as limited by their particularities. Latin America and the Caribbean
were colonized by Europeans, but are rarely included in the West. In short,
it may not always be clear to what exactly these geographical imaginaries refer, but
they are used as though they correspond to a commonsensical external reality.
Through their repetition in everyday speech and academic and
institutional narratives, that reality is continuously brought into being .

Deconstruct cartography: revealing and affirming the

ambiguities of mapping creates a space which scrambles the
coordinates of cartographic calculation
Harley J.B (John Brian Harley (24 July 1932 20 December 1991) was a
geographer, cartographer, and map historian at the universities of Birmingham,
Liverpool, Exeter and WisconsinMilwaukee. He helped found the History of
Cartography Project and is the founding co-editor of the resulting The History of
Cartography. In recent years, Harley's work has gained broad prominence among
geographers and social theorists, and it has contributed greatly to the emerging
discipline of critical cartography
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/p/passages/4761530.0003.008/--deconstructing-the-map?
rgn=main;view=fulltext Accessed 7/29/2015 Published 1992
To move inward from the question of cartographic rulesthe social
context within which map knowledge is fashionedwe have to turn to the
cartographic text itself. The word 'text' is deliberately chosen. It is now
generally accepted that the model of text can have a much wider
application than to literary texts alone. To non-book texts such as musical compositions and
architectural structures we can confidently add the graphic texts we call maps. [42] It has been said that "what
constitutes a text is not the presence of linguistic elements but the act of construction" so that maps, as
"constructions employing a conventional sign system," [43] become texts. With Barthes we could say they
"presuppose a signifying consciousness" that it is our business to uncover. [44] 'Text' is certainly a better metaphor
for maps than the mirror of nature. Maps are a cultural text. By accepting their textuality we are able to embrace a
number of different interpretative possibilities. Instead of just the transparency of clarity we can discover the

Rather
than working with a formal science of communication, or even a sequence
of loosely related technical processes, our concern is redirected to a
history and anthropology of the image, and we learn to recognize the
narrative qualities of cartographic representation [45] as well as its claim to
provide a synchronous picture of the world. All this, moreover, is likely to
lead to a rejection of the neutrality of maps, as we come to define their
pregnancy of the opaque. To fact we can add myth, and instead of innocence we may expect duplicity.

intentions rather than the literal face of representation, and as we begin

to accept the social consequences of cartographic practices. I am not suggesting
that the direction of textual enquiry offers a simple set of techniques for reading either contemporary or historical
maps. In some cases we will have to conclude that there are many aspects of their meaning that are undecidable.
[46] Deconstruction, as discourse analysis in general, demands a closer and deeper reading of the cartographic text
than has been the general practice in either cartography or the history of cartography. It may be regarded as a

"To deconstruct," it is argued, is to reinscribe and

resituate meanings, events and objects within broader movements and
structures; it is, so to speak, to reverse the imposing tapestry in order to
expose in all its unglamorously dishevelled tangle the threads constituting
the well-heeled image it presents to the world. [47] The published map also has a 'wellsearch for alternative meanings.

heeled image' and our reading has to go beyond the assessment of geometric accuracy, beyond the fixing of
location, and beyond the recognition of topographical patterns and geographies. Such interpretation begins from
the premise that the map text may contain "unperceived contradictions or duplicitous tensions" [48] that
undermine the surface layer of standard objectivity. Maps are slippery customers. In the words of W. J. T. Mitchell,
writing of languages and images in general, we may need to regard them more as "enigmas, problems to be

We should regard them

"as the sort of sign that presents a deceptive appearance of naturalness
and transparence concealing an opaque, distorting, arbitrary mechanism
of representation." [49] Throughout the history of modern cartography in the
West, for example, there have been numerous instances of where maps
have been falsified, of where they have been censored or kept secret, or
of where they have surreptitiously contradicted the rules of their
proclaimed scientific status. [50] As in the case of these practices, map
deconstruction would focus on aspects of maps that many interpreters
have glossed over. Writing of "Derrida's most typical deconstructive moves," Christopher Norris notes
that deconstruction is the vigilant seeking-out of those 'aporias,' blindspots
or moments of self-contradiction where a text involuntarily betrays the
tension between rhetoric and logic, between what it manifestly means to
say and what it is nonetheless constrained to mean. To 'deconstruct' a
piece of writing is therefore to operate a kind of strategic reversal, seizing
on precisely those unregarded details (casual metaphors, footnotes, incidental turns of
argument) which are always, and necessarily, passed over by interpreters of a
more orthodox persuasion. For it is here, in the margins of the textthe 'margins,' that is, as defined
by a powerful normative consensusthat deconstruction discovers those same unsettling forces at work. [51] A
good example of how we could deconstruct an early mapby beginning
with what have hitherto been regarded as its 'casual metaphors' and
'footnotes'is provided by recent studies reinterpreting the status of
decorative art on the European maps of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. Rather than being inconsequential marginalia, the emblems in cartouches and decorative title
explained, prison-houses which lock the understanding away from the world."

pages can be regarded as basic to the way they convey their cultural meaning, [52] and they help to demolish the
claim of cartography to produce an impartial graphic science. But the possibility of such a revision is not limited to

a deconstructive strategy by beginning in the 'margins'

of the contemporary map. They also treat the map as a text and, drawing
on the ideas of Roland Barthes of myth as a semiological system [54],
develop a forceful social critique of cartography which though structuralist
in its approach is deconstructionist in its outcome. They begin, deliberately, with the
historic "decorative" maps. A

margins of the map, or rather with the subject matter that is printed on its verso: One side is taken up by an
inventory of North Carolina points of interestillustrated with photos of, among other things, a scimitar horned oryx
(resident in the state zoo), a Cherokee woman making beaded jewelry, a ski lift, a sand dune (but no cities)a ferry
schedule, a message of welcome from the then governor, and a motorist's prayer ("Our heavenly Father, we ask

this day a particular blessing as we take the wheel of our car ... "). On the other side, North Carolina, hemmed in by
the margins of pale yellow South Carolinas and Virginias, Georgias and Tennessees, and washed by a pale blue
Atlantic, is represented as a meshwork of red, black, blue, green and yellow lines on a white background, thickened
at the intersections by roundels of black or blotches of pink. To the left of ... [the] title is a sketch of the fluttering
state flag. To the right is a sketch of a cardinal (state bird) on a branch of flowering dogwood (state flower)
surmounting a buzzing honey bee arrested in midflight (state insect). [55] What is the meaning of these emblems?
Are they merely a pleasant ornament for the traveler or can they inform us about the social production of such state
highway maps? A deconstructionist might claim that such meanings are undecidable, but it is also clear that the
State Highway Map of North Carolina is making other dialogical assertions behind its mask of innocence and
transparence. I am not suggesting that these elements hinder the traveler getting from point A to B, but that there
is a second text within the map.

Topic Links

L Japan Okinawa
The affirmative misunderstands the history behind USinuenced Japanese mapping which allows them to overlook
the colonial violence resulting from the cartographic practices;
mapping was not just a tool of the colonizer, its the lifeblood
of day-to-day operations of the state
Fredman 12 [Dr. David Fedman, Instructor of Japanese, Korean, and world
history at the University of California, Irvine. Research interests include East Asian
cartography, Japanese mountaineering history, and the history of the earth sciences
in Asia. Japanese Colonial Cartography: Maps, Mapmaking, and the Land Survey in
Colonial Korea, The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol 10, Issue 52, No. 4, December 24,
2012.]
maps were tools of empire (Adas 1990; Bayly 2000; Headrick
Indispensable to governance, surveillance,
resource extraction, and countless other imperial initiatives, maps formed the
lifeblood of the day-to-day operations of the colonial state. But the impetus
behind colonial cartography was more than simply utilitarian, for, as a growing
Like railroads, telegraphs, and guns,
1981; Mitchell 2002; D. Yang 2011).

number of scholars have shown, the process of surveying was as important as the product (Atkins 2010; Burnett

And
science, pregnant as it was with notions of civilization, development, and
material progress, sat squarely at the heart of the imperial project. Statistics,
2000; Edney 1990; Harley and Laxton 1998; Pratt 1992). The survey, after all, made for good science.

blueprints, ethnographies: all formed building blocks upon which Japans civilizing mission in Korea would be
constructed (Henry 2006; Oh 2008).

Maps were no different. Cloaked in the mantle of

scientific precision, the triangulation survey showcased Japans superior methods. The observations of
Norbert Weber, a Benedictine monk who traveled to Korea in 1911, testify to this point: At each instrument stand,
he wrote, three to four assistants and a crowd of wondering spectators, who gather in wonder at the undreamed of
science no less than at the instrument with its pipes and glasses and spirit levels. What a great pleasure it must be
for the local Japanese surveyors to be able to put their science on show like this (Uden 2003, 58 ).

As some
of the first government-general employees to set foot in remote towns,
moreover, land surveyorswho were sometimes accompanied by local
police and officialsbecame for many Koreans the face of Japanese officialdom. It
is not hyperbole to state that the history of Japanese colonial cartography is terra
incognita for English-language scholarship.3 While scholars writing in
English have become attentive to the ways in which Japan immersed itself
in the conventions of international law (Dudden 2004), criminal procedure (Botsman 2005), and other
hallmarks of the modern nation-state (Ericson 1996; Frhstck 2003; Walker 2005), few have explored
the ways in which it sought out and appropriated international
cartographic norms. Fewer still have attended to the ways in which maps
and mapmakers figured into Japans administration of its colonies . In the case
of Korea, only the cadastral survey (of which more later) has garnered significant scholarly attention, and existing
studies maintain a laser-like focus on issues relating to the expropriation of Korean land by the government-general
and settler colonialists. The geodetic aspects of Japans land survey of Korea, as a result, have received precious
little scholarly attention, despite a growing body of literature addressing mapmaking and imperialism in other
colonial contexts (Bassett 1994; Edney 1990; B. Harley 1989; Mitchell 2002; Mundy 2000; Scott 1999; Thongchai
1994) and substantial literature on the subject in Japanese and Korean (in Japanese, Kobayashi 2009, 2011;
Miyajima 1991; Takagi 1966; in Korean, Hanguk Yoksa Yonguhoe 2010; Kim 1997).

Starting from the early 1900s with the triangulation survey

project, the U.S. and other imperial forces have used
cartography as a means of expanding their authority over the
sovereign territory of Japan to implement their colonial project
Fredman 12 [Dr. David Fedman, Instructor of Japanese, Korean, and world
history at the University of California, Irvine. Research interests include East Asian
cartography, Japanese mountaineering history, and the history of the earth sciences
in Asia. Japanese Colonial Cartography: Maps, Mapmaking, and the Land Survey in
Colonial Korea, The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol 10, Issue 52, No. 4, December 24,
2012.]
Though perhaps oversized, Helmerts confidence was not unfounded, for the geodetic sciencesthose concerned
with the measurement and mapping of the earthwere then in the midst of a veritable boom brought about by a
host of scientific advancements. None of these advancements inspired more excitement or commanded more

the triangulation survey: a mapmaking technique that,

though old by the time of the 1909 conference, offered a level of precision previously
unimaginable when coupled with the cutting-edge surveying instruments
of the time. Not surprisingly, the IGA was at the vanguard of the international triangulation project. Founded
international attention than

in 1886 for the purpose of forming an association through which the geodetic work carried on by various

this body quickly

established itself as the international hothouse for scientifically rigorous
cartography.1 Although standardizing the methods of mapmaking was not an
explicit goal of the IGA, by virtue of the active interchange of ideas, commented one
governments could be compared, harmonized, and rendered more efficient,

contemporary expert, the body exert[ed] a strong influence in making the methods used in various countries more
nearly uniform and progressive (Reinsch 1911, 68). This is especially true of the tools and techniques of the
triangulation survey, which dominated the 1909 agenda. If triangulation dominated the content of the 1909
conference,

the worlds colonial powers (namely Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and
the United States) dominated its composition. This is in no small part
because, as this paper will show, colonialism and cartography were deeply
intertwined undertakings. Scientifically rigorous maps, after all, were the
lingua franca of international sovereignty, making them a sine qua non for
the acquisition of and authority over colonial territories. Indeed, whatever the
differences in the colonial policies and ambitions of the s o-called Great
Powers, all of these nations shared an awareness of the instrumental role
that cartographic knowledge played in the imperial project. As such, these
nations often dispatched their brightest cartographic minds to their
colonies, where they oversaw the production of cutting-edge maps, most
of which were realized through the triangulation survey. One need only
inspect the list of delegates to the 1909 conference to gain a sense of the
close ties between the geodetic sciences and colonialism. Among those present
were Colonel Sir W. Morris, chief surveyor of Great Britains Geodetic Survey of South Africa; Major LenoxConyngham, then director of the Great Triangulation Survey of India; General Bassot of France, then president of the
association and formerly a chief surveyor for the French Geodetic Survey in Algeria; and many others (Helmert
1909, 375).

The US mapping conquest in Japan set the backbone for

modern statist development and facilitated the exercise of
state control
Fredman 12 [Dr. David Fedman, Instructor of Japanese, Korean, and world
history at the University of California, Irvine. Research interests include East Asian
cartography, Japanese mountaineering history, and the history of the earth sciences
in Asia. Japanese Colonial Cartography: Maps, Mapmaking, and the Land Survey in
Colonial Korea, The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol 10, Issue 52, No. 4, December 24,
2012.]
the survey process adumbrated above not only met the
cartographic standards and expectations of the international community,
From a technical standpoint,

but surpassed them.5 Indeed, despite Japans late arrival to the study of geodetic triangulation, it swiftly and firmly

The following exchange

between U.S. Secretary of Commerce William Redfield and William Bowie, then chief of
geodesy in the United States, at a 1917 hearing of the House
Congressional Appropriations Committee regarding Americas own
triangulation survey plans, throws this point into sharp relief: Mr. Bowie: It will take about $36,000
established itself as a key international player in the geodetic sciences.

for the triangulation and $140,000 for the precise leveling [of the United States]. I should hope that we may be able
to get this work done very much more quickly than that, and this is what we feel is absolutely necessary. Now, I can
show you by way of comparison some maps of Europe and of India. Secretary Redfield: This map shows Japan?
Bowie: Yes; that is Japan, which is on the same scale as the United States. Redfield: Is Japan more advanced than
we are in that regard? Bowie: Yes, sir; you can see that the areas in which they have no precise leveling are very
much smaller than ours; in fact, we have some areas quite as large as Japan without a single precise level bench
mark in it. Redfield: Are we equal to other nations in this work or behind them? Bowie: In accuracy we are the
equal of the other nations. As to the amount of work done we are very far behind. Japan started its geodetic
work later than we did, but they saw the economic advantage of it and pushed it to a rapid completion; that is, the
framework. I would call it the backbone. It corresponds to the steelwork of a skyscraper and you have to put up your
steelwork first in building a skyscraper. (United States Congress House Committee on Appropriations 1917, 1100

attest to the keen interest the international

community had in Japans cartographic endeavors but also to the vital
importance these surveys held for statist development. A backbone for
economic planning, these surveys provided the blueprints with which the
state would draw up its modernizing agenda. It is unsurprising that the government1101) Bowies words not only

general in Korea hastened to produce a set of such maps. In addition to clarifying capital assets, landholding

these surveys facilitated a wide range of stateled planning projects that were central to Japans vision for reforms and
progress. Although planners and administrators also employed their own sets of specialized maps, the
coherent and comprehensive spatial system provided by the triangulation
survey doubtless served to expedite the planning and implementation of
many such projects. In the years following the survey, state planners,
bureaucrats, military officials, and police repeatedly turned their gaze to
the maps and registers produced by the survey as they confronted the
challenges of day-to-day governance and state-driven enterprise. In this
way, the map, like the host of other ethnographic surveys conducted by
the government-general (Henry 2006), informed a wide range of decisions
about the application of resources, governance, and the exercise of state
power.
patterns, and administrative jurisdictions,

Attempting to inscribe a subjectivity onto the Okinawan body

only reinforces cartographic essentialism of being linked to the
Japan
Glenn D Hook & Richard Siddle (Professor at Hokkaido University since April 2011, previously
Lecturer in the School of East Asian Studies, University of Sheffield, UK from 1997. Research interests include race
and ethnicity, nationalism, minority peoples in Japan, multiculturalism, and most recently ethnic and mountain
tourism, approached from the perspectives of modern history and social anthropology. Publications include two
books, another forthcoming, and numerous articles and book chapters.Glenn Hooks research interests are in the
area of the international relations of contemporary Japan, particular in relation to East Asia, as well as in security
and risk in East Asia. His work explores Japans role in the restructuring of the East Asian political economy and
spatial scales of order at the regional, subregional and microregional levels. His work details the role of both state
and nonstate actors in the political, economic and security dimensions of regional relations and how new orders and
sites of governance emerge in the process of global and regional transformations. Japan and Okinawa: Structure
and Subjectivity Accessed: 7/28/2015 Published November 28,

2002

It is important, therefore, that these Okinawan voices are heard. In other words, the structural integration of
Okinawa within this USJapan relationship should not be understood to mean that the role of human agency that

Even a brief glance back through the

history of Ryukyu/ Okinawa provides a wealth of examples of how
Okinawans, both elites and commoners, have attempted to generate and
then impose their own understandings upon the structural realities
encountered. From Sai Ons eighteenth-century vision of Ryukyu (Smits 1999) through to the impassioned
is, Okinawans as volitional actors has no place.

resistance to Japanese annexation by Okinawans in self-imposed exile at the Chinese imperial court; from the
campaign for civil and political rights led by Jahana Noboru in the 1890s to the island-wide movement against US
appropriation of land in the 1950s; from the movement for reversion to Japan to the current anti-base struggles; at
various times, in a multitude of forms and involving a wide and disparate range of individuals or groups,

Okinawans have refused to accept predetermined structural prescriptions

of who they are or how they should behave. This continues with
contemporary struggles not only against the US bases but, equally
importantly, over the contested terrain of Okinawan history and memory,
and against the cultural industries of the mainland and their attempts to
inscribe their versions of authentic Okinawan identity and culture. We
need, therefore, to balance a consideration of Okinawas structural subordination with an investigation
into Okinawan subjectivity how Okinawan identities are constructed and how
these inform both the understandings and actions of ordinary Okinawans
themselves. The powerful structural constraints discussed above have their symbolic counterparts in
ideological and discursive formations within which Okinawans are produced as subjects, but which they can also

Attempts by outsiders to define an authentic Okinawan

identity have already been mentioned. Other historic examples include not
only discourses of Okinawan inferiority and backwardness, but also the
rhetoric of assimilation to an idealized and homogeneous Japanese
identity . These positions have been articulated not only by mainlanders but even by elite Okinawans
appropriate or contest.

themselves in their desire to share in the modernity and progress they identified with Japan (Siddle 1998).

Recent discussions of the suppression of the anti-base movement in

Okinawa, for instance, have largely ignored the subjectivity and volition
i.e. agency, of ordinary Okinawans. In total 1.3 million men and women live in Okinawa and care
must be taken not to simply ignore their role and to rush headlong into a strident condemnation of the heavyhanded tactics employed by the Japanese and US authorities, as if all would be well except for Okinawas structural
subordination. Of course, this is not meant to be taken as our support of such tactics .

The point is rather

that an overemphasis on the subversion of the democratic process

through deception, coercion and economic blackmail, while undeniably a

factor in the structural wedding of Okinawa to Japan and the US, can
nevertheless imply that Okinawans are weak, passive and naive. It is far from
unusual for them to be regarded not as agents in charge of their own destiny, but as ciphers who seem not to know

Invidiously, outsiders sometimes seem to feel better

judges of what Okinawans need and deserve (an accusation that this volume, too, cannot
entirely avoid). Or, equally unhelpfully, Okinawans are portrayed and even
idealized, in an atavistic return to former days, as a peaceloving, idyllic
and harmonious community. Indeed, one recent best-seller on both sides of the Atlantic presents
what is best for themselves.

Okinawa as the real Shangri-la with Okinawans as the healthiest and longest-lived population in the world, due
primarily to their happy and stress-free existence (Willcox et al. 2001). Such gross stereotypes disguise real
problems of home-grown yakuza and bosozoku violence, high divorce and alcoholism rates, school bullying and
other social ills that simply cannot be laid at the door of the US barracks. It is therefore high time to shift the focus
towards the complex ways in which Okinawan perceptions of themselves and their relationships intersect with the
powerful economic and political structures within which their lives are enmeshed. This is not simply blaming the
victim. Many Okinawans may indeed be complicit in their own subordination, but we need also to seek the causes
of that in their own understandings and choices, rather than merely in the naked exercise of power. This
acknowledgement of a primacy of place for agency in any discussion of Okinawa leads ineluctably to a further key
question can we even speak about Okinawans at all? Is the term merely an empty categorical vessel for interring
the inhabitants of Okinawa prefecture, which would then include the numerous Filipinos, Indians and even ex-US
servicemen who have settled in Okinawa, and exclude those born in Okinawan communities in Kansai and
elsewhere? Or, is it freighted instead with the recognition of a collective identity, a sense of belonging to a larger
community of Okinawans defined by civic and/or ethnic bonds? And are we to accept that, if indeed this identity
does exist, it is in some way uncontested, monolithic and capable of incorporating or disguising the diversity and
complexity within this over-determined space, Okinawa? Actors on the stage of Okinawan politics, from former
governor O ta Masahide to local activists like Takara Ben, argue just this, and shape the content of that identity or
the narrative of its formation in the service of their own, immediate agendas. It is precisely for this reason that the
politics of identity and its analysis that is core to these chapters is not a mere pandering to the current academic
fashions; it is rather a blunt recognition of how central these questions are to an understanding of Okinawa today.

What makes it so is that boundaries are not

set in stone but are contested and remain in a constant state of ux. Put
another way, the dislocation between the formally inscribed legal
boundaries of the Japanese state, which identify cartographic Okinawa,
and informally inscribed cultural boundaries, which help mark Okinawans
self-inscribed identity as Okinawans, is one factor that fuels identity
politics in the Ryukyus. The other major factor is the discontent over
Okinawas subordinate incorporation into Japan, which has crystallized
around the issue of the overwhelming US military presence. This combination of
That the matter is complex is not to be denied.

cultural stuff with present grievance produces a rich amalgam of potential identities for Okinawa and the
Okinawans that can be linked to political positions. At one extreme, writers and activists such as Takara Ben or Kina
Shokichi still hold to the political goal of complete independence from Japan. By excavating the historical symbols
of the old Ryukyu kingdom, which bespeak a vibrant independent culture, wide-ranging trade relations throughout
Southeast Asia and a high degree of political independence, these modern-day freedom fighters use the pen or
guitar (or more usually the Okinawan stringed instrument, the sanshin), but not the sword, to try to subvert or
transform these structures. At the other extreme are the all-out supporters of the status quo, who view the benefits
accruing from having returned to the fatherland in 1972 and the employment opportunities generated by the
construction state, tourists and the bases, as ample reward for the irritant of crimes committed by US military

For a majority of
Okinawans, however, gradual and incremental changes in these structural
constraints, leading to improvement in the status quo, rather than its
abrupt or radical transformation, seems to be the order of the day. This is
personnel. As Japanese they remain content with their vested interests.

particularly the case in terms of popular support for a reduction in the number of bases on the islands and their
more equitable distribution around Japan. In a January 1995 prefectural survey, for instance, those polled were
asked to rank the order of preference as to the action the prefectural and central governments should take about
US bases, with the highest three choices favouring return (i.e. closure), 43.3 per cent, an end to military exercises,
15.6 per cent, and an end to noise pollution by the US military (Okinawa Ken Somubu 1998: 256). This, of course,

was even before public anger was aroused to new heights by the rape of a 12-yearold schoolgirl by three US
military personnel. Despite the wide consensus on reducing the bases, the strongest advocate for their reduction,
progressive governor O ta Masahide (19908), lost a tightly fought election in 1998 to the conservative challenger,
Inamine Keiichi. This electoral change in the prefectural governor was the result of a perception, accurate or
otherwise, that the determined stand of O ta against the bases threatened the economic future of the prefecture.
The complex linkages and contradictions between economic realities and the US bases were exposed once more,
and many Okinawans voted for their livelihoods first. Nevertheless, the new governor has also pushed for a
reduction, albeit by different means, but has proved more compliant in his negotiations with Tokyo than O ta.
Politicization of the base issue has turned not just the present, but also the past, into a site of contestation.

For

many, the bases are inextricably linked with a historical narrative of

victimization that stretches back to the days of the Ryukyu Kingdom.

This
dominant narrative of Okinawan victimization begins with the Satsuma invasion of 1609 and is punctuated with
keywords like Ryukyu shobun, sotetsu jigoku (palm-tree hell the starvation period of the 1920s), tetsu no arashi
(the Typhoon of Steel Battle of Okinawa) and fukki (reversion). It culminates in the kichi mondai (base issue) and

The importance of this victimcentred narrative lies not so much in its validity or otherwise as historical
truth, but in its utility as an ideational resource for the construction and
articulation of a contemporary Okinawan identity politics. The 1995 rape of the
Okinawas unfair treatment at the hands of the central government.

schoolgirl, for instance, was such a powerful event precisely because it resonated within this narrative, the victim
representing yet another sacrificed daughter at the hands of a military occupation, as evocative a symbol as the
pure and innocent student nurses of the Himeyuri brigade killed in 1945. In the event, the rape was appropriated as
a metaphor for the violation of Okinawan territorial and political autonomy, and thus both the gendered nature of
the crime and the pain of the victim were subsumed within a wider nationalist politics of protest (Angst 2001).

L Horn of Africa
The affirmative has misdiagnosed the colonized history of US
intervention in the Horn of Africa- military cartographic
intervention is uniquely responsible for the violence permitted
throughout the region
Bamba 10 [Abou B. Bamba, Assistant Professor of History at Hobart and William
Smith Colleges, emphasis in African history (colonial and postcolonial), U.S.Francophone Africa Relations, Development Studies, Modernization Theory,
Transnational History, Imperialism, Historical Cartography and GIS. Rebirth of a
Strategic Continent: Problematizing Africa as a Geostrategic Zone, African
Geographical Review. 2010, Vol. 29 Issue 1 Page 93-94, Published 2010]
Despite the farfetched nature of some of these discourses as exemplified by Renners scandalous proposal

the cartographic discussions among American geographers and

policymakers yielded practical results on the battlefields in Africa. Since
the northern coastal areas of the continent served as some of the key
theaters of operation during the war, West Africa became strategically
important for the belligerents. In this context, the U.S. government signed an
agreement with Liberia in late December 1943 to ensure the construction of a
port and some other landing facilities to be used by the allied forces (U.S.
(Debres 1986),

Department of State 1944, 38; Duignan and Gann 1984, 304). The strategic importance of Liberia was further
confirmed when U.S. war industries came to rely on the West African countrys supply of rubber after the Japanese

the war brought West Africa into the

geographic purview of American diplomats and projected U.S. power in
the region, this attention resulted in the production of some rather broad, and even
speculative sketches and scripts of Africas geopolitical atlases which were best
epitomized by Renners cartographic Brave New World. Emanating from a group of elite men
with hegemonic aspirations yet largely detached from the human reality
of Africa, the maps proposed by Renner, Boggs, and their peers had little
to say about the peoples inhabiting the various socio-cultural landscapes
that the cartographers were discussing. Nestled in the comfort of their offices in
Washington, DC and New York, the American geographers rarely understood the
anthropological complexities and the human tragedy (i.e., military
conscriptions, crop requisitions, forced cultivation and collection, etc.) that
the war brought onto the continent, or if they did, they decided to turn a blind eye on them.
Maybe this is the very nature of military cartography. Still, as recent studies conducted
in the field of critical geopolitics have suggested, representational practices deployed by
geopoliticians are as much about recording the realities of the earth (or international politics) as they are
implicated in the the legitimation of territorial forms of reasoning and
claims to territory and resources (Dodds 1994, 275). In the specific case of
Africa, as it turned out, those territorial claims to strategic spaces and
resources became even more important in the postwar years when the
onset of the Cold War redefined the Third World as a new battleground to
recruit converts to capitalist or communist modernities. Keen historically-informed
geographic research is needed to unpack the modalities of these
modernities and their operations in Africa (Westad 2005; see also Cloud 2002). For now,
occupation of Southeast Asia (Villard 1944, 102). If

it is clear that both the invention of the African continent as a strategic

place and its eventual incorporation into American geopolitical thinking
does confirm the insight among critical geographers that the craft of the
geocartographer, whether it be scientific or otherwise, is always a
hegemonic practice. In this light, the maps of Africa that American geographerdiplomats and politically-minded geographers produced during the
Second World War and shortly thereafter were far from being innocent
tools that simply helped locate a place. Rather, they were key instruments that
reinforced the knowledge-power nexus that informed the rise of the
American Century (Crampton and Elden 2007; Smith 2003; Tuathail 1996).

The mapping of Africa is been a tool for the U.S. to enforce a

geographical understanding of its own global power
Bamba 10 [Abou B. Bamba, Assistant Professor of History at Hobart and William
Smith Colleges, emphasis in African history (colonial and postcolonial), U.S.Francophone Africa Relations, Development Studies, Modernization Theory,
Transnational History, Imperialism, Historical Cartography and GIS. Rebirth of a
Strategic Continent: Problematizing Africa as a Geostrategic Zone, African
Geographical Review. 2010, Vol. 29 Issue 1 Page 93-94, Published 2010]
African continent has
remained a backwater of U.S. global strategic thinking. While valid in many regards,
Historians of U.S.-Africa relations have indiscriminately argued that the

such characterization does not always capture the rather long interest of the United States in African strategic
spaces as during the 19th century when the U.S. government stationed a fleet off the coast of West Africa to
enforce the ban of the slave trade (Duignan and Gann 1984). Such an interest remained alive in the 20th century,
especially as the world readied itself for the second world war. Even before its official entry into the conflict, the
United States had hinted that access to territory would be a determinant in bringing about the final outcome of
the war. Thus in mid-1940, the Department of State disapproved the territorial concessions that the French
colonial authorities in Indochina had made to imperial Japan, which had made it easier for Japanese troops to
attack China (Hull 1940, 19697; US State Department 1940a, 253). At the same time, the United States was
taking geopolitically motivated measures to consolidate its hemispheric hegemony in Latin America and the
Caribbean. With a view toward reaching this goal, American diplomats signed various conventions with the
appropriate European colonial powers for the provisional administration of their colonies and possessions in the
Americas while at the same time Washington strengthened its bilateral cooperation with the neighboring nationstates south of the Rio Grande (U.S. State Department 1940b, 309; 1944b, 159; 1948, 743). The centrality of
geopolitical and cartographic concerns in these agreements is as striking as it is revealing. As one perceptive

the coming of the American Century was

graphed both on a geographical understanding of U.S. global power and a
normative reading of the cartographic tradition that American
geoscientists were putting in place (Smith 2003). The same concerns that
motivated American officials to sign cartographic treaties with Europeans
and Latin Americans also led U.S. geographer-diplomat Samuel W. Boggs
(1943, 194) to argue that the African continent was as much complementary
to the United States as it was to Europe. In this context, Boggs urged his compatriots to
unlearn some of our old geography and learn some new geography
relating to Africa. Going even beyond this exhortation, which might otherwise have
remained mere wishful thinking, the Chief of the Division of Geography and
Cartography at the Department of State sketched a new map (see Figure 1) which
purported to demonstrate that Africa would be closer to the United States if a
analyst has skillfully pointed out, it showed that

mapmaker substituted an equidistant map design for the popularly used Mercator projection (Boggs 1943, 194
95).

Cartographers have long known that the representation of three-

dimensional earth on a two-dimensional map is a process fraught with

distorting perils (Monmonier 1991; Pickles 2004). But Boggss comments and cartographic militancy
assumed more. In fact, his representational strategy and practice betrayed the willingness of the Department of
State to get closer to a continent whose strategic importance was being tested on a daily basis on the war fronts of
the Second World War (National Geographic 1942; Renner 1948, 408415).

Borders especially in the horn of Africa are maintained by

elitest and excolonial powers that destabilize the region
Amadife and Warhola 93 (Emmanuel N. Amadife associate prof at KSU and James
W. Warhola prof at University of Maine, Africa's Political Boundaries: Colonial
Cartography, the OAU, and the Advisability of Ethno-National Adjustment
International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, Vol. 6, No. 4 (Summer, 1993)
Crystal
The problem of maintaining ex-colonial international borders is clarified by
examining the OAU's position which reinforces geographical rather than
ethno-national identity. The legitimization and enforcement of current
African boundaries is undoubtedly one of the major purposes of the
organization. Yet the very framework of national boundaries, and the
international political-economic system sustaining it, was predicated on
the notion of national identity following the geographical delineation of
peoples; yet that new nationalism, where it has appeared at all, is tenuous
and politically problematical. The Organization of African Unity has played
a crucial role in buttressing inherited borders in post-colonial Africa. In
1964, for instance, the Organization argued that the post-colonial
territorial division constituted a "tangible reality" that must be respected
by its members.' The OAU continues to adhere rather strictly to this
position even after it had long recognized and acknowledged that the
current African borders constitute a serious and permanent cause of
instability/ This proposition is stated most unequivocally by Jackson and Rosberg, according to whom the
inherited territorial boundaries have little substantial indigenous African referents: "[i]t is inappropriate
to refer to the OAU as maintaining traditional African national identities
but rather it is denying them." This neglect, they argued, was evident in
the fruitless Somalian effort to make the territorial border reect the
geographical distribution of its inhabitants scattered in neighboring
Djibouti, Ethiopia, and Kenya.36 The OAU persistently rejected territorial
adjustments either in the form of splitting up large units (like Nigeria), or
of bringing together divided ethnic groups like the Somali. It was Nkrumah
who warned that the "OAU was becoming the most effective spokesman
for the African nationalist boundary order" because of the central political position it had
traditionally taken regarding frontier alteration.37 Maintenance of inherited borders can be
traced in large measure to the institutionalization of Article III of the
OAU's Charter. The question is the wisdom of that stance in the face of
massively changed socio-political conditions, both within Africa and on the
global political and economic scene.

Modern African borders are artifacts of imperialism left from

European powers to weaken and control native populations
Amadife and Warhola 93 (Emmanuel N. Amadife associate prof at KSU and James
W. Warhola prof at University of Maine, Africa's Political Boundaries: Colonial
Cartography, the OAU, and the Advisability of Ethno-National Adjustment
International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, Vol. 6, No. 4 (Summer, 1993)
Crystal
The

Berlin Conference of 1884-1885 completed a pattern of European

colonial encroachment upon Africa. Emblematically, the conference was conducted with no
African participation or even representation. Topographic, demographic, and
ethnographic considerations, to the extent that they mattered at all,
reected European, and not indigenous, interests. Forty-four percent of
the lines limiting colonial borders were (and thus, largely still are) straight lines,
parallel to existing lines or a projection of celestial lines.17 Many of Africa's
current problems are directly related to this partition of Africa as well as
to the particular mode of African "underdevelopment" (whereby the policies and
programs of modernization have evoked or revived ethnic assertiveness but not contributed too much to economic
advance).

The European powers that established colonial borders were not

interested in keeping ethnic groups together; in many cases they were
intent on fractionalizing groups. They were interested primarily in
securing European overlordship with minimal force and cost to
themselves. The Berlin Conference provided a mechanism whereby conflict might be avoided during and after
the partition of Africa.18 The European powers designed a map of their colonies
without respect for the unity of local cultural groups or the character of
indigenous political systems. In some cases, under the new boundaries
large ethnic groups were put together with those with whom they had an
historical animosity.19 "African frontiers," concludes Touval, "were decided upon
in complete disregard of local needs and circumstances ." 20 At the end of
the twentieth century Africa's question is whether or not maintenance of
those frontiers serves the same purpose. New types of "nations" have emerged despite the
ethno-political adventitiousness of their origins. Especially pertinent here are those which
anthropological studies distinguish as groups whose identity is rooted in
"primordial" attachments, and those whose existence is quite clearly a
cartographic creation. Much of so-called postcolonial nationalism in Africa
is of the latter type. It is highly problematic from an ethno-historical
perspective. However, it was not a problem until ethno-historical constituency groups began asserting
themselves under the impetus of social changes coming from other sources. This is precisely what has been

Despite the claim that the scramble

for Africa in the late 19th century was a somewhat rational response and
the only possible way for Europeans to divide and colonize the continent,
the consensus is that Africa was arbitrarily and artificially divided from the
very beginning. 1 The distribution of indigenous populations and many
nomadic or seminomadic groups complicated the task of territorial
divisions.22 Additionally, local political structures and institutions were
frequently no more comprehensive or encompassing than a village, and
happening, and will likely continue to happen, in Africa.

ethnic links were very loose, not providing much information for
ethnographically rational boundary setting even if the colonial powers had
been so inclined. These circumstances are hardly compatible with the
modern notion of a state governing a nationally distinct entity. ' The
boundary-making mechanism adopted was not unlike that developed in a
war situation: it minimized costs to the colonial powers and was executed
on the basis of sparse information. In many cases in Europe and
elsewhere, states were superimposed upon a number of ethnic groups
imperialistically, resulting in self-declared "nation-states" that subsumed
one or a number of subordinated ethnic groups under a dominant
leadership group. Africa is not unique in this mode of nation-state formation. Particularly in subSaharan Africa, however, subsequent processes of ethnic revival or
ethnogenesis have worked so that the question of boundary redefinition
has emerged with greater, not subsiding, force since the original
determination of the nation-state boundary lines. Soon after the wave of
independence in the 1960s it became clear that the post-colonial African
state was inherently fragile both internally and in relation to the outside
world. Externally, forces apparently motivated by material or geo-strategic
gain, or for altruistic reasons, were directly responsible for debilitating
state authority, as experienced, for example, in Congo, Central African
Republic, Angola, Somalia, and Ethiopia. Domestically, the African state has
labored under a lack of national consensus or even the absence of a
cohesive national identity, the problems often compounded by financial
insolvency and other conditions contributing to political instability . Often, the
result has been the emergence of a single ruling party, purportedly supra-ethnic in composition, purpose, and goal.

Yet even such supra-ethnic parties as KANU in Kenya, the MPLA in Angola,
or the even the CCM in Tanzania, have only tenuously served as political
media for postcolonial nationalism with the specter of ethnic conict as
potent in them as elsewhere. The arbitrary partition of Black Africa served
as the geopolitical foundation for inter-ethnic conict over much of the
continent. This phenomenon challenges the occasionally asserted
advantage Western colonial rule purportedly brought to Africa, the
termination of ethnic conict. Now, a generation or two after the end of
that colonialism, the conict appears not only to have resumed, but also
to have been exacerbated by, and entangled with, an ethnographically
spurious nationalism which demands loyalty but is unable to produce it.

Violence from African states is rooted in inequalities and

instability from the borders of the nation states
Amadife and Warhola 93 (Emmanuel N. Amadife associate prof at KSU and James
W. Warhola prof at University of Maine, Africa's Political Boundaries: Colonial
Cartography, the OAU, and the Advisability of Ethno-National Adjustment
International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, Vol. 6, No. 4 (Summer, 1993)
Crystal

African national governments typically exercise weak or tenuous control

over the peoples of their formal jurisdiction, and for a variety of reasons.
The more well-known cases of loss of control over major territories for
significant periods of time such as in Sudan, Zaire, Nigeria, or Ethiopia
should not obscure the problematical character of state control elsewhere
on the continent in the post-colonial era. Indeed, Max Weber's famous
definition of a state, "a corporate group that has a monopoly of legitimate
violence over a territory and its population" merely underscores the
problematical character of the post-colonial African state . Weber's definition was by
the late 1980s clearly not characteristic of the "states" which purportedly ruled many African countries. By the
terms of that definition, many African countries would scarcely qualify as
being de facto states, because of their periodic inability to suppress rival
groups seeking to establish a monopoly of force on all or a portion of the
country's territory. African countries might be seen as doubly artificial as
political units: they were established adventitiously, almost exclusively by
European colonizers; and they have been maintained by African elites in a
manner that has not only failed in many cases to transcend pre-colonial
communal ties, but also to have exacerbated ethnic consciousness and
given it an explicitly political character. How this evolved requires further elaboration.
Political control for many Black African governments has tended to be
confined to a few (or, in some cases only one) major urban areas, with
local enforcement and regional implementation of national laws and
policies often a matter of discretion. This phenomenon frequently reveals
its ethnic dimension when a single ethnic group is dominant nationally .
Political resistance to such a regime therefore frequently assumes the
form of an explicitly inter-ethnic conict. In the vast majority of African
countries the presence of a multiplicity of ethnic groups has made the
process of governance far more complex than envisioned either by the
exiting colonial powers or by the first generation of post-colonial African
leaders. The larger social processes energizing ethnic identity and ethnic
conict in the aftermath of Nigeria's civil war, for example, have been the
subject of much scholarly attention. Though a variety of mechanisms have
evolved in attempts to contain such ethnic conicts, as emerged in the
independence movement of Biafra, some clearly more democratic than
others, the reality is that none has proved capable of overcoming the
potential for ethnic conict within the framework of established by African
state borders inherited from colonialism.

L Persian Gulf/Middle East

The lines drawn in the middle east replicate colonial
imperialist ideology- the aff reaffirms these lines to continue
the process of domination
Culcasi 12 (Karen, Department of Geology and Geography, West Virginia
University, Mapping the Middle East from Within: (Counter-)Cartographies of an
Imperialist Construction 999-1000 Antipode Vol. 44 No. 4 2012,)

In
the
United
States
much
of
and
the
rest
world,
of
both
the
term
idea
of
and
the
are
accepted
readily
parts
of
discourses.
geographical
However,
Arab
states
of
East,
discourses
the
Middle
of
rejected
western
as
constructs.
imperialist
recent
(2010)
titled
Labels
article
a
menagerie
categories,
of
monikers,
Middle
reeks
of
East
Indeed,
imperialism.
the
label
East
Middle
and
boundaries
are
imperialist.
undeniably
The
toponym
actual
originated
in
century
twentieth
reference
British
to
interests
geopolitical
in
the
land
literally
middle
in
of
the
Great
east.
Britains
Further,
and
it
was
British
after
World
War
majority
Istress
that
drew
of
borders
states
generally
considered
core
the
the
Considering
East.
its
roots,
perhaps
it
is
unsurprising
from
within
the
strong
hesitation
accept
and
to
use
this
category.
geographic
Instead,
suggests,
the
defined
western
have
different
geographic
regional
that
delineations
its
character
unity.
1
2

In the United States and much of the rest of the world, both the term and
the idea of the Middle East are readily accepted parts of geographical
discourses.1 However, from within the Arab states of the Middle East,
discourses of the Middle East are often rejected as western
imperialist constructs.2 As described in a recent Economist (2010) article titled Labels and categories, a
menagerie of monikers, the label Middle East reeks of imperialism. Indeed, the label Middle East
and its vague boundaries are undeniably imperialist. The actual toponym
originated in the early twentieth century in reference to British
geopolitical interests in the land that was literally in the middle of Great
Britains east. Further, it was British and French powers after World War
I that drew the majority of the borders of the states that today are
generally considered the core of the Middle East. Considering its direct imperialist roots, it

is perhaps unsurprising that from within the Middle East there is a strong hesitation to accept and use this geographic category.
Instead, as the epigraph suggests, the Arab states of the western defined Middle East have created different regional geographic
delineations that stress its Arab character and unityeveral historians and geographers have shown that, in addition to its being a
western-imperialist construct, the idea, term, definition, and even the location of the Middle East is variable and ambiguous
(Adelson 1995; Bonine 1976; Culcasi 2010; Davison 1960; Fromkin 1991; Keddie 1973; Owen 2000; Whitaker 2004). This paper
provides a unique contribution to critiques of western constructions of the Middle East by focusing on cartographic discourses
within the Arab states of the western-defined Middle East. Through a largely empirical study, I systemically and critically examined

I focus on
maps because, as I discuss in detail below, they are powerful geopolitical
discourses that not only help to create places and identities at a variety of
scales, but they are also used as a form of resistance to hegemonic or
dominant norms (Harris and Hazen 2006:115 117; Pickles 2004; Wood
2010:111155). As I outline in this paper, the dominant cartographic
discourse I found contests the existence of the Middle East by simply
not mapping such a place, but also by cartographically constructing a
slightly different place called the Arab Homeland .3 The cartographic rejection of the Middle
an extensive sample of cartographic materials produced in eight different Arab states of the Middle East.

East and the construction of a specifically Arab geographical entity is a subtle but powerful form of counter mapping that echoes
the practice of a newly independent state removing its colonial place names and adopting more internally meaningful ones (Cohen
and Kliot 1992; Hagen 2003; Kadmon 2004; Monmonier 1996:110; 2006:7289; Ramaswamy 2004:209; Rundstrom 1991:9).

However, the construction and labeling of any geographical entity is a

geopolitical process that is replete with variations, alterations, and
exceptions to the norm. Even though the Arab Homeland is a common
regional category from within Arab states, a few maps of the Middle
East have been produced. My focus in this paper is on these exceptional maps, as opposed to the normative
cartographies of the Arab Homeland. A critical examination of these exceptional or
atypical maps provides unique insights into how the Middle East is
conceptualized cartographically from within this western-constructed

region, while also highlighting the ubiquity and hegemony of western

geographical categories and place names.

Western powers drew imperial lines to control the production

and consumption of oil in the Middle East the aff replicates
this violence when they continue to use colonial discoursecartography justifies this behavior only a critical analysis
solves
Kanna 13 (Ahmed teaches anthropology and human geography in the School of
International Studies, University of the Pacific. His publications includeDubai, The
City as Corporation (2011, Minnesota) andRethinking Global Urbanism (2012,
Routledge, co-edited with Xiangming Chen), along with numerous articles that have
appeared or are forthcoming inCultural Anthropology, City, Journal of Urban Affairs,
Review of Middle East Studies, MERIP, andJadaliyya. He is currently working on the
"global south" city and urbanism as objects of expertise, Theorizing the Arabian
Peninsula Roundtable: Towards a Critical Cartography of the Political in the Arabian
Peninsula http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/11292/theorizing-the-arabianpeninsula-roundtable_toward)
I must say at the beginning that I will have to restrict my comments to the
Gulf Arab countries, especially Bahrain, Kuwait, and the United Arab
Emirates (UAE), with which I have the most lived and research experience. I am pleased to note that my colleague and
friend John Willis is also participating in the roundtable, and I will leave it to him, with his deep knowledge of Yemen, to comment on

This
paradigm has tended to reinforce the naturalness of the domination of
Western oil consumer nations and of local political dynasties, represented
as wise stewards of the national wealth. This is underpinned by an
imagined geography that regionalizes cultures in a particular way: the
Gulf becomes, in effect, a bounded cultural zone in which questions of
historyin the sense of contestation and struggle over how to delimit
basic political rights and goodsand questions of cultural politicsthose
related to who can speak for whom in a national or cultural sense
evaporate. I think, by the way, that Toby Jones is correct in opening his comments by asking, provocatively, whether the
Arabian Peninsula even exists. Work in human geography (e.g., the metageogapher J.B. Harlys writing on
deconstructing the map, as well as the work of Kren Wigen and Martin
Lewis on the myth of continents, who based their insights on Edward
Saids notion of imaginative geography) is particularly germane here. We
must, as J.B. Harly teaches, attend to the ways that concrete and even
prosaic technologies and techniques of representation channel our spatial
imaginations in common-sensical and clichd directions, regionalizing and
culturalizing diverse spatio-cultural realities in particular ways . Maps, for example,
are technologies that not only imply the uses to which they are put (such as navigation or tracking resources). They often
significantly distort, in ways beyond the distortion intrinsic to all
cartography, territorial and cultural realities that might be entirely the
opposite of what is being represented. Nation-state maps are a case in
point: they carve up the world into seemingly sovereign and autonomous
units that bound the cultures that inhabit those units. But what is sovereignty actually
that country. With respect to the Gulf, the oil and security paradigm is perhaps the dominant narrative in research.

when you have the worlds superpower claiming exceptional rights to intervene willy-nilly wherever it wants to? John Willis raises
this issue in relation to Yemen, and it also resonates with both Neha Voras and Madawi Al-Rasheeds critiques of the rentier state as
an analytic frame to which we too casually resort.

What is the nation and what, therefore, are

politics when the national cartography departs radically from the
multinational population? Another common approach, it must be said, is
the foreign workers as slaves narrative, which I find intellectually lazy
and unwittingly depoliticizing both of laborers and labor employers. I
hasten to add that I would obviously not replace this with another
common narrative, which represents foreign workers as rational actors. I
think both are extreme oversimplifications. In short, there needs to be more emphasis on
history as process and contestation, and on politicizing historical, cultural,
and what Henri Lefebvre would call spatial framings vis--vis the Gulf . As to
the more specific question relating to difficulties in conducting research: in some ways, the Gulfor maybe the United Arab Emirates
in particularis not a difficult place to do research in, relative to many other places that anthropologists go. I mean this in a prosaic

The infrastructures of the United Arab Emirates, for example, are

good. It is a comfortable place (for a Westerner), and the Emiratis, South
Asians, Westerners, and non-Emirati Arabs with whom I worked were
generally very decent, generous people. One cannot, however, forget that
for other, differently situated and bodied subjectsnon-Western
expatriates, especially non-Western women, working-class subjects, etc.
movement and access to these basic infrastructures is much more
difficult, and surveillance is much more invasive. This can be seen from ones initial arrival at
sense.

Dubai airport, for example, when passport holders from the United States and Europe are separated from others, and the two groups

More interestingly, and perhaps

more importantly, there are other, more subtle, difficulties in the arena of
knowledge production. For example, one reviewer of my book Dubai, The City as Corporation, correctly and
sifted into differently privileged, variously invasive passport checks.

insightfully noted that I tried to make a virtue of what Madawi Al- Rasheed in this roundtable refers to as the gate-keeping that goes
on all over the place in Gulf Arab countries. Dubai, where I did most of my research (but I have also found Bahrain and Kuwait, with
which I have some experience, similar) is an astonishingly managed and mediated society. There isfrom my own subjective
experiencea stifling atmosphere of capitalist/consumer law and order. A disproportionate number of my meetings occurred in
corporate offices. Conversations often bled into corporate public relations or public relations for the Emirate of Dubai (by people who

As Al-Rasheed says,
studying countries in the Arabian Peninsula remains mediated by
gatekeepers whose interest lies in maintaining the image of stability,
affluence, and security. Another good example of how this affects
knowledge production can be seen in my own sub-discipline of urban
studies, where there has been, over the past decade or so, a consistent
emphasis on a particular image of the Gulf city . This image, produced by a collaborative
were not necessarily connected to the particular company in which I was interested).

formation of Gulf and pan-Arab academic expertise, Western academic expertise, and Gulf oil money, is constructed around notions
of Gulf urbanism as modern, culturally diverse and tolerant, and a model for global urbanism (in Dubai, it was called mithal

In my current work, I am becoming increasingly

interested in how this mediation operates. What is meant by the city in
discourses on urbanism in Gulf Arab states, what work does this discourse
do, how does it organize specific kinds of common sense about what the
city is, and how does this common sense relate to power dynamics
within and without the Gulf?
Dubai or the Dubai model).

The Middle East is always described in a western frame

Culcasi 12 (Karen Culcasi prof of geology and geography and West Virginia
university Mapping the Middle East from Within: (Counter-) Cartographies of an
Imperialist Construction Antipode Vol. 44 No. 4) Crystal

In the United States and much of the rest of the world, both the term and
the idea of the Middle East are readily accepted parts of geographical
discourses.1 However, from within the Arab states of the Middle East,
discourses of the Middle East are often rejected as western
imperialist constructs.2 As described in a recent Economist (2010) article titled Labels and categories,
a menagerie of monikers, the label Middle East reeks of imperialism. Indeed,
the label Middle East and its vague boundaries are undeniably
imperialist. The actual toponym originated in the early twentieth century
in reference to British geopolitical interests in the land that was literally in
the middle of Great Britains east. Further, it was British and French
powers after World War I that drew the majority of the borders of the
states that today are generally considered the core of the Middle East.
Considering its direct imperialist roots, it is perhaps unsurprising that
from within the Middle East there is a strong hesitation to accept and
use this geographic category. Instead, as the epigraph suggests, the Arab states of the western
defined Middle East have created different regional geographic delineations that stress its Arab character and
unity.

Rejecting the construction of Middle East is imperialist and

rooted in a colonial discourse that perpetuates the erasure of
identities
Culcasi 12 (Karen Culcasi prof of geology and geography and West Virginia
university Mapping the Middle East from Within: (Counter-) Cartographies of an
Imperialist Construction Antipode Vol. 44 No. 4) Crystal
Several historians and geographers have shown that, in addition to its being a western-imperialist construct,

the

idea, term, definition, and even the location of the Middle East is
variable and ambiguous (Adelson 1995; Bonine 1976; Culcasi 2010; Davison 1960; Fromkin 1991;
Keddie 1973; Owen 2000; Whitaker 2004). This paper provides a unique contribution to
critiques of western constructions of the Middle East by focusing on
cartographic discourses within the Arab states of the western-defined
Middle East. Through a largely empirical study, I systemically and critically examined
an extensive sample of cartographic materials produced in eight different
Arab states of the Middle East. I focus on maps because, as I discuss in detail below, they
are powerful geopolitical discourses that not only help to create places
and identities at a variety of scales, but they are also used as a form of resistance to hegemonic
or dominant norms (Harris and Hazen 2006:115 117; Pickles 2004; Wood 2010:111155). As I outline in
this paper, the dominant cartographic discourse I found contests the
existence of the Middle East by simply not mapping such a place, but
also by cartographically constructing a slightly different place called the
Arab Homeland.3 The cartographic rejection of the Middle East and
the construction of a specifically Arab geographical entity is a subtle but
powerful form of counter mapping that echoes the practice of a newly
independent state removing its colonial place names and adopting more
internally meaningful ones (Cohen and Kliot 1992; Hagen 2003; Kadmon 2004; Monmonier 1996:110;
2006:7289; Ramaswamy 2004:209; Rundstrom 1991:9).

The affirmatives representations of the Middle East stem from

a colloquial understanding rooted in
Culcasi 12 [Karen Culcasi, Professor in the Department of Geology and Geography, West Virginia University,
Mapping the Middle East from Within: (Counter-) Cartographies of an Imperialist Construction, Sep 2012, Vol. 44
Issue 4, p1099-1118]

In the post World War I years, the location of the Middle East varied
immensely depending on who was using the term or who was drawing the
map, and it was often confused and conflated with the more established term Near East. However, by the
end of World War II the term Middle East was institutionalized in official
British documents (Bilgin 1998:19) and in the US Department of State (Kurzman 2007). Then,
during the Cold War years when oil exploitation and the expansion of
Israel became global issues, the Middle East slowly but surely became a
common cartographic and geopolitical discourse across much of the world. Though
commonplace today, it is vital to underscore that the political map of the Middle
East is an imperialist artifact that reects the geopolitical and economic
interests of the European powers who created it, not the desires of the
people who actually live there. As Alisdar Drysdale and Gerald Blake (1985:224) wrote, within
the Arab World there is still a nagging sense that the political map is a
capricious colonial artifact that reects the interests of the outside
powers who drew it, not the aspirations of those who inherited it, and that its drafting is
neither final nor complete. Thus, it is perhaps unsurprising that many states of the
Middle East reject this imperialist geographic category. Most of the French and
British mandated states won their independence after the World War II. As in newly independent states across
the globe, the borders and ruling structures that imperial powers created were resilient after independence and,
over time, these new states developed nations and national identities that coincided with the imposed boundaries

even as new national identities, such

as Jordanian or Iraqi, were being imagined and constructed, a broader
Arab identity was also growing. The pan-Arab movement, which had its origins as a
reaction to Ottoman hegemony in the eighteenth century, became a powerful political and
ideological force in the mid-twentieth century (particularly within Egypt, Syria, Jordan,
Palestine and Iraq).5 The basic goal of this movement was to unite all Arabicspeaking peoples across the world; and with European imperialism after World War I and Israels
(Ajami 1978; Baram 1990; Khalidi 2004:67). However,

territorial expansion after World War II, this movement gained incredible geopolitical momentum.

The geographical imperialist views of the Middle East reinforce

western domination and intervention
Culcasi 10 (Karen Culcasi prof of geology and geography and West Virginia
university CONSTRUCTING AND NATURALIZING THE MIDDLE EAST The Geographical
Review 100 (4) October 2010) Crystal
The construction of the Middle East is deeply embedded in Orientalist
discourses. In his seminal book Orientalism, Edward Said argued that,
since early European explorations, Westerners have imagined the
Orient and its inhabitants as timeless, backward, violent, and inferior.
These geographical imaginings of the Orient were pivotal in constructing
the Other as inherently different from us. Once established as different and inferior,
Western domination of these Other peoples and places was not merely
justified but also warranted. Although imaginings of the backward, violent, and inferior Other

have been altered slightly since the early nineteenth century, as Douglas Little argued in American Orientalism: The

have survived and are now deeply

ingrained in everyday American life. Today, however, the terminology has
changed from the Orient to the Middle East. As we perceive the
Orient, so too do we often perceive the Middle East in negative and
particularistic contexts, such as terrorism, instability, violence, Islamic
fundamentalism, anti-Americanism, oppression of women, or oil wealth
Such manufactured and oversimplified geographical imaginings have not
only shaped many peoples perceptions of the Middle East but also
inuenced material practices and political decisions Since, American prejudices against
United States and the Middle East since 1945 they

Middle Easterners, Arabs, and Muslims have increased and so have reported incidents of racial/cultural profiling and

recent geographical imaginings of this Other as a threat

to America have helped to frame and legitimize U.S. hegemonic endeavors
in the Middle East.
hate crimes Furthermore,

The affirmative representation of cartographic

Culcasi 12 [Karen Culcasi, Professor in the Department of Geology and Geography, West Virginia University,
Mapping the Middle East from Within: (Counter-) Cartographies of an Imperialist Construction, Sep 2012, Vol. 44
Issue 4, p1099-1118]

Several historians and geographers have shown that, in addition to its being a
western-imperialist construct, the idea, term, definition, and even the location
of the Middle East is variable and ambiguous (Adelson 1995; Bonine 1976;
Culcasi 2010; Davison 1960; Fromkin 1991; Keddie 1973; Owen 2000; Whitaker
2004). This paper provides a unique contribution to critiques of western
constructions of the Middle East by focusing on cartographic discourses
within the Arab states of the western-defined Middle East. Through a
largely empirical study, I systemically and critically examined an extensive sample
of cartographic materials produced in eight different Arab states of the Middle
East. I focus on maps because, as I discuss in detail below, they are powerful
geopolitical discourses that not only help to create places and identities
at a variety of scales, but they are also used as a form of resistance to
hegemonic or dominant norms (Harris and Hazen 2006:115 117; Pickles 2004;
Wood 2010:111155). As I outline in this paper, the dominant cartographic
discourse I found contests the existence of the Middle East by simply not
mapping such a place, but also by cartographically constructing a slightly different
place called the Arab Homeland.3 The cartographic rejection of the Middle
East and the construction of a specifically Arab geographical entity is a
subtle but powerful form of counter mapping that echoes the practice of a
newly independent state removing its colonial place names and adopting
more internally meaningful ones (Cohen and Kliot 1992; Hagen 2003; Kadmon
2004; Monmonier 1996:110; 2006:7289; Ramaswamy 2004:209; Rundstrom
1991:9). However, the construction and labeling of any geographical entity
is a geopolitical process that is replete with variations, alterations, and
exceptions to the norm. Even though the Arab Homeland is a common regional
category from within Arab states, a few maps of the Middle East have been
produced. My focus in this paper is on these exceptional maps, as opposed to the
normative cartographies of the Arab Homeland. A critical examination of these

exceptional or atypical maps provides unique insights into how the Middle East is
conceptualized cartographically from within this western-constructed region, while
also highlighting the ubiquity and hegemony of western geographical categories
and place names.

Focus on the idea, term, definition, and locations of the

Persian gulf are rooted in a history of Middle Eastern
cartographic discourses that shape the geopolitical identity to
serve western colonial interest
Culcasi 12 [Karen Culcasi, Professor in the Department of Geology and Geography, West Virginia University,
Mapping the Middle East from Within: (Counter-) Cartographies of an Imperialist Construction, Sep 2012, Vol. 44
Issue 4, p1099-1118]

The Middle East and the Arab Homeland, like any world region, are ambiguous
geographical entities that are created through a variety of discursive and
material processesranging from cartographic practices to the establishment of
supranational organizations (Harvey 2001:224226; Lewis and Wigen 1997; Paasi 2001). As geographical
constructs, the location of these places is uid and variable. While it is important
to underscore that there is no one singular spatial definition of either the
Middle East or the Arab Homeland, according to prosaic western and Arab cartographic
delineations these places do greatly overlap. As Figure 1 summarizes, maps and
definitions of the Middle East produced in the USA since the 1950s
generally consider the states of Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon,
Israel/Palestine, Saudi Arabia, the UAE (United Arab Emirates), Oman,
Yemen, Bahrain, Qatar, and Egypt as core states; while the peripheral states of North
Africa and Southwest Asia (Morocco, Western Sahara, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Sudan, Pakistan and Afghanistan) are
often included as part of the region, but with little regularity.4 Though the non-Arab states of Israel, Iran and

according to
normative cartographic discourses within Arab States they are never
included as part of the Arab Homeland (see Figure 2). By contrast, North African states like
Sudan and Morocco are always included as the core of the Arab Homeland. Recognizing that both
the Middle East and the Arab Homeland are ambiguous and uid
constructions is important, but, as I highlight throughout this paper, it is how and why these places are
constructed that is so imperative to understand (Forsberg 2003). In order to gain a better
Turkey (and sometimes Cyprus too) are commonly considered part of the Middle East,

understanding of how cartographic discourses within Arab states both reject and re-create the Middle East, I
collected a broad sample of maps during 4 months of fieldwork in Cairo, Egypt in 2005. I literally examined every
map I could find that had a world-regional, continental, or world scope, paying particular attention to maps,

Using card catalogues, online

databases, as well as assistance from librarians and booksellers, I
systematically searched for these small-scaled maps (small scale in cartographic terminology) in the
atlases, and textbooks that used the label Middle East.

Egyptian National Archives and Library, at the American University of Cairos Library and Rare Books archives, in
the Egyptian Geographical Societys cartographic library, in two large book markets (souks), a state-run tourist
office, and with a private map collector. Through a disciplined and rigorous searching process, I collected a large

All the maps in

my sample were published after the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1919
because, as I explain below, this was a formative event in the creation of the
Middle East. State organizations (eg ministries of education) or private
cartographic companies that worked in conjunction with state agencies
published the majority of the maps in my sample, and most of these maps were
sample of maps in over 50 atlases and over 70 textbooks, as well as some 30 sheet maps.

produced for educational purposes at the primary or secondary level. Though

many of the maps I examined were produced in Egypt, my sample also includes maps and atlases from the
neighboring Arab states of Oman, Jordan, the UAE, Libya, Lebanon, Qatar and Kuwait. What it does not include,
however, are maps from the predominantly non-Arab Middle Eastern states of Turkey, Iran or Israel. Egypt was a
logical location to research Arab cartographies for two specific reasons. From the 1950s to the 1970s, Egypt was
the political center of the pan-Arab movement. Former president Gamal Abdel Nasser was not only the head of
Egypt for 14 years, but he was also the leader of the pan-Arab movement (as discussed more below). Thus, I
expected that cartography produced in Egypt since the 1950s would be framed within discourses of Arab identity
and unity. Secondly was the issue of availability. Egypt, unlike many of its Arab neighbors, had well established
cartographic programs and archives well before the country achieved complete independence. Further, the book
markets and libraries in Cairo are quite large, which simply meant that maps and atlases would be available for me
to collect and analyze. From my examination

of hundreds of maps, I found that the Middle

East is nearly nonexistent, while the Arab Homeland is unequivocally a more
common regional designation. The Arab Homeland is a normative and
powerful internal cartographic discourse that creates a decidedly nonimperialist way of dividing and conceptualizing the world. The consistent
construction of the Arab Homeland is a subtle form of geopolitical
resistance that is counter to the dominant western divisions of the world
that generally recognize the Middle East. However, in my large sample, I also
found a few maps of the Middle East. On these rare occasions that the Middle East was mapped
and labeled, it was either in reference to petroleum resources or explanatory text
was necessary in order to clarify what was meant by the term Middle
East. The majority of this paper focuses on these odd or exceptional maps that actually use the term and
geographically delimit the Middle East, because, as I mentioned above, these maps tell a unique
story of the hesitant adoption of an imperialist geographical construct . The
maps I discuss in this paper were not randomly selected from my larger sample, but they are the only maps of
the hundreds that I examined that used the term Middle East. However, in order to frame why these maps are so
exceptional it is first important to explain the normative regional geography of the Arab Homeland. Thus, in this
paper, I include one map from an Egyptian state textbook as an example of the normative regional cartographies
in Egypt and its Arab neighbors. It is important to stress that this is only one of literally over a hundred maps I
analyzed on the Arab Homeland, and that this place, like the Middle East, is a social construct and has continued
to change over time and space.

Middle Eastern international politics is an aftereffect of

Western imperialism
Culcasi 12 (Karen Culcasi prof of geology and geography and West Virginia
university Mapping the Middle East from Within: (Counter-) Cartographies of an
Imperialist Construction Antipode Vol. 44 No. 4) Crystal
The Middle East is a recent, western-imperialist construct . Though Europeans
had othered the East and the Ottoman Islamic lands since the eighteenth century (Said 1978), it was not
until the twentieth century that the term, the vague boundaries, or even
the idea of the Middle East became commonplace. At the beginning of
the twentieth century, the term Middle East was used sporadically in
Britain and the British Empire in India to refer to lands in the middle of
Great Britains east (eg Gordon 1900; Mahan 1902), but it was not until the Cold War
years that a more widely accepted version of the Middle East was
created and institutionalized (Bilgin 1998; Culcasi 2010; Davison 1960; Fromkin 1989, 1991; Koppes
1976; Smith 1968). During its height in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Ottoman Empire controlled
almost the entire region that today is generally considered the core of the Middle East (with the exceptions of Iran
and the interior and southern portions of the Arabian Peninsula ).

Though the Ottoman Empire

weakened and lost portions of its territories in the nineteenth century, it

was not until the Empire fell during World War I that Britain and France
became the dominant imperial powers in the emerging Middle East. By
1923, Great Britain officially controlled the new mandated states of Iraq,
Palestine and Transjordan (though the latter two were initially one entity); and France controlled
Syria, which included Lebanon. The Ottoman Empires North African territories were under European control before
the onset of World War I, and after the Empires demise Britain made Egypt a nominally independent territory,

The only areas of the

former Ottoman Empire that were not under the control of European
powers after the war were Turkey and most of what would soon become
Saudi Arabia, though British and French leaders were still instrumental in
drawing the boundaries of these remaining places. Similar to the 1884
Berlin Conference, in which European powers divided the African continent
into colonial territories, it was during the World War I period of European
boundary drawing that many of the states that today are considered the
core of the Middle East began to take geographical form. In the post
World War I years, the location of the Middle East varied immensely
depending on who was using the term or who was drawing the map, and it
was often confused and conated with the more established term Near
East. However, by the end of World War II the term Middle East was
institutionalized in official British documents (Bilgin 1998:19) and in the
US Department of State hen, during the Cold War years when oil
exploitation and the expansion of Israel became global issues, the Middle
East slowly but surely became a common cartographic and geopolitical
discourse across much of the world.
France maintained control of Algeria and Morocco, and Italy occupied Libya.

Generic/Advantage Links

L Generic
Nation-states create boundary lines to legitimize the
destruction of the natural frontiers- the continuation of postworld war boundaries allows for western aggression
Orakhelashvili 09 (Dr. Alexander, has taught and researched public
international law at four British universities over the past 10 years. His teaching also
includes criminal law and jurisprudence. He is a frequent speaker at international
conferences and seminars on developments in public international law, and has
provided legal advice regarding public international law issues in litigation before
English and American courts, INTERNATIONAL LAW AND GEOPOLITICS: ONE
OBJECT, CONFLICTING LEGITIMACIES?*, Pg 185-187)***this has been modified for
abelist language
Contemporary international law is premised on inviolability of state
boundaries. Geopolitics focuses on frontiers in terms of their utility in ensuring stable settlement of relevant conflicts or
controversies, with the durability of frontiers. In this sense frontiers can be motivated by
economic, security or ethnic factors each of which can contribute to or
undermine their stability and durability . Obviously ev- ery territorial conquest is motivated by
advantages following from the resources and location of the territory. This factor cannot by itself justify territorial aspirations. But
the underlying question of geopolitics seems to go deeper and address
the fundamental needs of defence, security and economic existence . Before
they divided states, boundaries served as dividing zones between primitive tribes . The primary purpose of
having boundary zones in that context was twofold: to be an extreme limit
of the area within which the relevant tribe could obtain necessary fold
supply and use resources; and if located at the appropriate side, to
prevent other tribal groups from intruding. 97 Thus, ever since the time immemorial, two principal
functions of boundary related to economic survival and security of the relevant entities. In other words, boundaries are necessary
premises for existence and survival Under some views, natural frontiers are determined above all by the access to the sea, and by
the language factor. 98 As Spykman observes, The boundary is thus not only a line of demarcation between legal systems but also

Natural frontiers, such as deserts, swamps,

forests, mountains, have historically contributed to the defence of states
but nature alone cannot create impassable barriers. The advance of
technology and communication means enables penetrating through
natural obstacles; frontier fortifications can be no hindrance to aerial
bombardment. Thus frontier has lost a good deal of its significance. Still, Even if ground must be sacrificed and
a point of contact of territorial power structures.

advanced positions surrendered, the frontier still performs its strategic function if it retards the first onslaught and provides a barrier
zone behind which the nation can mobilise the full strength of its economic and military resources. 99 Proponents of German

Desirable frontiers favoured the

nation that expands and challenges the neighbour nation that wants to
obtain strategic frontier. In other words, good frontier favours the nation
attacking the existing international order. Haushofer argued that only declining nations seek stable
Geopolitikhad their own understanding of frontiers as temporary.

borders. At the same time, the concept of dynamic frontier was borrowed by Haushofer from the British geopolitical thinking. 100
Given that geopolitical aspirations to revise frontiers often motivate wars, crises and frictions, it may have been right to observe that
The best political frontier is that which has ceased to matter. 101 Few cases can demonstrate this better than that of the Afghan-

This case demonstrates the importance of

boundaries as signifying the limit on territorial sovereignty in the context
of conict in Afghanistan, where much of the Taliban support comes from
the neighbouring Pakistani area of Waziristan where Taliban runs its own
Pakistani border in the area of the Waziristan prov- ince.

mini-state. Yet, the existence of an international border that divides

Waziristan from Afghanistan has for a long while prevented the US and
NATO intervention beyond the border line, and thus curbs their capacity in
fighting Taliban. The invasion of Waziristan in September 2008 by the United States forces have been criticised as
infringement of the sovereignty of Pakistan, 102 and the latters military has professed in having put up armed resistance to the US
forces secure land boundaries have often been aspired and obtained in practice, but the legality of boundary depends not on the

A comprehensive analysis of
postFirst World War and post-Second World war boundary negotiations
and agreements that have caused the multiple re-arrangements of
European state boundaries, has demonstrated that the predominant
attitude has always been to obtain secure boundaries through concluding
treaties rather than through unilateral determination of security claims.
Secure boundaries have also been obtained in the context of the
aggressors responsibility.
security factor as such, but on the agreement that reflects these security needs.

Status quo maps were created from with an embedded

colonialist perspective that erased indigenous groups and
reformatted the globe to best suit European commercial
systems.
Arias 09 [Santa Arias, The Politics of Historiography; The Spatial Turn
Interdisciplinary Perspectives p. 132; Barney Warf and Santa Arias; 2009; Santa
Arias - Spanish, University of Kansas, author, Her research is devoted to the role of
space in the material and discursive understanding of Latin American colonial
societies;
http://sociology.sunimc.net/htmledit/uploadfile/system/20110226/20110226011525
388.pdf, BM]
Beneath the spaces represented on paper we find the social forces behind
Europes civilizing mission. Kitchins mapMexicoorNewSpain,inwhichthe motions of
Corts may be traced acknowledge in detail physical aspects of the
territory that includes the topography,rivers,lakes,coastlinesandharbors;as well as human
spaces established by indigenous groups, Spanish missionaries or British
settlers(Figure8.2).ThismapwasdonewithmorecareanddetailthanthosecommissionedtoKitchinforinclusioninRaynalsHistoirephilosophiqueet
politique(1770).HecombinedinhisdepictionFrenchcartography,especiallydAnvillesrepresentationoftheAmericas(HemisphereOccidentalouduNouveau
Monde,1761),withnewerrevisionsdoneaccordingtoinstructionsandnewknowledgeofexpeditionsoftheinterior.Kitchins

visualization of the territories relied on what was considered trustworthy

information and when none was existent, he did not hesitated on labeling
it as unknown.Inthismap,NewMexicoborderstothenorthaGreatSpaceofLandunknownthaterasesfromthelandscapetheindigenousgroups
populatingtheGreatPlainsregion.AsinmuchofRobertsonswork,the mapalsoshows ambivalence towards the
Amerindians. In the case of Spains possessions, Amerindian place-names
are clearly marked intermingling with Spanish settlements. In most
European maps of the colonial period, the cartographer controls the
location of indigenous settlements. These regions are omitted to leave
space to other places where crucial historical events took place or where
major colonial institutions were located.InthemapMexicoorNewSpainthepromisedrouteofCortsisburied,
andtheviewercanbarelydistinguishimportantplacesofhisitinerarysuchashisfirstestablishmentofVeracruz,ortheindigenousZempoalla(Cempoala),or
Tlaxcala.TheenvironsofMexicoreferringtoTechnotilananditssurroundingsareasarehighlightedintheinsert.Itprovidesfurtherdetailsonasmallerscaleofthe
AztecregionaroundthelakeofMexicowherethehistoricalcalzadas,watersourcesandurbandesignareclearlymarked. Muozintendedtoincludethreemaps,
oneofthemrepresentingtheCaribbeanregion,describedsimilarlytoKitchinsMapoftheGulfofMexicothatwasincludedinRobertsons.Beyondthetactical

inclusionofmapstoshowthescenarioofevents,Muoz

embedded the history of the region within a

reection of the world commercial system. For Muoz, Columbus, who
represented Spanish interests, was the key figure in the emergence of
modernity. He established the existence of a new continent and redefined
European seapower.ForMuozandRobertson,the Atlantic became the space of global
politics, with Spain and England respectively leading in the colonization
(as synonym of progress) of North and South America.

Maps are markers of domination and colonialism

Pickles 95 (John Pickles prof of international studies at north Carolina at chapel
hill 1995. Representations in an Electronic Age: Geography, GIS, and Democracy
Ground Truth: The Social Implications of Geographic Information Systems) Crystal
Faith in the mapmaker, in technologies of measurement, (and the science that
underlies them), in the idea of the map space in what we like to call the real
world. Yet the map and map-maker have often been implicated in profound
acts of betrayal: With centuries of distance and historical hindsight, we can see
that error and bias, exploitation and colonialism, self-serving centrism and
ecological harm can so easily be read into the subsoil of old maps and that
they may as well be listed with symbols and explained in the legend [...]. In
would be foolish to ascribe that unspeakable tragedy (the Great Dying of the New
World brought about by Spanish conquest) to the maps that chartered the New
World; but it would be equally foolish to ignore the intricate weave of social
and cultural nerves that connect discovery, exploration, and mapmaking.
The map is the game board upon which human destinies are played out,
where winning or losing determines the survival of ideas, cultures, and
sometimes entire civilizations (Hall, 1993, 370-1). Hall (1993) is refreshingly
clear-sighted about the exciting possibilities of new maps and their inherent
dangers: Every map presages some form of exploitation {}. Geopolitics,
after all, is impossible without a cartographer, and that exercise of control
over a distinct domain marks a watershed in political power, confirming
the notion that maps are not merely pictures of the world, but depictions
of a world that can be shaped, manipulated, acted upon [...]. Map historian J.
B. Harley refers to cartography as the science of princes, and it is a
characterization that applies to modern mapmakers as well. From the expenditures
financed by Spain and Portugal in the fifteenth century to experiments sponsored by
the National Science Foundation last year, there exists a tradition of what might be
called mercenary geographers. In the context of contemporary science, the term
strikes the ear harshly; but in the context of the history of exploration and mapping,
there is compelling and overwhelming evidence that explorers, terrestrial and
intellectual, must align their professional and personal ambitions with wealthy and
powerful nations, which can afford the expeditions (or, in the modern
analogue/idiom, the experiments) that chart and stake a claim to new territories
(Hall, 1993, 383-4). Thus, Hall (1993, 387) asks, Can we acquire modern map
knowledge without inventing and committing new, equally modern and
unimagined cruelties?

Maps are a powerful tool of colonialism

Kitchin et al 9 (Rob Kitchin, ERC Advanced Investigator and PI of the
Programmable City project, Chris Perkins lecture of geography at Manchester
university and Martin Dodge prof of geography at Manchester University 2009
Thinking about maps, rethinking maps) Crystal
Mapping then is seemingly transformed into a universal scientific practice and maps become mobile and
immutable artefacts through which the world can be known and a vehicle through which spatial knowledge can be

What is mapped, how it is mapped, and the power of

maps is the result of Western sciences ability to set the parameters and
to dominate the debate about legitimate forms of knowledge . As Latour notes,
however, cartographic theory and praxis is seemingly immutable in nature
because it disciplines its practitioners and silences other local mapping
knowledges. And yet, immutable Western cartographic practice is itself
similarly the product of localized practices that are deemed appropriate
within a limited circle of practitioners and mapping agencies, who exercise
powerful claims to scientific objectivity and truth. The immutability of
maps is then at one level a powerful illusion, but one that readily does
work in the world. Latour contends that the immutability, combinability and
mobility of maps allowed exploration, trade and ultimately colonialism to
develop by allowing control to be exerted from afar and knowledges about
new territories to be effectively transported globally. Maps became a vital
part in the cycle of knowledge accumulation that allowed explorers to
bring the lands back with them and to successfully send others in their
footsteps (Latour 1987: 220, original emphasis). Latour thus argues that the European
cartographers of the Renaissance produced centres of calculation (key sites of
cartographic practice) that came to dominate the world.
transported into new contexts.

Maps create and shape the realities that we live by the representation
that we impose on them
Kitchin et al 9 (Rob Kitchin, ERC Advanced Investigator and PI of the
Programmable City project, Chris Perkins lecture of geography at Manchester
university and Martin Dodge prof of geography at Manchester University 2009
Thinking about maps, rethinking maps) Crystal
In so doing, maps he suggests do not simply represent space at a
particular time, but produce new spaces times. Maps open up new
possibilities such as international trade and territorial conquest and
thus create new geographies and histories. To understand maps then, Latour
suggests that it is necessary to unpick the cultures, technologies and
mechanics of how a particular form of mapping came to gain immutability
and mobility to reveal its contingencies and relationalities. Following on
from his work, the development of Actor-Network Theory (ANT) in science
studies has provided a framework for considering how maps work in concert
with other actants and actors to transform the world. ANT involves the
tracing out of the context and instruments of mapping its assemblage
not just cartographic praxis. For example, understanding the road system ,
Latour argues, cannot be fully realized by looking at infrastructure and vehicles

alone, it also needs to consider civil engineering, plans of roads,

standards for signage, garages, mechanics, drivers, political lobbying,
funding, spare parts and so on. Maps do not have meaning or action on
their own; they are part of an assemblage of people, discursive processes
and material things. They are deployed in an actor-network of practices
rather than existing as decorporalized, a priori, non-ideological knowledge
objects. ANT then seeks to provide a broader and richer understanding of
the creation of maps through particular actor-networks (e.g. a national mapping
agency) and the use of maps as actants within various actor-networks (e.g. land
conservation) by considering the diverse, day-to-day practices of, and the
interactions and the circulation of ideas and power between, various
actors (people, texts, objects and money) (Perkins 2006). In so doing, ANT identifies the nature of boundary
objects (objects such as technical standards that enable the sharing of information across networks), centres of
calculation (locations such as mapping agencies where observations are accumulated, synthesized and analysed),
inscription devices (technical artefacts that record and translate information such as tables of coordinates or
satellite imagery), obligatory points of passage (a site in a network that exerts control and influence such as
government department), programs of action (the resources required for an actor to perform certain roles) and
trials by strength (how competing visions and processes within the network compete for superiority) (cf. Martin

From this perspective, the stories of mapping always need to be

considered as historically contingent actor-networks; as timed, placed,
cultured and negotiated; a Web of interacting possibilities in which the
world is complex and nothing is inevitable. The focus shifts from what the
map represents to how it is produced and how it produces work in the
world (Perkins 2006).
2000).

L State
Maps are tools for the state- they legitimize the state to take
land and erase people to create its own area
Wood 12 (Denis, is an artist, author, cartographer and a former professor of
Design at North Carolina State University, The Anthropology of Cartography, Pg
297 http://www.deniswood.net/content/Anthro%20Cart.pdf)
But I don't Insist on it here because where I really want to go is to the performance of the state and we're almost there. By the time

maps laboured extensively in the

service of the state. Or maybe this understates It, for certaInly it was one
of the principal assertions of the critical cartography that was then being
born - the assertion that most enflamed the ire of the old guard - that maps had political agendas,
that they were tools of the state. The papers given at the 1985 Nebenza hl Lectu res at the Newberry
Fels and I came to write 'Designs on Signs' it had become obvious that

Library and later collected under the title MOllarcl/s, Ministers, and Maps: The Emergence of Cartography as a Tool of Govemment ill
Early Modem Europe began to sketch something of the range of the map's labours for the state; Fels and I something of their
inwardness; and Brian Harley's 'Maps, Knowledge, and Power' of 1988 and later papers something of their penetration and ... grip
(Buisseret 1992; Wood and Fels 1986; Harley 1988, 2(01).

In the lecture I gave to inaugurate the

Power of Maps exhibition I simply took it for granted that the map was a
weapon in the arsenal of state control, discussing the map under the
headings of subjugation, intimidation and legitimation . But the state had many tools at its
disposal: what was it about the map that the state found SO valuable, especially the state emerging in early modern China, Europe,

It is important to observe that all the

bureaucratic functions fulfilled by maps during this period could have
been handled without maps, as they had been during the later Middle
Ages. The historians of cadastral mapping, Roger Ka in and Elizabeth
Baigent, remind us that maps are not indispensable even for cadastral;
and this leads them to wonder why so many states adopted cadastral
mapping during the early modern period. 'Conviction of the merits of
mapping was a precondition for mapping itself', they argue (1992: 343). This is a theme in
Japan and elsewhere? Tile Anthropology of Cartography 297

much contemporary scholarship where a particularly significant merit was the ability of the map to figure the new state itself, to
perform lite shape of statehood, to give the state what the historian Thongchai Winichakul calls a geo-body (1994).18 The early
modern state was in the opening phase of an evolution from an older structure in which loyalty had been offered to one's lord, one's
immediate community and one's family (typified by a powerful sense of mutual obligations among face-to-face acquaintances), to a
novel political organization with increasingly impersonal institutions and abstract character. This impersonal state required new

Contemporary scholarship is unanimous that the map

possessed an all but unique power to give the elusive idea of this new
state concrete form, both for those living within it and for those
contemplating it from without; and has documented this for Japan, China, Russia, France, the United States,
Mexico, Siam, British Guyana, Israel and elsewhere. 19 The most striking feature about all these
assertions is their persuasion that the map was an artefact that
constructed the state, that literally helped to bring the state into being,
that brought it into focus. It's almost as though it were the map that in a graphic performance of statehood
forms for its embodiment.

conjured the state as such into existence: out of the territories of the recently warring daimyo of Japan, out of the far-flung
possessions of Chinese emperors out of the disjointed rabble of the American colonies

L Masking
Cartography Masks
Kim (Annette Sidewalk City: Remapping Public Space in Ho Chi Minh City) 05
Cartography has been relatively slow among the geographic subdisciplines
to debunk positivism. Traditional cartographys research agenda focused on accuracy and increasing
clarity through user testing and cognitive models. An optimal map was possible because the data being mapped
was thought to be objectively factual and map readers were thought to have universal cognitive systems for

While the science behind mapping has been used for

hundreds of years to claim its authority, several scholars attribute the
height of cartographys claim to objectivity as a response to World War II
propaganda maps (Edney 2005; Krygier and Crampton 2006; Pickles and Stallman forthcoming). In the
interpreting maps.

United States, Arthur Robinson spearheaded the effort to make maps that eliminated evocative, political or
unscientific elements from the map. Some argued that scientific standardization would cure maps of becoming
propaganda.

But, critics argue that maps that claim to be neutral only mask
the larger political projects of the state by projecting the truth .
Furthermore, such a dispassionate cartography produces an inhumane
geographic discipline. So, the first generation of critical cartography
literature importantly critiqued the relationship between power and the
map masked as objective chapter, there were originally two separate
towns. Aggressive government policies and remapping efforts have been
trying to erase the former divide between the two towns to create a
seamless city. The maps of HCMCs expanding boundaries and new districts display the states
rationalization of rapid urbanization (although, as fig. 1.3 shows, the maps boundary does not match what was
happening on the ground). Maps have helped to naturalize manmade features like irrigation systems (Mathur and
Da Cunha 2006).

And maps help create an artificial order out of the natural

landscape that is constantly in ux (Mathur and Da Cunha 2001; Wood and Fels 2008).

L Western Epistemology/Eurocentrism
Western understanding of space through maps justifies
conquest and colonization
Harley J.B (John Brian Harley (24 July 1932 20 December 1991) was a
geographer, cartographer, and map historian at the universities of Birmingham,
Liverpool, Exeter and WisconsinMilwaukee. He helped found the History of
Cartography Project and is the founding co-editor of the resulting The History of
Cartography. In recent years, Harley's work has gained broad prominence among
geographers and social theorists, and it has contributed greatly to the emerging
discipline of critical cartography
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/p/passages/4761530.0003.008/--deconstructing-the-map?
rgn=main;view=fulltext Accessed 7/29/2015 Published 1992
No map is devoid of an intertextual dimension and, in this case too, the
discovery of intertextuality enables us to scan the image as more than a
neutral picture of a road network. [56] Its 'users' are not only the ordinary motorists but also the
State of North Carolina that has appropriated its publication (distributed in millions of copies) as a promotional
device. The map has become an instrument of State policy and an instrument of sovereignty. [57] At the same time,

It also constructs a
mythic geography, a landscape full of 'points of interest,' with incantations
of loyalty to state emblems and to the values of a Christian piety. The
hierarchy of towns and the visually dominating highways that connect
them have become the legitimate natural order of the world . The map finally
it is more than an affirmation of North Carolina's dominion over its territory.

insists "that roads really are what North Carolina's all about." [58] The map idolizes our love affair with the
automobile. The myth is believable. A cartographer's stock response to this deconstructionist argument
might well be to cry 'foul.' The argument would run like this: "Well after all it's a state highway map. It's designed to
be at once popular and useful. We expect it to exaggerate the road network and to show points of interest to

The appeal to the

ultimate scientific map is always the cartographers' last line of defence
when seeking to deny the social relations that permeate their technology .
It is at this point that Derrida's strategy can help us to extend such an
interpretation to all maps, scientific or non-scientific, basic or derived. Just
motorists. It is a derived rather than a basic map." [59] It is not a scientific map.

as in the deconstruction of philosophy Derrida was able to show "how the supposedly literal level is intensively
metaphorical" [60] so too we can show how cartographic 'fact' is also symbol. In 'plain' scientific maps, science
itself becomes the metaphor. Such maps contain a dimension of 'symbolic realism' which is no less a statement of
political authority and control than a coat-of-arms or a portrait of a queen placed at the head of an earlier
decorative map. The metaphor has changed. The map has attempted to purge itself of ambiguity and alternative
possibility. [61] Accuracy and austerity of design are now the new talismans of authority culminating in our own age
with computer mapping. We can trace this process very clearly in the history of Enlightenment mapping in Europe.
The topography as shown in maps, increasingly detailed and planimetrically accurate, has become a metaphor for a
utilitarian philosophy and its will to power. Cartography inscribes this cultural model upon the paper and we can
examine it in many scales and types of maps. Precision of instrument and technique merely serves to reinforce the
image, with its encrustation of myth, as a selective perspective on the world. Thus maps of local estates in the
European ancien regime, though derived from instrumental survey, were a metaphor for a social structure based on
landed property. County and regional maps, though founded on scientific triangulation, were an articulation of local

Maps of the European states, though constructed along arcs of

the meridian, served still as a symbolic shorthand for a complex of
nationalist ideas. And world maps, though increasingly drawn on
mathematically defined projections, nevertheless gave a spiralling twist to
the manifest destiny of European overseas conquest and colonization. [62] In
values and rights.

This in turn
enhances our understanding of how the text works as an instrument
operating on social reality. In deconstructionist theory the play of rhetoric is closely linked to that of
each of these examples we can trace the contours of metaphor in a scientific map.

metaphor. In concluding this section of the essay I will argue that notwithstanding 'scientific' cartography's efforts
to convert culture into nature, and to 'naturalize' social reality, [63] it has remained an inherently rhetorical
discourse. Another of the lessons of Derrida's criticism of philosophy is "that modes of rhetorical analysis, hitherto
applied mainly to literary texts, are in fact indispensable for reading any kind of discourse." [64] There is nothing
revolutionary in the idea that cartography is an art of persuasive communication. It is now commonplace to write
about the rhetoric of the human sciences in the classical sense of the word rhetoric. [65] Even cartographersas
well as their criticsare beginning to allude to the notion of a rhetorical cartography but what is still lacking is a

The issue in contention is not whether some maps

are rhetorical, or whether other maps are partly rhetorical, but the extent
to which rhetoric is a universal aspect of all cartographic texts . Thus for some
rhetorical close-reading of maps. [66]

cartographers the notion of 'rhetoric' would remain a pejorative term. It would be an 'empty rhetoric' which was
unsubstantiated in the scientific content of a map. 'Rhetoric' would be used to refer to the 'excesses' of propaganda
mapping or advertising cartography or an attempt would be made to confine it to an 'artistic' or aesthetic element
in maps as opposed to their scientific core. My position is to accept that rhetoric is part of the way all texts work

Again we ought to dismantle the arbitrary

dualism between 'propaganda' and 'true,' and between modes of 'artistic'
and 'scientific' representation as they are found in maps . All maps strive to frame
their message in the context of an audience. All maps state an argument about the world
and they are propositional in nature. All maps employ the common devices
of rhetoric such as invocations of authority (especially in 'scientific' maps [67]) and
appeals to a potential readership through the use of colors, decoration,
typography, dedications, or written justifications of their method . [68]
Rhetoric may be concealed but it is always present, for there is no
description without performance. The steps in making a mapselection,
omission, simplification, classification, the creation of hierarchies, and
'symbolization'are all inherently rhetorical. In their intentions as much as in their
and that all maps are rhetorical texts.

applications they signify subjective human purposes rather than reciprocating the workings of some "fundamental
law of cartographic generalisation." [69] Indeed, the freedom of rhetorical manoeuvre in cartography is
considerable: the map-maker merely omits those features of the world that lie outside the purpose of the

There have been no limits to the varieties of maps that have

been developed historically in response to different purposes of argument,
aiming at different rhetorical goals, and embodying different assumptions
about what is sound cartographic practice. The style of maps is neither fixed in the past nor
immediate discourse.

is it today. It has been said that "The rhetorical code appropriates to its map the style most advantageous to the
myth it intends to propagate." [70] Instead of thinking in terms of rhetorical versus non-rhetorical maps it may be
more helpful to think in terms of a theory of cartographic rhetoric which accommodated this fundamental aspect of

Thus, I am not concerned to privilege

rhetoric over science, but to dissolve the illusory distinction between the
two in reading the social purposes as well as the content of maps.
representation in all types of cartographic text.

Assuming that western cartographic standards are based on

nature justifies eurocentrism
Harley J.B (John Brian Harley (24 July 1932 20 December 1991) was a
geographer, cartographer, and map historian at the universities of Birmingham,
Liverpool, Exeter and WisconsinMilwaukee. He helped found the History of
Cartography Project and is the founding co-editor of the resulting The History of
Cartography. In recent years, Harley's work has gained broad prominence among
geographers and social theorists, and it has contributed greatly to the emerging

discipline of critical cartography

http://quod.lib.umich.edu/p/passages/4761530.0003.008/--deconstructing-the-map?
rgn=main;view=fulltext Accessed 7/29/2015 Published 1992
One of Foucault's primary units of analysis is the discourse. A discourse has been defined as "a system of possibility
for knowledge." [13] Foucault's method was to ask, it has been said, what rules permit certain statements to be
made; what rules order these statements; what rules permit us to identify some statements as true and others as

what rules allow the construction of a map, model or classificatory

system, what rules are revealed when an object of discourse is modified or
transformed ... Whenever sets of rules of these kinds can be identified, we are dealing with a discursive
formation or discourse. [14] The key question for us then becomes, " What type of rules have
governed the development of cartography ? Cartography I define as a body
of theoretical and practical knowledge that map-makers employ to
construct maps as a distinct mode of visual representation . The question is, of
course, historically specific: the rules of cartography vary in different societies. Here I refer particularly
to two distinctive sets of rules that underlie and dominate the history of
Western cartography since the seventeenth century. [15] One set may be defined as
false;

governing the technical production of maps and are made explicit in the cartographic treatises and writings of the
period. [16] The other set relates to the cultural production of maps. These must be
understood in a broader historical context than either scientific procedure or technique. They are, moreover, rules
that are usually ignored by cartographers so that they form a hidden aspect of their discourse. The first set of
cartographic rules can thus be defined in terms of a scientific epistemology. From at least the seventeenth century

European map-makers and map users have increasingly promoted a

standard scientific model of knowledge and cognition. The object of
mapping is to produce a 'correct' relational model of the terrain. Its
assumptions are that the objects in the world to be mapped are real and
objective, and that they enjoy an existence independent of the
cartographer; that their reality can be expressed in mathematical terms;
that systematic observation and measurement offer the only route to
cartographic truth; and that this truth can be independently verified . [17] The
onward,

procedures of both surveying and map construction came to share strategies similar to those in science in general:

increasingly
complex classifications of its knowledge and a proliferation of signs for its
representation; and, especially from the nineteenth century onward, the
growth of institutions and a 'professional' literature designed to monitor
the application and propagation of the rules. [18] Moreover, although cartographers have
cartography, also documents a history of more precise instrumentation and measurement;

continued to pay lip service to the 'art and science' of mapmaking, [19] art, as we have seen, is being edged off the
map. It has often been accorded a cosmetic rather than a central role in cartographic communication. [20] Even
philosophers of visual communicationsuch as Arnheim, Eco, Gombrich, and Goodman [21] have tended to
categorize maps as a type of congruent diagramas analogs, models, or 'equivalents' creating a similitude of
realityand, in essence, different from art or painting. A 'scientific' cartography (so it was believed) would be
untainted by social factors. Even today many cartographers are puzzled by the suggestion that political and
sociological theory could throw light on their practices. They will probably shudder at the mention of deconstruction.

The acceptance of the map as 'a mirror of nature' (to employ Richard Rorty's phrase
[22]) also results in a number of other characteristics of cartographic
discourse even where these are not made explicit. Most striking is the
belief in progress: that, by the application of science ever more precise
representations of reality can be produced. The methods of cartography have delivered a
"true, probable, progressive, or highly confirmed knowledge." [23] This mimetic bondage has led to a tendency not
only to look down on the maps of the past (with a dismissive scientific chauvinism) but also to regard the maps of
other non-Western or early cultures (where the rules of mapmaking were different) as inferior to European maps.
[24]

Similarly, the primary effect of the scientific rules was to create a

'standard'a successful version of 'normal science' [25] that enabled

cartographers to build a wall around their citadel of the 'true' map. Its
central bastions were measurement and standardization and beyond there
was a 'not cartography' land where lurked an army of inaccurate,
heretical, subjective, valuative, and ideologically distorted images.
Cartographers developed a 'sense of the other' in relation to
nonconforming maps. Even maps such as those produced by journalists, where different rules and
modes of expressiveness might be appropriate, are evaluated by many cartographers according to standards of
'objectivity,' 'accuracy,' and 'truthfulness.' In this respect, the underlying attitude of many cartographers is revealed
in a recent book of essays on Cartographie dans les mdias [26].

Relying on Eurocentric cartographic assumptions justifies

power hierarchies that lead to violence
Harley J.B (John Brian Harley (24 July 1932 20 December 1991) was a
geographer, cartographer, and map historian at the universities of Birmingham,
Liverpool, Exeter and WisconsinMilwaukee. He helped found the History of
Cartography Project and is the founding co-editor of the resulting The History of
Cartography. In recent years, Harley's work has gained broad prominence among
geographers and social theorists, and it has contributed greatly to the emerging
discipline of critical cartography
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/p/passages/4761530.0003.008/--deconstructing-the-map?
rgn=main;view=fulltext Accessed 7/29/2015 Published 1992
In this example of cartographic vigilantism the 'ethic of accuracy' is being
defended with some ideological fervor. The language of exclusion is that
of a string of 'natural' opposites: 'true and false'; 'objective and
subjective'; 'literal and symbolic' and so on. The best maps are those with an "authoritative
image of self-evident factuality." [29] In cases where the scientific rules are invisible in the map we can still
trace their play in attempting to normalize the discourse. The cartographer's 'black
box' has to be defended and its social origins suppressed. The hysteria among leading cartographers at the
popularity of the Peters' projection, [30] or the recent expressions of piety among Western European and North
American map-makers following the Russian admission that they had falsified their topographic maps to confuse

What are we to make

of the 1988 newspaper headlines such as "Russians Caught Mapping " (Ottawa
Citizen), "Soviets Admit Map Paranoia" (Wisconsin Journal) or (in the New York Times) "In
West, Map makers Hail 'Truth" and "The rascals finally realized the truth and were able to tell it, a
geographer at the Defense Department said"? [31] The implication is that Western maps are
value free . According to the spokesman, our maps are not ideological documents, and the condemnation of
Russian falsification is as much an echo of Cold War rhetoric as it is a credible cartographic criticism. This
timely example also serves to introduce my second contention that the
scientific rules of mapping are, in any case, inuenced by a quite different
set of rules, those governing the cultural production of the map . To discover
these rules, we have to read between the lines of technical procedures or of
the map's topographic content. They are related to values, such as those
of ethnicity, politics, religion, or social class, and they are also embedded
in the map-producing society at large. Cartographic discourse operates a
double silence toward this aspect of the possibilities for map knowledge. In
the enemy give us a glimpse of how the game is played according to these rules.

the map itself, social structures are often disguised beneath an abstract, instrumental space, or incarcerated in the
coordinates of computer mapping. And in the technical literature of cartography they are also ignored,

notwithstanding the fact that they may be as important as surveying, compilation, or design in producing the
statements that cartography makes about the world and its landscapes. Such an interplay of social and technical

In maps it produces the "order" of its

features and the "hierarchies of its practices." [32] In Foucault's sense the
rules may enable us to define an episteme and to trace an archaeology of
that knowledge through time. [33] Two examples of how such rules are
manifest in maps will be given to illustrate their force in structuring
cartographic representation. The first is the well-known adherence to the
'rule of ethnocentricity' in the construction of world maps. This has led
many historical societies to place their own territories at the center of
their cosmographies or world maps. While it may be dangerous to assume universality, and
there are exceptions, such a rule is as evident in cosmic diagrams of preColumbian North American Indians as it is in the maps of ancient
Babylonia, Greece or China, or in the medieval maps of the Islamic world
or Christian Europe. [34] Yet what is also significant in applying Foucault's critique of knowledge to
rules is a universal feature of cartographic knowledge.

cartography is that the history of the ethnocentric rule does not march in step with the 'scientific' history of mapmaking. Thus, the scientific Renaissance in Europe gave modern cartography coordinate systems, Euclid, scale

it also helped to confirm a new myth of Europe's

ideological centrality through projections such as those of Mercator. [35] Or
maps, and accurate measurement, but

again, in our own century, a tradition of the exclusivity of America was enhanced before World War II by placing it in

Throughout the history of

cartography ideological 'Holy Lands' are frequently centered on maps . Such
centricity, a kind of "subliminal geometry," [37] adds geopolitical force and meaning to representation. It is
also arguable that such world maps have in turn helped to codify, to
legitimate, and to promote the world views which are prevalent in
different periods and places. [38] A second example is how the 'rules of the
social order' appear to insert themselves into the smaller codes and
spaces of cartographic transcription. The history of European cartography
since the seventeenth century provides many examples of this tendency .
its own hemisphere ('our hemisphere') on the world map. [36]

Pick a printed or manuscript map from the drawer almost at random and what stands out is the unfailing way its
text is as much a commentary on the social structure of a particular nation or place as it is on its topography. The
map-maker is often as busy recording the contours of feudalism, the shape of a religious hierarchy, or the steps in

Why maps can be

so convincing in this respect is that the rules of society and the rules of
measurement are mutually reinforcing in the same image. Writing of the map of
the tiers of social class, [39] as the topography of the physical and human landscape.

Paris, surveyed in 1652 by Jacques Gomboust, the King's engineer, Louis Marin points to "this sly strategy of
simulation-dissimulation": The knowledge and science of representation, to demonstrate the truth that its subject

The proofs of its 'theoretical'

truth had to be given, they are the recognizable signs; but the economy of
these signs in their disposition on the cartographic plane no longer obeys
the rules of the order of geometry and reason but, rather, the norms and
values of the order of social and religious tradition . Only the churches and important
declares plainly, flow nonetheless in a social and political hierarchy.

mansions benefit from natural signs and from the visible rapport they maintain with what they represent.
Townhouses and private homes, precisely because they are private and not public, will have the right only to the
general and common representation of an arbitrary and institutional sign, the poorest, the most elementary (but

Once
again, much like 'the rule of ethnocentrism,' this hierarchicalization of
space is not a conscious act of cartographic representation. Rather it is
taken for granted in a society that the place of the king is more important
than the place of a lesser baron, that a castle is more important than a
maybe, by virtue of this, principal) of geometric elements; the point identically reproduced in bulk. [40]

peasant's house, that the town of an archbishop is more important than

that of a minor prelate, or that the estate of a landed gentleman is more
worthy of emphasis than that of a plain farmer. Cartography deploys its
vocabulary accordingly so that it embodies a systematic social inequality.
The distinctions of class and power are engineered, reified and legitimated
in the map by means of cartographic signs. The rule seems to be 'the more
powerful, the more prominent.' To those who have strength in the world shall be added strength in
the map. Using all the tricks of the cartographic tradesize of symbol,
thickness of line, height of lettering, hatching and shading, the addition of
colorwe can trace this reinforcing tendency in innumerable European
maps. We can begin to see how maps, like art, become a mechanism "for
defining social relationships, sustaining social rules, and strengthening
social values." [41] In the case of both these examples of rules, the point I am making is that the rules
operate both within and beyond the orderly structures of classification and measurement. They go beyond the

Much of the power of the map, as a representation of

social geography, is that it operates behind a mask of a seemingly neutral
science. It hides and denies its social dimensions at the same time as it
legitimates. Yet whichever way we look at it the rules of society will
surface. They have ensured that maps are at least as much an image of
the social order as they are a measurement of the phenomenal world of
objects.
stated purposes of cartography.

L Economics
Maps are a tool of the state to exploit people- drawing
boundaries only keeps the distinction between rich and poor
countries
Dr. Redi-Henry 11 (Simon, an historical and political geographer with interests
in political philosophy and the history of ideas, political economy, and the
international politics of the Cold War and Post-Cold War era. I have explored these
issues through substantive work on science, development, global health, and
humanitarianism. I gained my first degree and PhD at the University of Cambridge
and came to Queen Mary in 2004. Presently I am on leave (2012-14) as a Philip
Leverhulme Prize holder based in Oslo, where I am also a Senior Researcher at the
Peace Research Institute, Spaces of security and development: An alternative
mapping of the securitydevelopment nexus Security dialogue pgs 98-99)
David Chandler has argued that we may too easily take our (critical)
concerns with the meshing of development and security practices
concerns that usually conclude that poverty reduction is sacrificed to the
security needs of wealthier, more powerful states too far. We may endow them with a
sense of meaningfulness that obscures the more important fact of rich nations simultaneously disengaging from serious policy

He therefore argues that the developmentsecurity

nexus discourse is in reality little more than political theatre played out on
an international stage for a primarily domestic audience . It is in this sense that the
making (Chandler, 2007: 363).

development security nexus may be mapped as a constitutive part of what Chandler calls anti-foreign policy: that is, as an

Such a mapping helps expose how todays

developmentsecurity nexus mediates what has long been a pervasive
geographical imagination of the West: that of the global borderlands as an
appropriate site for experimentation in the government of peoples (as Duffield
exercise of rhetoric in the pursuit of power.

[2005: 148] puts it, since the nineteenth century the recurrent task of development has been to reconcile the disruptive effects of
progress on indigenous peoples, such as commercial exploitation, impoverishment and unchecked urbanisation, with the need for
societal order). But, as Duffield (2010: 62) elaborates in his own contribution to the special issue, what is most important is not

He posits the
containment of spontaneous migration and the shift in focus from states
to people as the proper object of security as two such examples, both of
which are indicative of a broader re-imagining of the relationship between
rich and poor nations. These are particularly telling examples. But, as Malinda Smith (2005) shows in her study of
the constitution of Africa as a security threat, we might also consider wider geographical
imaginaries that may have their roots in longstanding colonial discourses,
but that operate today in conjunction with a more active downplaying of
the political-economic causes of the problems of many African nations: an
act of historical amnesia in which the securitydevelopment nexus is
heavily implicated. In all cases, and in elaboration of the first point above, there is a need to attend to the fact that,
whether development and security interconnect [but] whats new in this monotonous relationship.

for all its existence is rhetorically claimed, perhaps even wished for by some, there is today no longer an outside to networks of

The reality is that new/old

ways of drawing boundaries between us and them (civil/uncivil, moral/
amoral, failed state/successful state, etc.) are constantly being defined
and deployed, and the developmentsecurity nexus plays a formative role
within this process (Buur et al., 2007b: 14; see also Hardt and Negri, 2001).
modern governance that can be pacified in the name of security or development.

Mapping creates a distinction between us and them through

the discourse of economics only critical mapping can helps us
understand the security development nexus
Dr. Redi-Henry 11 (Simon, an historical and political geographer with interests
in political philosophy and the history of ideas, political economy, and the
international politics of the Cold War and Post-Cold War era. I have explored these
issues through substantive work on science, development, global health, and
humanitarianism. I gained my first degree and PhD at the University of Cambridge
and came to Queen Mary in 2004. Presently I am on leave (2012-14) as a Philip
Leverhulme Prize holder based in Oslo, where I am also a Senior Researcher at the
Peace Research Institute, Spaces of security and development: An alternative
mapping of the securitydevelopment nexus Security dialogue pgs 98-99) *security
development is the belief that development of third world countries comes with
security
Attending to the securitydevelopment nexus as part of a broader field of
discourse and practice is but one basis for a more critical mapping,
however. As a second step, we might take toward an alternative mapping; there is much that can be learned from other attempts to describe the
epistemic and material effects of particular discursive artifices. And the most obvious one here is Saids (1978) account of Orientalism. This is not a
parallel that needs overdoing, though there is much in Saids description of Orientalism as a field of discourse and practice, and above all in the flexible
positional superiority (Said, 1978: 7; emphasis in original) he saw it as offering the Occident, that resonates with contemporary uses of the security

2 More importantly, perhaps, the experience of post-colonial

authors in seeking a form of critique that can acknowledge the effects of
such a field of discourse and practice as the nexus without re-producing
and reifying it as a given thing has much to teach us if we wish on any
level to not just denote but also challenge the securitydevelopment
nexus.3 If we are to take both these critical cartographic injunctions seriously, then what sort of tasks must our mapping of the
developmentsecurity nexus address? Instead of attempting a
comprehensive, Borgesian approach to the entire reach of the developmentsecurity nexus ( see Salter, 2007), I
would suggest that we might begin with the fact that the projects of both
security and development are characterized by a desire to enact change
upon the world, and that one of the central ways both seek to achieve this
is through a concern with the geographical indexing of life itself (Kearns and Reiddevelopment nexus.

Henry, 2009). Such a concern may be registered as a will to know, as a desire to intervene or as an impulse to ascribe value to different lives in different
places. In all cases, it is about which lives do and which lives do not count and the determination of that by actors operating from particular positions.

Given this, we might imagine three primary tasks for a mapping of this
central aspect of the nexus. First, how is it given form and meaning in and
through prior geographical imaginaries? Second, how is it variously
promoted or resisted in different places and settings (cultural,
institutional, legal, political, economic), and across and between different
scales of action (the home, the region, the nation)? Third, how is it being
taken up within ongoing struggles over space itself ? Before setting out how such a critical
mapping can help us to better understand the ongoing formation of the
securitydevelopment nexus, I want first to identify what seem to be emerging as certain dominant geographical biases
within approaches to the securitydevelopment nexus, biases that are evident within the contributory essays to the Security Dialogue special issue on the
SecurityDevelopment Nexus Revisited.

L Cartographic Gaze
The aff uses the cartographic gaze that is an extension of
capitalism and imperialism
Stallmann 12 (Timothy, 2012, free lance cartographer under the instructions of
John Pickles, Alternative Cartographies: Building Collective Power, p. 63-65)
Critically analyzing the ways in which particular maps do work in the world is one part of Cramptons one-two punch. The other,

rooted in an understanding of the symbiotic relationship between

cartography and the modern imperial state, is a practice which attempts to make particular maps
which work otherwise. Over the past several centuries, the political consequences of
what Pickles calls the cartographic gaze have almost always been the extension
and defense of capitalism, imperialism, private property and real estate
development, and the state. It stands to reason that the most inspiring examples of counter-cartographic
practice stem from First Peoples movements, autonomist labor organizing, queer and feminist movements, and neighborhood
organizing

L Constructed Ontology
The map precedes the territorythe way that maps are drawn express
power relations that reduces the multiplicity of spaces to a reservoir of
instrumental value for imperial ends
Kitchin et al 9 (Rob Kitchin, ERC Advanced Investigator and PI of the
Programmable City project, Chris Perkins lecture of geography at Manchester
university and Martin Dodge prof fo geography at Manchester University 2009
Thinking about maps, rethinking maps) Crystal
the notion of a map as social
construction to argue that the map itself, its very makeup and
construction its self-presentation and design, its symbol set and
categorisation, its attendant text and supporting discourse is
ideologically loaded to convey particular messages . A map does not simply
represent the world; it produces the world. They argue that maps produce the
world by making propositions that are placed in the space of the map.
Maps achieve their work by exclaiming such propositions and Wood and Fels define
this process as one of posting information on map. Posting is the means by
which an attribute is recognized as valid (e.g. some class of the natural world) and is
spatialized. It is the means by which the nature of maps (is category) and the
nature of maps (there sign) conjoin to create a unified spatial ontology (this is
there). However, the map extends beyond spatial ontology by enabling
higher order propositions (this is there and therefore it is also; Wood and Fels 2008) to link
things in places into a relational grid. Wood and Fels argue that the power of this
spatial propositional framework is affirmed through its call to authority
by being an objective reference object that is prescriptive not descriptive .
So the map produces and reaffirms territory rather than just describing it.
Like Pickles, Crampton and others, Wood and Fels (2008) extend

L Terroism
Imperialism today has become centered around the War on
Terror and the War in Iraq Rejection in every instance is key
to challenge this ideology
Dalby (Simon Dalby, PhD, coeditor of Geopolitics, Professor of Geography @
Carleton University in Ottawa. Imperialism, Domination, Culture: The Continued
Relevance of Critical Geopolitics Published by Routledge in 20 08.
To take on his self-imposed task Tuathail argued in 1986 that it was
necessary to directly tackle geopolitical language, and the practices of
foreign policy making that invoked geographical terminology, but that
such an analysis must not abstract the language from the context of its
production. This needed to be complemented by a focus on the formulation of
foreign policy and the nature of the state system. In short, he suggested the
necessity of engaging directly with geopolitical culture, a theme that
reected other debates in the 1980s about culture and ideology, and
about how the discourse of dissent to use Rob Walkers
contemporaneous term, could effectively challenge the militarism of the
times.15 These questions have not gone away, although two decades later
very different enemies are being produced through geopolitical discourses
that render Islamic extremists as the enemy. Another generation of activists
has emerged to struggle with the consequences of military power, and as the
epigraph to this paper reproducing the slogan from the placards used at numerous
protests against the invasion of Iraq in 2003 suggests, geographical formulations
are part of this discourse too. Tuathail went on to argue that the concept
of a culture (in its broadest, all pervasive, not narrow sense) of geopolitics
is a much sounder ontological position for it reifies neither the economic
nor the political but postulates a dialectical (interconnected) relationship
between the two within the historical context of particular signifying
practices.16 Using this concept of geopolitical culture makes possible a
mode of analysis that overcomes the wariness that geographers had about
geopolitics after World War Two. Contemporary geographers should be
just as wary of the phenomenon, for it is premised on the reality as well as
the assumption of imperialism and domination. Mackinder (1904) understood
this and endorsed it. Contemporary social scientists should understand this and
expose it.17 Although Tuathails paper did not use the term critical
geopolitics, it did directly link foreign policy formulation, signifying practices,
language, geography and culture with an explicit rejection of imperialism and
domination. What has followed since under the label of critical
geopolitics shares these concerns, and the explicit political stance that it
is not the task of the geographer to provide state policy makers with
rationales for foreign policies that promote imperial power or coercion.
The analytical gaze is turned precisely on these activities, and in the process
becomes an explicitly critical practice. While the discipline had to wait a decade for
Tuathails book called Critical Geopolitics in which he elaborated a series of

theoretical concerns which showed that matters of representation and text required
a more sophisticated understanding of power, knowledge and identity, than that
specified earlier in terms of a simple exposure of domination, here in this initial
formulation are the key themes that were subsequently to mark the intellectual
terrain of critical geopolitics.18 But refusing the temptations to practice
geopolitics and instead engaging its culture to understand how geopolitics
works has not proven easy in the decades since. Many writers have
grappled with the matter of culture; Tuathail has returned to it recently to
spell it out in more theoretical detail and also to make it a key theme in teaching
undergraduates critical geopolitics.19 The numerous discussions elsewhere in
academia about post-coloniality, positionality, and post-modernism on the
one hand, and the not entirely unrelated discussions of method on the
other, have shaped the discussions in critical geopolitics too. So while the
achievements of a vibrant discussion of geopolitics in a number of critical registers
has been clear, the difficulties of critique have persisted and the debate about
method and purpose continue.20 But there is little doubt that the themes that
Tuathail sketched out in 1986 have been remarkably persistent; imperialism is at
least as relevant today as it was then, even if Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan are now
more in the news than El Salvador. While it is certainly an oversimplification,
nonetheless it is not too far from the mark to suggest that critical geopolitics is
what happened when post-structuralism, post-modernism, feminism and
other variants of critical social theory and the post-colonial debates in
other disciplines, and especially in international relations, met a revived
political geography in the late 1980s.21 Tuathails focus on the culture of
foreign policy making suggests this very clearly; his work with John Agnew in this
period, and in particular their crucial paper on Geopolitics and Discourse which
finally appeared in Political Geography in 1992, years after its initial circulation as a
conference paper, emphasises the multiple forms of geopolitical reasoning and the
intertexts between more formal thinking, practical articulations in political practice
and popular culture.22 Edward Saids Orientalism, perhaps the key text in
crystallising what subsequently became post-colonial studies, was
especially inuential in formulations of discourse and the geographical
imagination.23 It was so because (a point not elaborated in Tuathail s 1986
paper, but prominent in 1992) of the importance in geopolitical culture of the
construction of threats to American national security, how these threats
are mapped, and how such mappings structure strategic thinking,
specifying important places and marginal places, and in turn the
justifications for certain kinds of military forces best suited for dealing
with dangers in these specific places. The Soviet Threat was the dominant
danger through the Cold War period, and its specification drew on the classical
geopolitical writing of Mackinder and Spykman in constructing its Manichean
cartography of hostile otherness.24 Much more recently Derek Gregory has once
again used Said as his point of departure in criticising The Colonial Present and the
architectures of enmity that structure imperial hubris.25

L Tech Satellites
Status quo ERS technology functions to protect and expand
the sovereign state, but is on the cusp of a complete
redefining
Arias 09 [Santa Arias, The Politics of Historiography; The Spatial Turn
Interdisciplinary Perspectives p. 132; Barney Warf and Santa Arias; 2009; Santa
Arias - Spanish, University of Kansas, author, Her research is devoted to the role of
space in the material and discursive understanding of Latin American colonial
societies;
http://sociology.sunimc.net/htmledit/uploadfile/system/20110226/20110226011525
388.pdf, BM]
The emergence of high-resolution satellite imagery on the world market
provides an interesting example of how the practices of sovereignty can be
driven by technological developments and globalization. It makes little sense to
place domestic restrictions on high-resolution data which are easily accessible from foreign suppliers. A technology
that cannot be controlled by a single government is impossible to contain; satellite images can only be
suppressed if the data are sent to a ground station under the control of the censoring government.

In a
classic sovereignty bargain, the United States has been forced to revise
its conceptions of national security in order to promote its own industrial
competitiveness. It might be an overstatement to declare, as some have, that satellites have
"abolished the concept of distance,"41 but it is certainly the case that the practices associated with
territorial sovereignty are being revised. There is no single, straightforward logic to ERS
technology. Certainly, it still bears the imprint of its origins in military
reconnaissance, the root purpose of which was to protect the
superpowers' territorial integrity. Moreover, ERS is being used by some
developing countries to expand and reinforce their claims to sovereignty
within their borders. Yet the emergence of ERS data on the world market
has dramatically eroded the ability of states to control information about
the resources within their borders. The almost universal availability of
ERS data has rendered much of the world transparent; its global nature
appears to be undercutting the characteristically modern conceptualization of
Earth as territorially demarcated. If, as David Harvey suggests, modernity located
"the other" in a specific place "in a spatial order that was ethnocentrically
conceived to have homogenous and absolute ities,,,42 then ERS, by virtue of its
globality and its' transparency, challenges this spatial order, and thus
stands at the cusp of the modern and the postmodern.

ERS relationship to modernity, power, and information

disbursement beg for it to be interrogated and reimagined
Arias 09 [Santa Arias, The Politics of Historiography; The Spatial Turn
Interdisciplinary Perspectives p. 132; Barney Warf and Santa Arias; 2009; Santa
Arias - Spanish, University of Kansas, author, Her research is devoted to the role of
space in the material and discursive understanding of Latin American colonial
societies;
http://sociology.sunimc.net/htmledit/uploadfile/system/20110226/20110226011525
388.pdf, BM]
Because of its central role in the dissemination of knowledge about the
Earth, the most interesting political questions involving ERS technology
pertain to the control of knowledge and information and the purposes to
which they are applied, bringing us back to the neglected informational dimension
of sovereignty. Knowledge and sovereignty are conceptual kin ; both sorts
of claims are fundamentally about whose voice is to be regarded as
authoritative. And because the quest for scientific knowledge is a
cornerstone of modernity, these issues inevitably return us to the larger
question of the relationship of ERS to modernity. Information has inherent public-goods
attributes, so that governments are likely to continue to play a significant role in ERS funding and application.60

its close
relationship to power can kindle conicts over its control and possession.
Consider the following disputes over access to satellite-derived information. Developing countries'
lack of confidence in an uninterrupted supply of ERS data from the United States,
particularly after the privatization of Landsat, prompted the largest of
them to build their own remote sensing satellites.61 Researchers harbored similar
sentiments, but they lack the option of building their own satellites. According to one scientist , the tenfold
increase over the 1970s price in the cost of Landsat data after
privatization effectively impeded a good deal of scientific research .62 Both
And although infonnation is "slippery" by nature, its production and dissemination are costly and

government agencies and scientific researchers feel that commercialization threatens their access to data. SPOT,
for instance, implemented a policy in 1989 of giving preferential service to its largest customers, the oil and mining
industries, potentially placing certain government agencies at a disadvantage in obtaining urgently needed data. 63

recently, European governments have threatened to launch a "data

war" by attempting to restrict commercial access to ERS data from
weather satellites. Their moves have inamed researchers, who claim that
scientific and commercial data are not easily distinguishable. 64 In a similar vein,
More

ensuring data consistency is a central concern for researchers, whereas commercial competitiveness entails exactly
the opposite: capabilities, image size, and hardware are differentiated as much as possible to prevent commercial

In June 1995, the World Meteorological Organization

voted to restrict the availability of some kinds of weather data, "in effect
creating a new commodity which can be encrypted, bought and sold,
licensed, and controlled in a way that such data had not been before. "66 All
of these points of dissension have implications for issues of control and
authority in an information age, issues that include but are not limited to state
sovereignty. New technologies do not emerge as neutral tools; rather,
they arise in a context of ongoing struggles for control and authority,
certain voices and inhibiting others. Any technology as useful as ERS
users from switching systems. 65

KATO 93[MasahideKato;NuclearGlobalism:TraversingRockets,Satellites,andNuclearWarviathe
StrategicGaze;1993;MasahideT.Kato,Ph.D.CenterforSouthAsianStudies,UniversityofHawaiiatManoa;
http://www.jstor.org.hal.weber.edu:2200/stable/pdf/40644779.pdf,BM]

Such practice of reframing/redefining the periphery through photo image

became operational with the launching of the Earth Resource Technology
Satellite(ERTS,alsoknownasLandsat)in1972.The technostrategic map prepared by
ERTS was clearly designed for the benefit of TNC capital: The major oil and
mining companies, who could expand the resources in learning how to
identify geological formations that indicated reserve stood to reap the
most dramatic benefits. Speculators in cropfutureswouldalsofindERTSdataprofitable,
usingthemtopredictyields.Politicallyspeaking,the image recapitulation of the earth by
transnational capital and imperial states bespeaks their effort to
reterritorialize/contain the spatial movements of excolonies (thesocalled"Third
Worldmovements").Through an objectification process of the periphery, TNCs
have attempted to make the Third World disappear from their screen by
reclassifying it in the cognitive category of "natural resources. "Thesame
processhastakenplacein thecaseofthe Green Revolution,inwhichthe strenuous
recolonization of the peripheral space was none other than a
counterrevolutionary attempt to destroy the hegemonic recomposition of
the periphery(theThirdWorldmovements).In both cases, what was at great stake
was the sovereigntyoftheThirdWorld,thatis, the relative autonomy of Third
World space and time. By the objectification of the periphery through the
eye of the absolute strategic gaze, the sovereignty of the Third World has
been nullified without involving any conventional battles. The
Declaration of Bogota in 1976 signed by eight equatorial nations (Brazil,
Colombia,Congo,Ecuador,Indonesia,Kenya,Uganda,andZaire)protested the First World
monopoly over satellite surveillance.18Itwasa desperate attempt by the
Third World nations, who were faced with the invisible invasion and
destruction of their sovereignty by the TNCs and imperial states .Thefinal
transferofLandsattoaprivatecorporation,theEarthObservationSatelliteCompany(EOSAT),in1984
consolidatedaneraoftransnationalcapitalizationofthestrategicgaze.Francejoinedthecompetitionforthe
remotesensingsatelliteinformationmarketwithSPOT(satellitepourl'observationdelaterre),whichproduced
imageswith10meterresolution(asopposedtothe30meterresolutionprovidedbyLandsat).19Theimages
reproducedbySPOThavefurtherliquefiednationalconfigurations,replacingthemwiththeconfigurationsof
transnationalcapital.WiththedissolutionofthesuperpowerivalrybetweentheUnitedStatesandtheformerSoviet
Union,theirterrainofcompetitionhasshiftedtolaunchingcommercialsatellitesonconvertedintercontinental
blisticmissile(ICBM)rockets.Herein,theintegrationoftheFirstWorldimperialstatesandTNCshasbecometotal
asfarassatellitesurveillanceisconcerned.Forexample,Satelife,whichisaprivateventurerunbyU.S.andformer
Sovietspecialists,aimsto"givephysiciansinremoteareasofdevelopingcountriesaccesstomajorcentersof
medicalinformationlocatedinindustrializedcountries."PlanetEarth,aU.S.,Japanese,andWestEuropeanproject,
isdesignedtomonopolize"arelativelydetailedandaccuratepictureofthechangesandinteractionsoccurringinthe
planetecosphere."20Behind the rhetoric of such humanitarian postures, it is very

clear the TNCs and imperial states have secured a monopoly over
transcendental space and time, traversing and penetrating the Third
World with impunity.21Outerspacethushasbecomethespaceoftransnationalcapitalparexcellence.

OnecouldsaythatsatellitesurveillanceperfectedoneofSunTzu'saxioms,"supreme excellence

consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting

Internal Links
Maps are a manifestation of social relationships behind a guise
of neutral science. We can redefine cartographyrewrite the
mapto change the social structure
Harley, Director of the Office of Map History in the American
Geographical Society Collection, 89
[JB, Summer 1989, Deconstructing the Map, CARTOGRAPHICA VOL 26 No 2 , page
6-7, http://quod.lib.umich.edu/p/passages/4761530.0003.008/--deconstructing-themap?rgn=main;view=fulltext, PAC]
A second example is how the 'rules of the social order' appear to insert
themselves into the smaller codes and spaces of cartographic transcription.
The history of European cartography since the seventeenth century provides many
examples of this tendency. Pick a printed or manuscript map from the drawer
almost at random and what stands out is the unfailing way its text is as
much a commentary on the social structure of a particular nation or place
as it is on its topography. The map-maker is often as busy recording the
contours of feudalism, the shape of a religious hierarchy, or the steps in the tiers
of social class,39 as the topography of the physical and human landscape.
Why maps can be so convincing in this respect is that the rules of society
and the rules of measurement are mutually reinforcing in the same image.
Writing of the map of Paris, surveyed in 1652 by Jacques Gomboust, the King's
engineer, Louis Marin points to "this sly strategy of simulation-dissimulation": The
knowledge and science of representation, to demonstrate the truth that
its subject declares plainly, ow nonetheless in a social and political
hierarchy. The proofs of its 'theoretical' truth had to be given, they are the
recognisable signs; but the economy of these signs in their disposition on
the cartographic plane no longer obeys the rules of the order of geometry
and reason but, rather, the norms and values of the order of social and
religious tradition. Only the churches and important mansions benefit from natural
signs and from the visible rapport they maintain with what they represent.
Townhouses and private homes, precisely because they are private and not public,
will have the right only to the general and common representation of an arbitrary
and institutional sign, the poorest, the most elementary (but maybe, by virtue of
this, principal) of geometric elements; the point identically reproduced in bulk.40
Once again, much like 'the rule of ethnocentrism,' this hierarchicalization of
space is not a conscious act of cartographic representation . Rather it is
taken for granted in a society that the place of the king is more important
than the place of a lesser baron, that a castle is more important than a
peasant's house, that the town of an archbishop is more important than that of a
minor prelate, or that the estate of a landed gentleman is more worthy of emphasis
than that of a plain farmer. Cartography deploys its vocabulary accordingly so
that it embodies a systematic social inequality . The distinctions of class
and power are engineered, reified and legitimated in the map by means of

cartographic signs. The rule seems to be 'the more powerful, the more
prominent.' To those who have strength in the world shall be added
strength in the map. Using all the tricks of the cartographic trade size of
symbol, thickness of line, height of lettering, hatching and shading, the addition of
color we can trace this reinforcing tendency in innumerable European maps. We
can begin to see how maps, like art, become a mechanism "for defining
social relationships, sustaining social rules, and strengthening social
values."41 In the case of both these examples of rules, the point I am making is
that the rules operate both within and beyond the orderly structures of
classification and measurement. They go beyond the stated purposes of
cartography. Much of the power of the map, as a representation of social
geography, is that it operates behind a mask of a seemingly neutral
science. It hides and denies its social dimensions at the same time as it
legitimates. Yet whichever way we look at it the rules of society will
surface. They have ensured that maps are at least as much an image of
the social order as they are a measurement of the phenomenal world of
objects.

Impacts

! Ethic Wars and Genocide

European imposed borders result in massive ethnic wars and
genocide
Amadife and Warhola 93 (Emmanuel N. Amadife associate prof at KSU and James
W. Warhola prof at University of Maine, Africa's Political Boundaries: Colonial
Cartography, the OAU, and the Advisability of Ethno-National Adjustment
International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, Vol. 6, No. 4 (Summer, 1993)
Crystal
Examples of ethnic differences reecting serious national conicts abound
in post-colonial Africa; they appear to be the rule rather than the
exception. The full-scale civil wars largely along ethnic lines in Sudan (19561972; resumed in 1989-present); Rwanda (1959-1964, and since intermittently); Ethiopia; and
Nigeria (1967-1970) illustrate the point. Equally significant, many intracountry
civil conicts, which on the surface appeared as ideological or factionallybased wars, were in fact ethnic conicts carried on under a non-ethnic or
ostensibly supra-ethnic banner. The civil conicts in Angola, Mozambique,
Liberia, Uganda, and Sudan are cases in point. The existence and ready
diagnosis of the problem nonetheless produced a muted
acknowledgement from most African leaders, who frequently argued that
recognizing the claims of different ethnic groups could precipitate
secessionist wars analogous, perhaps, to the chain of military coups d'etat
beginning in the mid-1960s, or could start a process of 'Balkanization' in
Africa that would be impossible to halt without massive amounts of blood
being shed. Ignoring the existing and unfolding patterns is no viable
solution, given the social conditions in which they originate; and
repressing potential ethnic conicts is likely to provide as implausible a
long-term civic peace as the USSR's "Leninist nationality policy " did in
purportedly resolving that country's simmering ethnic troubles. Although the two regions (Africa and
former USSR) differ profoundly, the sobering and unavoidable point is that
many of the same social forces giving rise to ethnic conict in the former
USSR and Eastern Europe are operating as powerfully, though somewhat
differentially, in Africa. Since these forces are so powerful, and far from displaying signs of abating into
the 21st century, we turn now to a closer examination of what they imply for Africa's political framework.

Imperialistic economic conditions increase ethnic conict and

wars
Amadife and Warhola 93 (Emmanuel N. Amadife associate prof at KSU and James
W. Warhola prof at University of Maine, Africa's Political Boundaries: Colonial
Cartography, the OAU, and the Advisability of Ethno-National Adjustment
International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, Vol. 6, No. 4 (Summer, 1993)
Crystal
The potential for ethnic conict has been aggravated by the economic
stresses which most African countries have labored under, in many cases
trying to meet strict socio-political conditions dictated by IMF or World
Bank structural adjustment programs. The comprehensive examination of

the origins and development of ethnic-based conict by Donald Horowitz

underscores the significance of economic factors in energizing and
politicizing ethnic identity.30 A particularly sobering aspect of this
phenomenon is that economic factors have proven to catalyze ethnic
conict differentially: through rapid group enrichment; through economic
degeneration of one group in relation to another; through perceptions of
group favoritism, and so on. In light of this differentially operating factor, it is not surprising
that ethnic conict should abound on a continent so economically troubled
and "dismodernistic," so ethnographically complex, and with such a
tortured history of nation-state evolution. Given global patterns of ethnic
strife, the energization and politicization of ethnic consciousness under
these circumstances is quite predictable.

! Imperialism
Imperialism
Edward W. Said

(Edward Wadie Said (Arabic pronunciation: [wdi sid]; Arabic: , Idwrd

Wad Sad; 1 November 1935 25 September 2003) was a Palestinian American literary theorist and public
intellectual who helped found the critical-theory field of postcolonialism. Born in Jerusalem in Mandatory Palestine to
Palestinian parents resident in Egypt, he was an American citizen through his father Accessed 7/28/2015 Culture
and Imperialism Published

1993)

One should not pretend that models for a harmonious world order are
ready at hand, and it would be equally disingenuous to suppose that ideas
of peace and community have much of a chance when power is moved to
action by aggressive perceptions of "vital national interests" or unlimited
sovereignty. The United States' clash with Iraq and Iraq's aggression against Kuwait concerning oil are
obvious examples. The wonder of it is that the schooling for such relatively
provincial thought and action is still prevalent, unchecked, uncritically
accepted, recurringly replicated in the education of generation after
generation . We are all taught to venerate our nations and admire our
traditions: we are taught to pursue their interests with toughness and in
disregard for other societies. A new and in my opinion appalling tribalism is
fracturing societies, separating peoples, promoting greed, bloody conflict, and uninteresting assertions of
minor ethnic or group particularity. Little time is spent not so much in "learning about
other cultures"-the phrase has an inane vagueness to it-but in studying the map of
interactions, the actual and often productive traffic occurring on a day-by-day, and even minute-by-minute
basis among states, societies, groups, identities. No one can hold this entire map in his or her head, which is why
the geography of empire and the many-sided imperial experience that created its fundamental texture should be

we look back at the

nineteenth century, we see that the drive toward empire in effect brought
most of the earth under the domination of a handful of powers. To get hold of
part of what this means, I propose to look at a specific set of rich cultural
documents in which the interaction between Europe or America on the one
hand and the imperialized world on the other is animated, informed, made
explicit as an experience for both sides of the encounter . Yet before I do this,
historically and systematically, it is a useful preparation to look at what still remains
of imperialism in recent cultural discussion. This is the residuum of a dense,
interesting history that is paradoxically global and local at the same time,
and it is also a sign of how the imperial past lives on, arousing argument
and counter-argument with surprising intensity. Because they are contemporary and
easy at hand, these traces of the past in the present point the way to a study
of the histories the plural is used advisedly-created by empire, not just
the stories of the white man and woman, but also those of the non-whites
whose lands and very being were at issue, even as their claims were
denied or ignored. One significant contemporary debate about the residue of imperialism the matter of
considered first in terms of a few salient configurations. Primarily, as

how "natives" are represented in the Western media-illustrates the persistence of such interdependence and
overlapping, not only in the debate's content but in its form, not only in what is said but also in how it is said, by
whom, where, and for whom. This bears looking into, although it requiies a self-discipline not easily come by, so
well-developed, tempting, and ready at hand are the confrontational strategies. In 1984, well before The Satanic
Verses appeared, Salman Rushdie diagnosed the spate of films and articles about the British Raj, including the
television series The Jewel in the Crown and David Lean's film of A Patsage to India. Rushdie noted that the
nostalgia pressed into service by these affectionate recollections of British rule in India coincided with the Falklands

War, and that "the rise of Raj revisionism, exemplified by the huge success of these fictions, is the artistic
counterpart to the rise of conservative ideologies in modern Britain." Commentators responded to what they
considered Rushdie's wailing and whining in public and. seemed to disregard his principal point. Rushdie was trying
to make a larger argument, which presumably should have appealed to intellectuals for whom George Orwell's wellknown description of the intellectual's place in society as being inside and outside the whale no longer applied;
modern reality in Rushdie's terms was actually "whaleless, this W(:>rld without quiet corners [in which] there can
be no easy escapes from history, from hullabaloo, from terrible, unquiet fuss."27 But Rushdie's main point was not
the point considered worth taking up and debating.

Instead the main issue for contention

was whether things in the Third World hadn't in fact declined after the
colonies had been emancipated, and whether it might not be better on the
whole to listen to the rare-luckily, I might add, extremely rare-Third World
intellectuals who manfully ascribed most of their present barbarities,
tyrannies, and degradations to their own native histories, histories that
were pretty bad before colonialism and that reverted to that state after
colonialism. Hence, ran this argument, better a ruthlessly honest V. S. Naipaul than an absurdly posturing
Rushdie.

! Laundry List
It is through the exercise of mapping that we come to accept
modern notions of military intervention- the epistemic
acceptance of state power through modern maps and their
hidden values legitimate the current violence of the state. Only
by recognizing the inherent nature of cartographic violence
can we begin the deconstruction process
Fredman 12 [Dr. David Fedman, Instructor of Japanese, Korean, and world
history at the University of California, Irvine. Research interests include East Asian
cartography, Japanese mountaineering history, and the history of the earth sciences
in Asia. Japanese Colonial Cartography: Maps, Mapmaking, and the Land Survey in
Colonial Korea, The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol 10, Issue 52, No. 4, December 24,
2012.]
While this paper has done little to explicate the close-knit network of individuals and institutions engaged in
geodetic surveying, it is hard to overstate the importance these individuals played in the triangulation survey of

The prevailing standards, conventions, and wisdom about surveying owed swiftly
through the institutional circuitry of the Land Survey Bureau, governmentgeneral, Japanese military, and many universities engaged in geodetic
research. This network not only channeled ideas and information, but also was
instrumental in determining the ow of human capital, the many
surveyors and administrators who were dispatched across the empire where they
contributed to the production of cartographic knowledge in a wide range
of capacitiesfrom fieldwork to data input to academic research and
teaching. This network expanded well beyond Korea. In a sense, it expanded in tandem with the
reaches of the empire itself: as Japan acquired new territories, mapmakers were
dispatched to ever more distant regions of Asia, where they would not only
produce map sheets but also train local surveyors and conduct their own research. By 1945, a vast web
Korea.

of mapmakers, mapping stations, schools, and collaborating institutions stretched across Japans empire, then

the history of the triangulation survey of Korea is

also a human storyone replete with the complexities, frustrations, and setbacks
that come with any task as intricate and taxing as a triangulation survey.
spanning the Asia-Pacific. In other words,

In Korea, the remote, mountainous regions of the northeast proved resistant to easy mapping and many regions
necessitated multiple surveys and revisions. These difficulties were compounded by the challenges of translation,
human error, resistance, and weatherall of which conspired to tax the patience, resolve, and resources of these

the veneer of scientific precision and objectivity projected by

these maps obscures the challenges and complexities inherent to this
process . It is therefore imperative that we also consider the rhetorical
qualities of these mapsthe ways in which these maps signal the values,
assumptions, and worldviews of their creators . For no matter how thoroughgoing or
precise Japanese surveyors thought their mapmaking enterprise, the surveying process was in its
very essence an exercise in reduction. Far from comprehensive, objective, or
neutral, these maps convey abstractions of reality, informed by the sort of
propositional logic described here by Denis Wood (2010, 41): Mapmakers are not
cognitive agents parachuted into a pre-given world with a chain and theodolite, to
measure and record what they find there. Rather theyre extraordinarily
mapmakers. Yet

selective creators of a worldnot the world, but a worldwhose features they

bring into being with a map. Following Wood, many critical cartographers have
challenged the notion of the scientific map as a neutral, benign, or
objective representation, suggesting alternatively that we should treat it
as a value-laden construction, one valuable not only for its conveyance of
spatial information but also for its rhetorical and ideological strategies
(Edney 1990; B. Harley 1989; Monmonier 1993). Perhaps the most striking rhetorical feature of these maps is the
aesthetic finish of science: the premium placed on the precise, rigorous, and empirical representation of space.
Stripped of artistry and embellishments, these maps evince nothing but cold, hard fact: a
representational strategy that occludes the limitations and lacunae of these maps. The spiritual and geomantic
topographies of Koreans everyday life are one such lacuna, but many others exist.6 Perhaps the greatest lacuna of
all, however, is reserved for historiography: the absence of critical analyses of Japanese colonial mapmaking as a

colonial cartographic materials were born of

an intricate process. These maps did not emerge from a vacuum; rather, they were
constructed in a colonial context animated by the same aspirations,
emotions, and power relations that ran latent throughout Korean society
under Japanese rule. To take these maps as natural or neutralto examine their content
solely for what they tell us about spatial arrangementsis to overlook the
ways in which the surveying process marked (and was marked by) social
relations, power dynamics, and the popular imagination. This short paper has striven
process. As this paper has shown, Japanese

to lay the groundwork for a critical interpretation of these maps as both a product and a process, but much work
remains.

! Loss of Idenity
Western cartography renders spaces personless and
relationless to the areas that are mapped
Kitchin et al 9 (Rob Kitchin, ERC Advanced Investigator and PI of the
Programmable City project, Chris Perkins lecture of geography at Manchester
university and Martin Dodge prof of geography at Manchester University 2009
Thinking about maps, rethinking maps) Crystal
Western cartography, according to Ingold (2000: 203), thus transforms everywhere-asregion, the world as experienced by a mobile inhabitant, into everywhereas-space, the imaginary birds-eye view of a transcendent
consciousness (see also Propens chapter in this volume in which he discusses the nature of disembodied
views of the whole earth). In so doing, people and their experiences are obliterated
from the map, and the structure of the world is fixed without regard to the
movements and actions of its inhabitants the world it describes is not a
world in the making, but one ready-made for life to occupy (p. 235); in the
cartographic world . . . all is still and silent (p. 242). Maps as reminders of
paths and expressions of experience, as they were conceived in the
European Middle Ages, morphed into supposed representations of space
through the application of scientific principles. The issue is, however, that people
live in the everywhere-as-region and know as they go they are
constantly mapping as they move through places employing a form of
process cartography so there is a disconnect between Western notions of
a map, and the everyday ways in which people come to know and be in the
world. This leads to a paradox the more a map aims to furnish a precise
and comprehensive representation of reality, the less true to life this
representation appears (p. 242).

Maps empower the empire to steal land and strip the

indigenous people of their land- the past millennium proves
Wood 12 (Denis, is an artist, author, cartographer and a former professor of
Design at North Carolina State University, The Anthropology of Cartography, Pg
289 http://www.deniswood.net/content/Anthro%20Cart.pdf)
Maps encode these links by fusing signs onto a common plane . that of the map. It is
the coexistence of the signs on the plane that links them. The signs arc subject to no fewer than the 10 codes "'cIs and I
enumerated in 'Designs on Signs: Myth and Meaning in Maps': the iconic, the linguistic, the tectonic, the temporal, the

More or less permanent

sign systems that make links through the plane of territory subject to
fewer codes fail to rise to the level of the map. Typically these lack presentational coding.
presentational, the thematic, the topic, the historical, the rhetorical and the utilitarian.

Examples include sketch maps (which we distinguish from maps precisely as we distinguish preparatory drawings and sketches from
paintings) and experimental sketch maps (mappers don't 'seal' experimental sketch maps ~a e it's precisely their subjectivity that's

The restriction of maps to incontestably authoritative objects (by

excluding sketch maps, experimental sketch maps, paintings, photos and
the like) gives maps Immense power. For the past half millennium people
armed with maps have stolen land from others (often stealing the others
themselves along with the land), have taken property, mowed down
of interest).6

forests, despoiled streams and rivers, forced people to pay taxes to

support foreign wars, drafted them into armies, forced them to move to
the other sides of borders, sent their children to schools they may not have wanted them to go to, and stopped
them from selling tomatoes out of their garage. Of course all these things ca n be accomplished
without maps - they used to be (and often still are) - but the map - an
authoritative image of the world as it Is - makes it so much easier: 'Look,
it's not me insisting on this. See, it's right here on the map. If you live
here, you can't sell tomatoes. Retail sales are not allowed in residential zoning districts. It's really that simple.'

! Africa Conict
African colonial borders spur conict
Sparke 7 (Matthew Sparke prof of geography and international studies at
Washington University Everywhere but Always Somewhere: Critical Geographies of
the Global South The Global South, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Winter, 2007) Crystal
Conicts may also derive from the ill-defined nature of many borders. Poor
delimitation and demarcation, whether because the same colonial power
was in charge of both sides of the border or because of imprecise colonial
treaties, are common occurrences across the continent. The former can lead to
classical territorial disputes, and in the latter case attempts at demarcation often cause tensions.
Discrepancies

between delimitation and demarcation may also promote

conict (Ajala, 1983; Allott, 1974). Multiple and contradicting treaties have, for
example, contributed to disputes between Benin and Niger (over the island of
Lete), between Ethiopia and Somalia, and between Nigeria and Cameroon
(Mariam, 1964; Ngwa, 1993). Other delimitation conicts have involved Burkina and
Mali, Chad and Nigeria, Cte dIvoire and Ghana, Zaire and Zambia, and
Zambia and Botswana. Sudan and Kenya also disagree over the Ilemi
Triangle portion of their joint boundary (Brownlie, 1979). As for the ambiguous
demarcation between Senegal and Gambia, it was only partly resolved
when Senegal returned 26 villages from the Kantora region to Gambia in
the 1960s in one of only two African precedents of postcolonial boundary
redrawing (Renner, 1985).6 The belief that the boundary area contains natural resources can magnify
disputes (Kum, 1993; Zartman, 1969). This was the case with the armed clashes
between Burkina and Mali in 1974 and 1985 over the Agacher strip, which
was rumored to hold oil reserves. The phosphate deposits in Western
Sahara have also inuenced Moroccan claims over the region, as have oil
fields in the dispute about offshore islands between Cameroon and
Nigeria. In general, unequal resourcesincluding water, oil and other
minerals, fisheries, and access to the seaseem to promote conict (Asiwaju,
1993; Prescott, 1972). Artificial borders may also provide an opportunity for
disputes by becoming pretexts to pick quarrels (Allott, 1969; Lyons, 1998; Zartman,
1969). Although the 1985 Christmas war between Burkina and Mali was based on territorial claims, these
appeared secondary to the animosity between Thomas Sankaras revolutionary regime and Moussa Traors
conservative government, for example. The dispute between Ghana and Togo in 1965 and 1966 was also partly
driven by Nkrumahs domestic economic problems.

! Fetishization
Contemporary images of the globe have normalized a
technoengineered worldview that is fetishized yet anything
but natural
Schfer 05 [Wolf Schfer; head of the Center for Global History, Department of
History, Stony Brook University; Ptolemys Revenge: A Critique of Historical
Cartography; 08/29/05, revised 11/16/05;
http://www.stonybrook.edu/libmap/coordinates/seriesa/no3/a3.htm, BM]
The terrestrial globe provides the logo of our age if not the fetish of our time.[2] The
most popular (non-pornographic) image after the arrival of the World Wide
Web in the early 1990s was the earth and not the sun. Earth you find everywhere, on websites,
posters, buttons, banners and backgrounds; for images of the sun, you have to go to the technical pages of astronomy. A majority of
webmasters and designers has voted with countless globes and world maps for the earth as the (Begin Page 2) key image of the
global age.[3] Watching TV[4] or browsing the Web, one is tempted to think that Ptolemy and the geocentric cosmology got a
belated revenge on Copernicus and the heliocentric revolution.[5] There are of course many good reasons to refocus on the earth
as the still most important place for humankind and life in the twenty-first century: concerns about the environment and the power

contemporary focus on the

geobody is therefore not that people pay too much attention to the ecological health of the planet or scrutinize
globalization too much; it is that they have learned to view the modern map of the world as
a naturalistic and self-evident thing. Saturated with contemporary world maps
and easily available images of the globe, people are forgetting (if they ever knew)
that the geography of the whole planet was a sketchy and fragmented affair throughout human
history, and has become comprehensive only quite recently Modern science and
technology have gained an interpretive monopoly about all things
physical. High-resolution photography and computer-enhanced satellite imagery deliver brilliant hemispheric panoramas.
Profoundly iconic and imprinted in the collective brain, the spinning
geobody and its cartographic representation have become a natural
sight. Yet our map of the world and photorealistic globe are anything but natural;
produced by modern geography and imagineered[6] by technoscience,
they only appear to be natural because they are firmly embedded in the
present worldview. Earlier pictures of the earth were disjointed and incomplete, sacred and imaginary, myopic and
symbolic; falsely universalistic perhaps but also local to a fault. This article proceeds from the assumption that the current
global perspective obscures the manifold geographies of the past and the
protoglobalization of the planetthe discovery, exploration and exploitation of the whole earth in the last
five hundred years. I will argue that the universal success of the modern world map has
effectively displaced all preglobal geographies in the public mind so that we must
of unfettered globalizations are prominent among them. The problem with the

ask now, what does it mean to project the novelty of the global world back in time? What are the hidden costs of framing global
history in the context of the modern geographical consensus?

! Dispacement?
OTuathail 96 [Gearoid Professor, Government and International Afffairs, School
of Public and International Affairs, Virginia Tech Critical Geopolitics: the politics of
writing global space Pages 1-2, Google Books]
Geography is about power. Although often assumed to be innocent, the geography
of the world is not a product of nature but a product of histories of struggle between
competing authorities over the power to organize, occupy, and administer space.
Imperial systems through-out history, from classical Greece and Rome to China and
the Arab world, exercised their power through their ability to impose order and
meaning upon space. In sixteenthcentury Europe, the centralizing states of the
new monarchs began organizing space around an intensified principle of royal
absolutism. In regions both within and beyond the nominal domain of the Crown,
the power of royal authority over space was extended and deepened by newly
powerful court bureaucracies and armies. The results in many instances were often
violent, as the jurisdictional ambitions of royal authority met the determined
resistance of certain local and regional lords. Within the context of this struggle, the
cartographic and other descriptive forms of knowledge that took the name
geography in the early modern period and that were written in the name of the
sovereign could hardly be anything else but political. To the opponents of the
expansionist court, geography was a foreign imposition, a form of knowledge
conceived in imperial capitals and dedicated to the territorialization of space along
lines established by royal authority. Geography was not something already
possessed by the earth but an active writing of the earth by an expanding,
centralizing imperial state. It was not a noun but a verb, a geo-graphing, an earthwriting by ambitious endocolonizing and exocolonizing states who sought to seize
space and organize it to fit their own cultural visions and material interests. More
than five hundred years later, this struggle between centralizing states and
authoritative centers, on the one hand, and rebellious margins and dissident
cultures, on the other hand, is still with us. While almost all of the land of the earth
has now been territorialized by states, the processes by which this disciplining of
space by modern states occurs remain highly contested. From Chechnya to Chiapas
and from Rondonia to Kurdistan and East Timor, the jurisdictions of centralized
nation-states strive to eliminate the contradictions of marginalized peoples and
nations. Idealized maps from the center clash with the lived geographies of the
margin, with the controlling cartographic visions of the former frequently inducing
cultural conflict, war, and displacement. Indeed, the rise in the absolute numbers of
displaced peoples in the past twenty-five years is testimony to the persistence of
struggles over space and place. In 1993 the United Nations High Commissioner for
Refugees estimated that roughly 1 in every 130 people on earth has been forced
into flight because of war and state persecution. In 1970 there were 2.5 million
refugees in the world; today that figure is well over 18.2 million. In addition an
estimated 24 million people are internally displaced within their own states because
of conflict.2 More recently, genocide in Rwanda left over 500,000 murdered and
produced an unprecedented exodus of refugees from that state into surrounding
states. Refugees continue to be generated by ethnic cleansing campaigns in the

Balkans; economic collapse in Cuba; ethnic wars in the Caucasus; state repression
in Guatemala, Turkey, Indonesia, Iraq, and Sudan; and xenophobic terror in many
other states. Struggles over the ownership, administration, and mastery of space
are an inescapable part of the dynamic of contemporary global politics.

Alt(s)

Counter Mapping
The alternative is countermapping
Maps can be used for discourses of power but countermapping allows for
marginalized individuals and groups to confront the dominant discourses
and power relations with their own mapping
Culcasi 12 (Karen Culcasi prof of geology and geography and West Virginia
university Mapping the Middle East from Within: (Counter-) Cartographies of an
Imperialist Construction Antipode Vol. 44 No. 4) Crystal
Any place, whether a nation like Egypt or a region like the Middle East,
is constructed through a variety of discursive and material processes.
However, the perceived neutrality and objectivity of maps makes them one
of the most powerful ways to create and naturalize places (Harley 1989; Pickles
2004). The cartographic construction of places can occur formally through
the institutionalization of place names and the drawing of borders, and
informally by making abstract space knowable, definable, and controllable
(Mitchell 2002; Scott 1998). As literature in the loosely defined subfield of critical cartography has recently

maps are not merely representations of preexisting spaces, but

instead they are active discursive practices that have a central role in
helping to create, naturalize, and even contest places (Kitchin and Dodge 2007; Wood
2010; Wood and Fels 2008). Generally funded and supported by state organization,
national maps are one example of how cartography and the construction
of place are intimately linked. Large-scale national mapssuch as
cadastral or topographical mapsare essential for ordering and recording
the geographical possessions of the state (Scott 1998; Wood and Fels 2008). Yet
national maps are also crucial for symbolizing the national territory as a
unified and legitimate nation (Herb 2004; Kashani-Sabet 1999; Monmonier 1997; Zeigler 2002).
emphasized,

These iconic or logo maps, as Benedict Anderson (1991:175) referred to them, help to provide tangible evidence

The
connection between mapping and national discourses has been well
examined, but as I focus on in this paper, the cartographic construction of
places also happens at larger world-regional scales. Whether at a national
or world-regional scale, maps typically work to create and perpetuate
dominant geographical discourses. Cartography has historically been a
tool of the powerful. Indeed, elite classes (whether they were ministers, monarchs or the
state) have traditionally controlled the production and distribution of maps.
However, cartography has also been used in order to negotiate, resist, and
challenge powerful classes and their normative ideas. As the availability of
cartographic technologies and geospatial information increased in the late
twentieth century, there has been a growth in map production and use
across the globe. The increased accessibility of efficient and affordable cartographic technologies and data
of the existence of the national territory which can otherwise be an abstract geographical entity.

eventually filtered down to groups who historically had not held the means of (map) production. As a result,

many marginalized groups have adopted a broad range of mapping

practices in order to contest dominant discourses and material realities . In a
1995 Antipode article on the cartographic efforts of local activists fighting to gain control over portions of the
Indonesian forest, Nancy

Peluso uses the term countermapping to refer to

cartographic attempts to disrupt dominant power structures and

discourses. Since then, literature on counter mapping as grown substantially (eg Harris and Hazen 2006:115
117; Herb et al 2009:334; Pickles 2004; Wood 2010:111155). Many scholars have described
how non-governmental, grassroots, and community movements have
adopted counter-mapping practices in order to draw attention to sociospatial inequalities that range from indigenous territorial claims to urban
squalor (Crampton 2010:124125; Gibson 1999; Harley 1990b; Harris and Hazen 2006; Hodgson and Schroeder
2002; Johnson, Louis and Pramono 2006; Mundy 1996; Orlove 1991; Peluso 1995; Rundstrom 1991; Sparke 1995,

While counter-mapping has become more common at the

non-governmental or community level, it is also evident in other realms,
which have been less frequently theorized as counter mapping. On a
broader level, mapping that questions dominant discourses or seeks to
disrupt traditional power relations, regardless of the scale of the issue or
who exactly produced the maps, is a form of counter-mapping. For
example, I argue that cartographic discourses that consistently ignore the
existence of the Middle East, even if they are produced by state
governments, are a form of geopolitical resistance to western geographic
norms. It is with this broader or more subtle form of counter mapping that
I am concerned with in this paper. As I discuss below, maps produced
within Arab states construct a world-regional geography that is different
from maps published in the USA, and thus, these maps form a counter
construction of the division of a portion of the world.
1998; St Martin 2009).

Counter Mapping Solvency

Critical cartography allows for an understanding of power
relations and increasing counter mapping and geographies
Sparke 7 (Matthew Sparke prof of geography and international studies at
Washington University Everywhere but Always Somewhere: Critical Geographies of
the Global South The Global South, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Winter, 2007) Crystal
To use Du Bois's terms, a critical capsizal of colonial cartographic convention
involves articulating a double consciousness about the over-mapping of
the global South: acknowledging the power of the over-mapping by
dominant imaginative geographies while also disclosing the critical
possibilities of the other geographies that are covered-up.9 Toni Morrison
provides a powerful example at the start of her book about whiteness. Morrison
explains that she wants "to draw a map of a critical geography and use that
map to open as much space for discovery, intellectual adventure and close
exploration as did the original charting of the New World - without the
mandate for conquest" (3). Even in the original moments of mapping the
'New World' as New it is possible in this way to locate critical ^-original
geographies of the global South. Thus in 'Newfoundland', to pick an early
example from what eventually became the "The True North, Strong and Free" according to Canada's national anthem - the maps of Shawnadithit can be read as a
critical commentary from the last of the native inhabitants on the new found
colonizers at their territorial-##2- terrorizing work10. Tracking forward to the
present, the same possibility of mapping the Global South without a
mandate for conquest discloses many other critical geographies,
geographies that map other-wise and which by doing so locate the Global
South in places such as the tent cities of rich country homeless protests as
well as in the reimagination of the Caribbean, Africa, Asia and Latin
America as heterogeneous but shared grounds for anti-imperial uprising
and critique. Just like Shawnadithit 's counter-mappings, the doubleconsciousness in these diverse geographies means that they are imagined
and developed in critical relationship to cartographies of colonial control.
For example, the World Social Forum, which has been held now four times in Porto
Alegre, Brazil, once in Mumbai, and which is currently proliferating globally in the
form of more accessible and diverse regional social forums, was initially imagined as
a venue where the globalization is inevitable' world view articulated at the
World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, might be capsized and
critiqued. Retaining some of the global imagery, but transforming it
through appeals to the grassroots globalization of the global South, World
Social Forum participants have repeatedly argued that "Another World is
Possible."11 Instead of the 'level playing field' view of globalization that is
routinely rehearsed by the player-managers in Davos, the World Social
Forum has therefore also allowed for diverse counter-mappings that
highlight how increasing economic interdependency has also come with
increasing inequalities and increasing awareness about how to resist
too.12

Mapping and GIS allows for the voice of the oppressed to form decisions
and form counterhegemonic action
Pickles 95 (John Pickles prof of international studies at north Carolina at chapel
hill 1995. Representations in an Electronic Age: Geography, GIS, and Democracy
Ground Truth: The Social Implications of Geographic Information Systems) Crystal
GIS and informatics do
open virtual spaces for real social interaction, new communities of
dialogue, and new interactive settings for which we currently have only
poor language and no architecture. The electronic airways are, in this view, interpreted to be
foundational for the reemergence of a civic culture, a community of dialogue, and a global village. They are
also the potential source of new powers for marginalized groups to whom
traditional media have been inaccessible. In this view, the electronic
airways and systems of informatics provide a potential source of counterhegemonic social action, and GIS as a specific form of data handling and
imaging offers a diverse array of practical possibilities . In both cases
(the resurgence of civic culture and the potential for counter-hegemonic
action) informatics are seen as a potential liberator of socially and
politically marginalized groups, and thus a source of democratizing power
for these newly networked groups. If information is power in this sense,
and if community is built through dialogue, then information permits both
to emerge for those who would otherwise have no voice and no space for
collective action. Uses of communication systems for politically progressive purposes and for the defense
Such claims are deeply disturbing and at root problematic. Nonetheless,

of speech against totalitarianism have recently taken on a character of mythic proportions, as users extol the
progressive uses of fax machines by students in China during the 1989 Democracy Movement, or the use of e-mail
by those opposed to the coup against Gorbachev to maintain contact with each other and the outside world (Penley
and Ross, 1991, viii). Like Pancho Villa, who captured the trains and used them to attack government troops and

new informatic democrats

and revolutionaries are eulogized as examples of progressive power, and
as counterexamples to the more widespread business, state, and military
uses of the technology. Even though the funding for research and
development of the hardware and software used in GIS and other imaging
systems has come primarily from business, state, and military sources,
advocates of the progressive potential of information and imaging
technologies argue that access is hard to deny, networks are quite difficult
to control information is readily accessible and used by individuals and
groups with limited budgets and expertise, and the ability to use the
technology in depth permits groups like environmental organizations to
counter claims by polluters about their environmental impacts, by
developers about likely effects on groundwater, and so on. In this view,
GIS enables communities to make better decisions by providing access to
more and better information. It provides more powerful tools for local
planning agencies; it offers exciting possibilities for data coordination,
access, and exchange; and it permits more efficient allocation of resources
and a more open rational decisionmaking process.3
gain access to the very heart of the cities during the Mexican Revolution,

Counter Cartography is key to see past the objectivity of

representational maps
Stallmann Freelance Cartographer and GIS analyst, 12 (Timothy,
2012, Alternative Cartographies: Building Collective Power, p. 63-65, Accessed
6/30/14, ESB)
Maps are not, have never intended to be , exact mirrors of the Earths surface.
Simplification, generalization and data refinement are key tools in the
process of Western scientific cartography. It is at the same time important
to understand that traditional cartography still functions very much
through a logic of representation. Map icons, for example, may or may not be
designed in order to resemble, but they consistently are designed in order to
represent. Representational maps work because they function as part of
(material) chains of resemblance which co-constitute the territory which
they claim to represent. This logic of representation is what makes it possible to
point at a map and say something like: this is Raleigh, that is the Ferry from
Hatteras to Ocracoke, or the darker purple areas have a higher median income.
These statements depend on institutions, practices, relationships,
bulldozers, annexation lawsuits, and census forms which discipline both spaces
and people. Re presentational cartography attempts to make invisible the
institutions, practices, relationships, and people who do the work
necessary to keep chains of representation smoothly functioning. The
institutions, practices, technologies and bodies underlying
representational cartography claim, in Donna Haraways language , the
power to see and not be seen, to represent while escaping
representation. 12 What escapes representation is oftentimes the object
of counter-cartography the ways these systems function to maintain and
increase a hierarchical distribution of wealth, how they distribute life
chances in ways which make it harder for marginalized communities to
exercise autonomy, how they violently impose the territorial will of the
few on the many , and their perverse capacity honed to perfection in
the history of science tied to militarism, capitalism, colonialism, and
male supremacy to distance the knowing subject from everybody and
everything in the interests of unfettered power. 13 Counter-cartography,
growing out of social movements which situate themselves in opposition
to the unfettered power of individual states, of multinational corporations,
of border regimes, neoliberalism or capitalism, opposes both the material
of chains of representation and the this-is-that-is-there logic of maps
which they make possible. Where representational cartography make s
statements about a defined territory, nonrepresentational 14 counter- cartography aims to ask questions and open
conversations. A non-representational map is not a map which says
nothing, nor is it one which has no connection with any outside. Rather,
non-representational mapping uses relations of what Foucault calls
similitude. 15 Graphic objects on the map plane have relations of
similarity with material objects, but also with other graphic objects, with

words and with ideas. Similitude explodes the unidirectional real

representation arrow of the Western map into a multitude of connections
both within and outside the map plane.

Transductive Cartography
The alt is to reject the aff in favor of a transductive
cartographic analysis
Maps are not singular objects but impacted by each experience
that interacts with it to form a better approach to societal
ontological underpinnings of relations.
Kitchin and Dodge 7(Rob Kitchin prof of geography at National University of
Ireland and Martin Dodge prof of geography at the University of Rochester
Rethinking maps Progress in Human Geography 31(3) (2007) Crystal
maps emerge in process through a diverse set
of practices. Given that practices are an ongoing series of events, it follows that maps are
constantly in a state of becoming; they are ontogenetic (emergent) in nature.
Maps have no ontological security, they are of-themoment; transitory,
eeting, contingent, relational and context-dependent . They are never
fully formed and their work is never complete. Maps are profitably
theorized, not as mirrors of nature (as objective and essential truths) or as socially
constructed representations, but as emergent. In this section we want to start to think
through how maps emerge through practices drawing on the concepts of
transduction and technicity; to provide a starting point for conceptually framing the process by
From our examples we would argue that

which John and Jane begin to solve their relational problems. According to Adrian Mackenzie (2003: 10)

transduction is a kind of operation, in which a particular domain

undergoes a certain kind of ontogenetic modulation. Through this
modulation in-formation or individuation occurs. That is, transduction
involves a domain taking-on-form, sometimes repeatedly (his emphasis). Simondon
(1992: 313) explains [t]he simplest image of the transductive process is furnished
if one thinks of a crystal, beginning as a tiny seed, which grows and
extends itself in all directions in its mother-water. Each layer of molecules
that has already been constituted serves as the structuring basis for the
layer that is being formed next, and the result is amplifying reticular
structure. In other words, the crystal grows through individuations, that
cite previous individuations, to transduce elements into a crystal. Using this
idea, if we think of John creating a map of population change, we can say that the plotting of
lines, colours and so on consists of a series of individuations that
transduces the blank page into a map, with each individuation citing
previous plottings. Transduction occurs because we are endlessly
confronted with sets of relational problems practices in effect aim to
solve these problems (Mackenzie, 2002). In the case of mapping, those problems
include metaproblems such as the production of maps or finding ones
way, that in themselves are made up of hundreds of smaller problems
such as where to place a label, what colour scheme to use, or how to
orientate or make correspondence between map and territory. The solving
of problems is always partial, opening up new problems (eg, the plotting of one line

and contextual (embedded within standards, conventions,

received wisdom, personal preferences, direction by others, and so on). In this sense, transduction is the
means by which a domain structures itself as a partial, incomplete
solution to a relational problem (Mackenzie, 2003: 10). In the examples above, the meta-problem
leads to the plotting of the next, and so on),

for John is one of providing information with respect to population change in Ireland in a meaningful form that can

This document in itself has

transductive effects, alternatively modulating how the world is
understood, and this understanding can then be used to enact policy
initiatives and to transduce material geographies. The meta-problems for Jane are to
be used by the contracting party in a policy document.

locate herself with respect to map and location, and then to make her way to the town hall. Similarly, both imagined

Without the map the problem of

getting from A to B might not be solved, or will be solved less efficiently or
in a more costly manner. As these relational problems make clear, maps
are the product of transduction and they enable further transductions in
other places and times; they are always in the process of mapping; of
solving relational problems such as how best to present spatial
information, how to understand a spatial distribution, how to find ones
way. Here, we want to make it clear that we are not drawing a distinction between what traditionally has been
divided into map-making and map use. Instead, to us all engagement with maps are
emergent all maps are beckoned into being to solve relational problems;
all are (re)mappings the (re)deployment of spatial knowledges and
practices. And all emergence is contextual and a mix of creative, reexive,
playful, affective and habitual practices, affected by the knowledge,
experience and skill of the individual to perform mappings and apply them
in the world. Conceiving of mapping in this way reveals the mutability of
maps; that they are remade as opposed to mismade, misused or misread.
Mapping works because its set of practices has been learnt by people,4
and because maps are the product of technicity (made by tools) and they
possess technicity (they are a tool themselves). Technicity refers to the
extent to which technologies mediate, supplement, and augment
collective life; the unfolding or evolutive power of technologies to make
things happen in conjunction with people (Mackenzie, 2002). For example, mapping
practices used to produce a spatial representation understood as a map
by its creator are the product of cartographic instruments (pens, paper,
rulers, software packages, etc) used in conjunction with people, where the
outcome is co-dependent on both instruments and individual, and
embedded within a particularized context. A spatial representation can be said to possess
and material geographies are alternatively modulated.

technicity when it is used by a person to solve relational problems; to alternatively modulate (transduce) activity
and space.

The solution arises from the conjunction of person and

representation; they are produced through, or folded into, each other in
complex ways. Maps thus should be understood processually . . . as
events rather than objects, as contingent the whole way down, as
networks of socialmaterial interactions rather than simply reections of
human capacities or innately alien objects (Mackenzie, 2003: 4, 8). Cartography as a
profession is thus repositioned as a processual,5 as opposed to representational, science. From this perspective,

the important question is not is not what a map is (a spatial representation or

performance), nor what a map does (communicates spatial information), but how the map
emerges through contingent, relational, context-embedded practices to

solve relation problems (their ability to make a difference to the world); to move from
essentialist and constructivist cartography to what we term emergent
cartography. Epistemologically, what this means is that the science of
cartography (how maps are produced) and critical analysis of cartography (the history
and politics of cartography) are both positioned as processual in nature. Rather than
one asking technical questions and the other ideological, both come to
focus on how maps emerge through practices; how they come to be in the
world. With respect to both, as Brown and Laurier (2005: 23, original emphasis) note,
this calls for a radical shift in approach from imagined scenarios,
controlled experiments or retrospective accounts to examine how maps
emerge as solutions to relational problems; to make sense of the
unfolding action of mapping. As such, cartographic research becomes
refocused as a science of practices, not representations; on how mapping
is produced, how mapping is contextually co-constituted (within individual, collective
and institutional frameworks), how mappings do work in the world , how the craft of
cartographers and the lexicon they develop and use influence how mappings are (re)made, how this work
varies between people and the relational problems being solved, how
maps gain the status of immutable mobiles and how this varies, and has
varied, over time and space. Within this conceptual view, technical questions (ontic knowledge)
concerning such things as accuracy and standards, remain an important focus of study, but are appreciated to be
contingent, relational and contextdependent; that addressing technical questions is in itself a process of seeking to

the focus of attention shifts to the

relationship between cartographer, individuals, and a potential solution,
and how mapping is employed to solve diverse and contextdependent
problems (eg, how John produced a map of population change and Jane produced a map using a published
spatial representation to get from one location to another), rather than a single map being
viewed as a universal and essential solution to a range of questions (that
solve a set of relational problems. In other words,

there can be a best or most accurate map that all people understand and use in the same way to address a

This is, we believe, a subtle but important distinction as it

recognizes a fundamental shift in conceptualizing the foundational
knowledge underpinning cartography, and reconfigures the epistemology
appropriately, without necessarily fundamentally altering many of the key
technical questions at a technical level (but clearly at a philosophical level) that
professional cartographers are interested in, while also opening up a set
of wider issues and concerns that we believe deserves wider attention.
range of problems).

Transductive Cart Solvency

Maps are in a constant state of becoming and reformation
about the ontological state that we impose on lines and dots.
Thus the refusal to view maps as static allows for a variety of
methods to confront elitist practices and helps create spaces
for resistance
Kitchin and Dodge 7(Rob Kitchin prof of geography at National University of
Ireland and Martin Dodge prof of geography at the University of Rochester
Rethinking maps Progress in Human Geography 31(3) (2007) Crystal
We think it productive to take a different tack to think ontologically about
cartography. For us, maps, as we illustrate in the next section and explain theoretically in the following
section, have no ontological security; they are ontogenetic in nature . Maps
are of-themoment, brought into being through practices (embodied, social,
technical), always remade every time they are engaged with; mapping is a
process of constant reterritorialization. As such, maps are transitory and
eeting, being contingent, relational and context-dependent. Maps are
practices they are always mappings; spatial practices enacted to solve
relational problems (eg, how best to create a spatial representation, how to understand a spatial
distribution, how to get between A and B, and so on). From this position, Figure 1 is not unquestioningly a map (an
objective, scientific representation (Robinson) or an ideologically laden representation (Harley), or an inscription

it is rather a set of points, lines and colours that

takes form as, and is understood as, a map through mapping practices (an
inscription in a constant state of reinscription). Without these practices a spatial
representation is simply coloured ink on a page. (This is not a facetious statement
without the knowledge of what constitutes a map is or how a map works how can it be otherwise?) Practices
based on learned knowledge and skills (re)make the ink into a map and
this occurs every time they are engaged with the set of points, lines and
areas is recognized as a map; it is interpreted, translated and made to do
work in the work. As such, maps are constantly in a state of becoming;
constantly being remade. At the heart of our analysis are two fundamental questions. First, how
do individuals know that an arrangement of points, lines and colours
constitute a map (rather than a landscape painting or an advertising poster)? How does the idea
of a map and what is understood as a map gain ontological security and
gain the semblance of an immutable mobile? Our thesis is that ontological
security is maintained because the knowledge underpinning cartography
and map use is learned and constantly reaffirmed. A map is never a map
with ontological security assumed; it is brought into the world and made
to do work through practices such as recognizing, interpreting,
translating, communicating, and so on. It does not re-present the world or
make the world (by shaping how we think about the world); it is a co-constitutive
production between inscription, individual and world; a production that is
constantly in motion, always seeking to appear ontologically secure . Second,
how do maps become? How does the constant, co-constitutive production
of a map occur? We seek to answer this question by examining two vignettes outlining the unfolding nature
that does work in the world (Pickles));

of mapping and by drawing on the concepts of transduction (that understands the unfolding of everyday life as sets

of practices that seek to solve ongoing relational problems) and technicity (the power of technologies to help solve
those problems) (see Dodge and Kitchin, 2005). The argument we forward is not being made to demonstrate clever

we are outlining what we believe

is a signifi- cant conceptual shift in how to think about maps and
cartography (and, by implication, what are commonly understood as other representational outputs and
endeavours); that is a shift from ontology (how things are) to ontogenesis (how things
become) from (secure) representation to (unfolding) practice . This is not
minor argument with little theoretical or practical implications. Rather it
involves adopting a radically different view of maps and cartography. In
word play or to partake in aimless philosophizing.1 In contrast,

particular, we feel that the ontological move we detail has value for five reasons. First, we think it is a productive

It acknowledges how life unfolds in

multifarious, contingent and relational ways. Second, we believe that it allows us a
fresh perspective on the epistemological bases of cartography how
mapping and cartographic research is undertaken. Third, it denaturalizes
and deprofessionalizes cartography (Pickles, 2004: 17) by recasting cartography
as a broad set of spatial practices, including gestural and performative
mappings such as Aboriginal songlines, along with sketch maps, counter
maps, and participatory mapping, moving it beyond a narrowly defined
conception of mapmaking. (This is not to denigrate the work of professional cartographers, but to
way to think about the world, including cartography.

recognize that they work with a narrowly defined set of practices that are simply a subset of all potential

As such, it provides a way to think critically about the practices of

cartography and not simply the end product (the socalled map). Fourth, it
provides a means to examine the effects of mapping without reducing
such analysis to theories of power, instead positioning maps as practices
that have diverse effects within multiple and shifting contexts. Fifth, it
provides a theoretical space in which those who research mapping as a
practical form of applied knowledge, and those that seek to critique the
map and mapping process can meet, something that Perkins (2003: 341) feels is unlikely to
happen as things stand. Perkins (2003: 342) makes this claim because he feels addressing how maps work
. . . involves asking different questions to those that relate to power of the
medium one set of questions being technical, the other ideological . We do
mappings.)

not think that this is the case both are questions concerning practice.

Linguistic Mapping
The alternative is to reject the aff in favor of cognitive
linguistic mapping
The map is a canvas for our ways that we view the world, and
language. Engaging in cognitive linguistics allows us to
deconstruct the ways that maps are viewed and what type of
actions we impose through these maps
Wood and Fels 8 (Denis Wood prof at North Carolina University and John Fels
Adjunt professor at North Carolina State university 2008 The Natures of Maps:
Cartographic Constructions of the Natural World) Crystal
This whole tradition of thinking about maps as graphics comes out of an
illustration, out of an advertising tradition. Indeed, the text in Elements of Cartography (whose first edition
came out in 1953) could have been lifted from something like William Longyears Advertising Layout (whose first

The various
sizes and shapes of the elements in the layout must have good artistic
composition. There are few, if any, distinct formal rules to guide the layout
man in deriving good balance. Balance has some of the qualities of a
seesaw. By setting a vertical line through the center of the layout to serve as a fulcrum, elements may be
balanced for both size and weight.19 Given the prevalent idea that maps amount to a
kind of seeing, none of this is surprising. Committed as most
cartographers are to the idea that maps present information,
cartographers rather appropriately approach map design as they would
the design of an advertisement ... or a smorgasbord ...where the aim is to
make everything as attractive as possible to draw the grazing eye. Doubtless
edition came out in 1946). For example, Longyear says: Balance is most important in a layout.

this is all sound advice (though what heart a designer is to take from knowing that in a well-balanced design

we see maps as
systems of propositions (as arguments), nothing could be further from what we have in mind. The
question is not for us how things are arranged for the eye, but how the
design promotes and constrains, how it directs, the construction of
meaning. It is not about the presentation of information. It is about the
construction of meaning as a basis for action . It is for us a question of cognition. The
discipline that has contributed most substantially to our thinking is the
new and rapidly evolving one of cognitive linguistics. Were proposing that
cognitive linguistics is a good model for thinking about cartography, for
thinking about cognitive cartographics. Why cognitive linguistics? Because it is a
nonrepresentational approach to language that is concerned with how we
think, act, and communicate. Unlike historical forms of linguistics, which
were essentially concerned with the nature of the signal, cognitive
linguistics is concerned with the meaning construction upon which
language operates. For cognitive linguists, meaning construction refers to the
high-level, complex mental operations that apply within and across
domains when we think, act, and communicate.20 This makes it a form of
linguistics analogous in intent to the theorizing were doing about
cartography, which is directed toward the thinking, acting, and
nothing is too light or too dark, too long or too short is open to question) but, given that

communicating that maps facilitate (i.e., cognitive cartographics). No surprise then

that cognitive linguistics critiques historical forms of language theorizing
in much the same way that we have critiqued traditional theories of
cartography. For example, cognitive linguistics critiques traditional forms of
language theory for their predisposition to sharply separate components
(syntactic, semantic, pragmatic), and to study these in isolation, especially
independent of their use in the world for reasoning and communication.
This parallels traditional cartographic thinking, which not only
compartmentalized map-making from map use, but within map-making,
compartmentalized projection, generalization, symbolization, design, and
the rest. In its interest in understanding the role of, say, grammar in
discourse configuration, cognitive linguistics is a model of appropriate
procedure for, to give one example, understanding the role that the choice
of map projection plays in shaping world view . As weve already quoted Gilles Fauconnier
in the introduction, Language data suffers when it is restricted to language,21
not just because language depends on highly structured background
knowledge, conversational meaning, negotiations, and the like, but
because it is directed toward an end in action. The same has to be said of
maps: map study suffers when it is restricted to maps. Furthermore, unlike historical
forms of language analysis, including semiotics (which we nonetheless hang on to), cognitive linguistics
is dynamic, committed to understanding the way meaning is constructed
on the y, which is certainly the way we propose to understand and
model map reading, as a process in time, which encourages the
construction of certain kinds of meaning and ultimately behaviour . Were
not interested in maps as pictures. Were interested in maps as the
significant players they are in the world of action. Maps let us
acknowledge this are not just of the world, but in it, very much a part of
it. At the heart of cognitive linguistics is what its developers think and write about as mental spaces. Mental
spaces, says Fauconnier, are partial structures that proliferate when we think
and talk. Since these constructions take place on a cognitive level, they
are partial cognitive structures. This is to mark their distinction from the
structure of language. Such a cognitive structure is not an underlying
form, it is not a representation of language or of language meaning, it is
not bijectively associated with any particular set of linguistic expressions.
Such a cognitive structure is not a representation of the world either, but
it relates language to the world by providing real-world inferences and
action patterns. Fauconnier and Mark Turner characterize these mental spaces as small
conceptual packets constructed as we think and talk, for purposes of local
understanding and action. These small conceptual packets (or partial
cognitive structures) correspond, Fauconnier and Turner elaborate, to
activated neuronal assemblies, which are linked or link themselves to
other activated neuronal assemblies.22 Cognitive linguists think about
these neuronal linkages as mappings. For example, the configurations of
words youre reading right now are opening up thinking spaces in your
brain, that is, activating assemblies of neurons, which are connected to,
project to, are mapped onto, other thinking spaces in the process of
constructing meaning.

Linguistic Mapping Solvency

Cognitive linguistics of cartography use maps to function as words
changing and prescribing the world around them and through them

Kitchin et al 9 (Rob Kitchin, ERC Advanced Investigator and PI of the

Programmable City project, Chris Perkins lecture of geography at Manchester
university and Martin Dodge prof fo geography at Manchester University 2009
Thinking about maps, rethinking maps) Crystal
Because maps are prescriptive systems of propositions, Wood and Fels
contend that map creation should not solely be about presenting
information through attractive spatial representations as advocated by
the majority of cartographic textbooks (which borrow heavily from graphic
design traditions). Instead they suggest map design should be about the
construction of meaning as a basis for action (p. 14). They propose
turning to cognitive linguistics to rethink map design as a form of
cognitive cartographics. Cognitive linguistics examines the ways in which
words activate neural assemblages and open up thinking spaces in the
mind within which meaning is constructed by linking present information
with past knowledge. They contend that maps perform like words, by
firing up thinking spaces. Employing cognitive cartographics, they
suggest, will create a non-representational approach to map design
focused on the construction of meaning rather than graphic design and
the nature of signs. It will also enable cartographic theory to move beyond
the compartmentalized thinking that has divided mapmaking from map
use by providing a more holistic framework. In other words, both map
design and map reading can be understood through a cognitive
cartographics framework.

Rethink/Remap
The alternative is a process of re-mapping that should be
dedicated to the people of the land, outsiders or a singular
person reinforce the project of power
Crouch and Matless 96 (David Matless Professor of Cultural
Geography, Faculty of Social Sciences at the university of Nottingham, David Crouch
is a Welsh historian, and Professor of Medieval History at the University of Hull,
Refiguring Geography: Parish Maps of Common Ground Transactions of the
Institute of British Geographers, Vol. 21, No. 1 (1996), pp. 236-255 used pages 245248)
Four maps Charlbury in Oxfordshire (Fig. 6) shows a typical layout, an Al-sized poster with a central illustrated plan and a fringe filled

Historical references
are inscribed over the surface. This is a consciously factual map, with
carefully drawn and painted images naturalistically presenting events and
things. The artist-instigator expressed a concern for accuracy, especially in
relation to footpaths where accurate record might help in their
preservation. The map was produced as an item of local cultural capital, a
thing of traditional beauty showing the best side of Charlbury: 'we wanted
it to look like an old painting..,. it's like a wedding photograph; as the Map is on show we wanted to show its
with details of buildings, clubs and societies - a group singing, a chessboard, children playing.

best qualities'. Standlake in Oxfordshire (Fig. 7) uses the corefringe layout but in a very different way, seeking to open up an
imaginal space for the viewer. The core street layout is a sketch, while

the fringe has diverse colour

sketches positioned in 70 six-inch squares making an uneven border; a
'no' sign to a local gravel pit, a gravel company's view of wild geese and
JCB in harmony: 'The whole collage can be read like a novel. The story is
geographical'. All the squares were painted by a different person or group;
no offers were rejected: 'We headed our questionnaire "Put yourself on
the map"'. A child's bedroom window view marks a private image on a public space for future memory. The squares line up in
utilitarian format, with none given priority. The badges of four land-owning Oxford colleges corner the image. The purpose
of the map shifted during production: it was intended as something to
celebrate the opening of the new village hall; but in the process we
discovered a real concern for the extension of gravel workings proposed
near the village, and the Map soon developed into a means for the whole
village to express concern over this. The sense that the map purposefully
combines the objective and subjective is expressed in both form and
content. Lockwood's 9 ft square textile collage (Fig. 8) negotiates the overlapping experiences and meanings of different
people across the several small settlements that make up a parish on the northern edge of the North York Moors. Places are held
together by a rich brown colour over the predominant part of the map depicting the surrounding moorland. Individual sections
display specific features: a children's playground, a terrace of houses, a spoil heap, hills. Stimulated by a Common Ground circular, a
Labour councillor instigated meetings with the Parish Council and other bodies. Thirty people formed a working group which
circulated every household and met each local club: 'Our objective for the map was to lift the place out of decline, so we needed to
discover what people valued'. The components and relative positions of features were negotiated in a series of meetings in every
hamlet: '350 people attended these, and over the next two years we met with people in village halls and fetes, working over and
arguing through the ideas'. Rather than promote a consciouslyunified or fragmented identity, different identities are inscribed over
an integrated yet variegated surface. Westbury Park's suburban Bristol map (Fig. 9) remakes the place through a game of Monopoly.

Cartoons, photographs and sketches, mostly in colour, and diverse

lettering and language appear all over the map surface. The map was an
immediate response to an invitation at a fair: People came back with their
ideas for what to put on the map after hours, sometimes minutes . We included all
the points, and used a lot of writing as this best expressed the different ways they felt about the place. Monopoly came from the

The result is a kaleidoscope of images and

references to objects - buildings, front gardens, shops - and to the events
of everyday life: 'Westbury Green; slip in doggy do'; 'Chinese shop for
when the freezer is empty'; 'step into wilderness - allotments'. The map
holds together and does not seek to adjudicate between differing opinions
on specific sites. Produced as a poster, it contains instructions on how to
cut and fold in order to make the centre pop up into a game of the place.
The process of map-making produced a local community association and a
changing of the area's recognized boundaries.
idea of one of the people who handed in a sketch.

Maps are created by the experiences that we have with them

and how we interpret them, as is the space that they
represent. They represent the ontological security that we
place onto the series of lines to justify actions must correct the
frame we view maps in
Kitchin et al 9 (Rob Kitchin, ERC Advanced Investigator and PI of the
Programmable City project, Chris Perkins lecture of geography at Manchester
university and Martin Dodge prof of geography at Manchester University 2009
Thinking about maps, rethinking maps) Crystal
In recent years, there has been a move towards considering cartography
from a relational perspective, treating maps not as unified
representations but as constellations of ongoing processes . Here it is recognized
that maps are produced and used through multiple sets of practices . Spatial data
are surveyed, processed and cleaned; geometric shapes are drafted, revised, updated, copied, digitized and

A map is then worked

upon by the world and does work in the world. It might be folded or rolled,
converted to another file format, embedded in other media; it might be
packaged, marketed, sold, bought, used, stored, collected, re-used,
thrown away or recycled; it might be read in different ways in different
contexts; it might be employed to plan a journey, make money, play a
game (see Perkins in this volume) or teach moral values. Mapmaking and map use
are understood as processual in nature, being both embodied and
dynamic. Mapping can then be conceptualized as a suite of cultural
practices involving action and affects. This kind of approach reects a
philosophical shift towards performance and mobility and away from
essence and material stability. This rethinking of cartography is supported
by historical and contemporary work. Researchers concerned with
historical contexts increasingly stress the interplay between place, times,
actions and ideas. Mapping in different cultures reects multiple
traditions including an internal or cognitive set of behaviours involving
thinking about space; a material culture in which mapping is recorded as
an artefact or object; and a performance tradition where space may be
enacted through gesture, ritual, song, speech dance or poetry (Woodward and
Lewis 1998). In any cultural context there will be a different blend of these elements. I nterpreting
mapping then means considering the context in which mapping takes
place; the way it is invoked as part of diverse practices to do work in the
scanned; information is selected for inclusion, generalized and symbolized.

world. Instead of focusing on artefacts, aesthetics, human agency, or the

politics of mapping, research focuses on how maps are constituted in and
through diverse, discursive and material processes. Arguments presently
emerging in the literature extend both the notion of maps as processes
and the ontological thought underpinning cartography by problematizing
the ontological security enjoyed by maps. The idea that a map represents
spatial truth might have been challenged and rethought in a number of
different ways, but a map is nonetheless understood as a coherent, stable
product a map; a map has an undeniable essence that can be
interrogated and from which one can derive understanding . Moreover, the
maps and mapping practices maintain and reinforce dualities with respect
to their conceptualization productionconsumption, authorreader,
design use, representationpractice, mapspace. This position has been
rejected by those adopting performative and ontogenetic understandings
of mapping. Maps rather are understood as always in a state of becoming;
as always mapping; as simultaneously being produced and consumed,
authored and read, designed and used, serving as a representation and
practice; as mutually constituting map/space in a dyadic relationship . James
Corner (1999) argues that cartographic theory has been hampered by a
preoccupation to view maps in terms of what they represent and mean
rather than what they do. Drawing on poststructural theory, he problematizes the conception of maps
as representations that are separate and proceeding from territory. Following Baudrillard, Corner argues that a
territory does not precede a map, but that space becomes territory
through bounding practices that include mapping. Moreover, given that
places are planned and built on the basis of maps, so that space is itself a
representation of the map, the differentiation between the real and the
representation is no longer meaningful (p. 222). Maps and territories are coconstructed. Space is constituted through mapping practices, among
many others, so that maps are not a reection of the world, but a recreation of it; mapping activates territory. Corner develops an
understanding of maps as unfolding potential; as conduits of possibilities;
as the sites of imagination and action in the world. The function of maps
is not to depict but to enable; mappings do not represent geographies of
ideas; rather they effect actualization (p. 225, original emphasis). Mapping involves
processes of gathering, working, reworking, assembling, relating,
sifting, . . . speculating and so on . . . [that] allow certain sets of
possibility to become actual (p. 228, our emphasis). In this sense, maps remake
territory over and over again, each time with new and diverse
consequences (p. 213). Corner explains that maps engender such re-territorializations because they
are doubly projective: they both capture elements from the world and also
project back a variety of effects through their use. As such, the agency of
maps lies not in their reproduction or imposition, but in uncovering
realities previously unseen or unimagined (p. 213).

Maps are in a constant state of ux with the relations is has to

the space is represents and the individuals who interact with
the map
Kitchin et al 9 (Rob Kitchin, ERC Advanced Investigator and PI of the
Programmable City project, Chris Perkins lecture of geography at Manchester
university and Martin Dodge prof of geography at Manchester University 2009
Thinking about maps, rethinking maps) Crystal
we need to simultaneously understand and value the process
cartography of mapping and critique and reform representational modes
of cartography. Vincent Del Casino and Stephen Hanna (2005) draw on poststructural theory, and in
particular the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari and Judith Butler, to argue that maps are in a constant
state of becoming; that they are mobile subjects whose meaning
emerges through socio-spatial practices of use that mutate with context
and is contested and intertextual. For them the map is not fixed at the
moment of initial construction, but is in constant modification where each
encounter with the map produces new meanings and engagements with
the world. Del Casino and Hanna (2005: 36) state that [m]aps are both representations
and practices . . . simultaneously. Neither is fully inscribed with meaning
as representations nor fully acted out as practices. In so doing, they argue that
maps are not simply visual objects ripe for deconstruction. . . . Maps . . .
are tactile, olfactory, sensed objects/subjects mediated by the multiplicity
of knowledges we bring to and take from them through our everyday
interactions and representational and discursive practices (p. 37). Maps and
spaces co-produce each other through spatial practices to create what
they term map spaces, wherein it is impossible to disentangle fully how
the map does work in the world from how the world shapes how the map
is performed they are co-constitutive. Del Casino and Hanna (2005) illustrate their
For Ingold,

arguments by an examination of how visitors produce the historic town of Fredericksburg in Virginia, by deploying
tourist maps, along with other texts and narratives (such as a guided tour), which together shape how people

They show that the real is read back into the map,
making it more legible. Tourists are both consumers and producers of the
map; authors and readers. Meaning emerges through action and action is
shaped by meaning in a complex, recursive and intertextual
performativity. The tourist map of Fredericksburg then is never complete, but is always mobile; always
interact with the space and the town.

being produced by tourists and producing Fredericksburg

Rethink Affect/Performance Solvency

Thinking affectively about contemporary map creation as a
performance of space has the ability to recreate existing
power structures that directly affect actual spaces in human
geography
Dogde, Perkins, Kitchins 2009 [Dodge, Perkins, Kitchin; Rethinking Map;
2009; Martin Dodge - School of Environment and Development, University of
Manchester, UK; Chris Perkins - School of Environment and Development, University of
Manchester, UK; Rob Kitchin - National Institute for Regional and Spatial Analysis and
Department of Geography, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Ireland ; BM]
new
insights will emerge if mapping is studied processionally rather than
representationally (cf. Kitchin and Dodge 2007). From that perspective, there is a need for
research that examines contemporary map creation as a performance of
space and the affective power owing from of-the-moment map use in diverse
contexts. There is a burgeoning body of research on the affective nature of
spaces in human geography that is clearly relevant to practices of
mapping (see Anderson and Harrison 2006 for a useful overview of this emerging field). This kind of
research might consider: the emotional capacity of maps to do work in the
world; the kinds of action and affect enabled in everyday mapping
activities; and the role affect might play in enacting solutions to spatial
problems. Thinking affectively could also grant insights in how people map, by focusing attention
on the relations between design and its deployment, which would help professional
mapmakers to create a wider range of products and interfaces capable of
evoking a greater variety of actions and responses beyond the often
taken-for-granted neutrality of the map as problem-solving artifact.
Thinking about what affective maps are and might be like has already
begun (see Aitken and Craine 2006). Experimental examples that tap into feelings have been produced,
Research methods also need to consider mapping as practices. Two of us have argued elsewhere that

particularly by artists (e.g. recent work around beauty mapping by Christian Nold and angry maps by Elin OHara

In epistemological terms several scholars have begun to see the

exciting and innovative potential for making mapping that encompasses
affective qualities of space. For example, the recent work of Mei-Po Kwan and
collaborators (e.g. Kwan 2007) enacts a feminist re-imaging of GIS as an affective
and emotional alternative to neutral science, and Margaret Pearce (2008) has translated
Slavick 2007).

the sense of place from the narrative of trappers diaries into affective maps of their journeys in eighteenthcentury Canada

Affectivity creates a new spectorality and transforms the

agency of collective consciousness.
Craine and Aitken 09 [Jim Craine and Stuart C. Aitken; The Emotional Life of
Maps; Rethinking Map; 2009; Stuart C. Aitken - Department of Geography, San
Diego State University San Diego, USA and Department of Geography and The
Norwegian Centre for Child Research, Norwegian University of Science and
Technology, Trondheim, Norway; Jim Craine - Department of Geography, California
State University, Northridge, USA; BM]

The current engagement of geography and cinema is primarily grounded

in the work of Gilles Deleuze and his concept of the movement-image an
actualization of the virtual in which images become embodied through an
affective process. We argue for a move through (but also with) Deleuze to
a more meaningful methodology that permits geographers to more fully
engage the digital and virtual geographic data sets not available to
Deleuze at the conception of his movement-image discourse. The digital
representation was unknown to Deleuze and thus, to accommodate new forms of geographic and
cartographic representations, geographers must move instead from the
actual to the virtual. We believe this move forward, a move beyond (and beside) Deleuze,
can be done through a geographic articulation of Pierre Lvys concept of
affectivity. Lvyian theory supports a new and importantly different kind of
spectorality, one in which the viewer/consumer can enter the places found
within the digital spaces of our new technologies . Deleuzian theory does not allow the
users body to enter this space. Lvy, however, privileges the computational power that lies
behind digital and virtual technologies, thereby promising an opportunity to more fully
comprehend the geographic data coded as an array of iconic images and
representations positioned within digital and virtual space. Referent and symbol, subjectivities
and icons can now merge as spatialized positions within the coordinated visual
worlds of digital space a space now accessible by our ability to move
towards the virtual. This is a new and profound way of mapping the body
through its virtual engagement with the technologies and outputs of our
discipline, thereby continuing the constitutive technogenesis of
geography. We can now develop a technical phenomenology of the body
that uses as its modality the virtuality of the human being in its
phenomenological affective engagements with geographical mediaspace.
This premise is not new to the social sciences. Mark Hansen (2006) applies the prioritization of the
phenomenal body to any engagement with digitally constructed images that
mediate the body through technology and thereby constitute
embodiment. According to Hansen (2006: 20), this is because digital technologies: 1
expand the scope of bodily (motor) activity; and thereby 2 markedly
broaden the domain of the prepersonal, the organism environment
coupling operated by our non-conscious, deep embodiment; and thus 3
create a rich, anonymous medium for our enactive co-belonging or
being-with one another; which thereby 4 transforms the agency of
collective existence from a self-enclosed and primarily cognitive operation
to an essentially open, only provisionally bounded, and fundamentally, motor,
participation.

Derrida Deconstruction
Revealing and affirming the ambiguities of mapping creates a
space which scrambles the coordinates of cartographic
calculation
Harley J.B (John Brian Harley (24 July 1932 20 December 1991) was a
geographer, cartographer, and map historian at the universities of Birmingham,
Liverpool, Exeter and WisconsinMilwaukee. He helped found the History of
Cartography Project and is the founding co-editor of the resulting The History of
Cartography. In recent years, Harley's work has gained broad prominence among
geographers and social theorists, and it has contributed greatly to the emerging
discipline of critical cartography
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/p/passages/4761530.0003.008/--deconstructing-the-map?
rgn=main;view=fulltext Accessed 7/29/2015 Published 1992
To move inward from the question of cartographic rulesthe social
context within which map knowledge is fashionedwe have to turn to the
cartographic text itself. The word 'text' is deliberately chosen. It is now
generally accepted that the model of text can have a much wider
application than to literary texts alone. To non-book texts such as musical compositions and
architectural structures we can confidently add the graphic texts we call maps. [42] It has been said that "what
constitutes a text is not the presence of linguistic elements but the act of construction" so that maps, as
"constructions employing a conventional sign system," [43] become texts. With Barthes we could say they
"presuppose a signifying consciousness" that it is our business to uncover. [44] 'Text' is certainly a better metaphor
for maps than the mirror of nature. Maps are a cultural text. By accepting their textuality we are able to embrace a
number of different interpretative possibilities. Instead of just the transparency of clarity we can discover the

Rather
than working with a formal science of communication, or even a sequence
of loosely related technical processes, our concern is redirected to a
history and anthropology of the image, and we learn to recognize the
narrative qualities of cartographic representation [45] as well as its claim to
provide a synchronous picture of the world. All this, moreover, is likely to
lead to a rejection of the neutrality of maps, as we come to define their
intentions rather than the literal face of representation, and as we begin
to accept the social consequences of cartographic practices. I am not suggesting
pregnancy of the opaque. To fact we can add myth, and instead of innocence we may expect duplicity.

that the direction of textual enquiry offers a simple set of techniques for reading either contemporary or historical
maps. In some cases we will have to conclude that there are many aspects of their meaning that are undecidable.
[46] Deconstruction, as discourse analysis in general, demands a closer and deeper reading of the cartographic text
than has been the general practice in either cartography or the history of cartography. It may be regarded as a

"To deconstruct," it is argued, is to reinscribe and

resituate meanings, events and objects within broader movements and
structures; it is, so to speak, to reverse the imposing tapestry in order to
expose in all its unglamorously dishevelled tangle the threads constituting
the well-heeled image it presents to the world. [47] The published map also has a 'wellsearch for alternative meanings.

heeled image' and our reading has to go beyond the assessment of geometric accuracy, beyond the fixing of
location, and beyond the recognition of topographical patterns and geographies. Such interpretation begins from
the premise that the map text may contain "unperceived contradictions or duplicitous tensions" [48] that
undermine the surface layer of standard objectivity. Maps are slippery customers. In the words of W. J. T. Mitchell,
writing of languages and images in general, we may need to regard them more as "enigmas, problems to be
explained, prison-houses which lock the understanding away from the world."

We should regard them

"as the sort of sign that presents a deceptive appearance of naturalness

and transparence concealing an opaque, distorting, arbitrary mechanism
of representation." [49] Throughout the history of modern cartography in the
West, for example, there have been numerous instances of where maps
have been falsified, of where they have been censored or kept secret, or
of where they have surreptitiously contradicted the rules of their
proclaimed scientific status. [50] As in the case of these practices, map
deconstruction would focus on aspects of maps that many interpreters
have glossed over. Writing of "Derrida's most typical deconstructive moves," Christopher Norris notes
that deconstruction is the vigilant seeking-out of those 'aporias,' blindspots
or moments of self-contradiction where a text involuntarily betrays the
tension between rhetoric and logic, between what it manifestly means to
say and what it is nonetheless constrained to mean. To 'deconstruct' a
piece of writing is therefore to operate a kind of strategic reversal, seizing
on precisely those unregarded details (casual metaphors, footnotes, incidental turns of
argument) which are always, and necessarily, passed over by interpreters of a
more orthodox persuasion. For it is here, in the margins of the textthe 'margins,' that is, as defined
by a powerful normative consensusthat deconstruction discovers those same unsettling forces at work. [51] A
good example of how we could deconstruct an early mapby beginning
with what have hitherto been regarded as its 'casual metaphors' and
'footnotes'is provided by recent studies reinterpreting the status of
decorative art on the European maps of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. Rather than being inconsequential marginalia, the emblems in cartouches and decorative title
pages can be regarded as basic to the way they convey their cultural meaning, [52] and they help to demolish the
claim of cartography to produce an impartial graphic science. But the possibility of such a revision is not limited to

a deconstructive strategy by beginning in the 'margins'

of the contemporary map. They also treat the map as a text and, drawing
on the ideas of Roland Barthes of myth as a semiological system [54],
develop a forceful social critique of cartography which though structuralist
in its approach is deconstructionist in its outcome. They begin, deliberately, with the
historic "decorative" maps. A

margins of the map, or rather with the subject matter that is printed on its verso: One side is taken up by an
inventory of North Carolina points of interestillustrated with photos of, among other things, a scimitar horned oryx
(resident in the state zoo), a Cherokee woman making beaded jewelry, a ski lift, a sand dune (but no cities)a ferry
schedule, a message of welcome from the then governor, and a motorist's prayer ("Our heavenly Father, we ask
this day a particular blessing as we take the wheel of our car ... "). On the other side, North Carolina, hemmed in by
the margins of pale yellow South Carolinas and Virginias, Georgias and Tennessees, and washed by a pale blue
Atlantic, is represented as a meshwork of red, black, blue, green and yellow lines on a white background, thickened
at the intersections by roundels of black or blotches of pink. To the left of ... [the] title is a sketch of the fluttering
state flag. To the right is a sketch of a cardinal (state bird) on a branch of flowering dogwood (state flower)
surmounting a buzzing honey bee arrested in midflight (state insect). [55] What is the meaning of these emblems?
Are they merely a pleasant ornament for the traveler or can they inform us about the social production of such state
highway maps? A deconstructionist might claim that such meanings are undecidable, but it is also clear that the
State Highway Map of North Carolina is making other dialogical assertions behind its mask of innocence and
transparence. I am not suggesting that these elements hinder the traveler getting from point A to B, but that there
is a second text within the map.

Solvency Power Balances

Critical cartography and GIS practices help disrupt the current
power balances
Pickles 95 (John Pickles prof of international studies at north Carolina at chapel
hill 1995. Representations in an Electronic Age: Geography, GIS, and Democracy
Ground Truth: The Social Implications of Geographic Information Systems) Crystal
In what ways can a social theoretic understanding transcend these polar
positions, and how we can speak about this technology without
presupposing the ontological and epistemological assumptions on which
GIS is founded? [] [T]he question is not only about the internal possibilities
and constraints of GIS, but about the reconfigurations of social, economic,
political, and disciplinary life that the emergence of electronic
technologies like GIS are creating. However, on of the central difficulties in developing a critical
social theory of GIS is the refusal of GIS users to distinguish between empirical and technical claims about objects,
practices, and institutions, and the discourses within which particular claims about objects, practices, and
institutions, and particular claims to truth, are made. That is, concepts, practices, and institutional linkages remain

The language
in use in GIS itself is instructive. In the words of GIS exponents and
practitioners the new electronic technologies permit the rapid and
extensive surveying of new and more complete sets of data at great
speed, decreasing cost, and greater efficiency. The technological changes
that make these advances possible also permit the standardization and
manipulation of a variety of discrete date sets to yield new spatially
specific sets of information that can be codified, and even commodified . This
largely unproblematized, naturalized as normal and reasonable ways of thinking and acting.

control technology and knowledge engineering require special skills, knowledge, and training. The output is in great
demand, students can find good jobs, and government, military, and business applications provide challenges for

In a society such as ours, but basically in any society,

there are manifold relations of power which permeate, characterize, and
constitute the social body, and these relations of power cannot
themselves be established, consolidated, nor implemented without the
production, accumulation, circulation and functioning of a discourse. There
the university researcher.

can be no exercise of power without a certain economy of discourses of truth which operates thorough and on the
basis of this association. We are subjected to the production of truths through power and we cannot exercise power

The task of a critical genealogy of

power is to clarify the detailed practices that constitute the history of the
present, and to provide accounts of the emergence of new modalities of
power (Fraser, 1989, 17). GIS is just one of these new complexes of discourse,
practice, and institutional ensemble, among many others, effecting changes in the
modalities of power. As a cultural practice, instituted historically, its forms and effects are consequently
except through the production of truth (Foucault, 1980, 93).

contingent, ungrounded except in terms of other, prior, contingent historically instituted practices. In this sense,

power is as much about the possibilities of modernization the ways in

which identity and differences are constituted as about the exercise of
inuence and the formation of new iron cages. As social relations and new
subjectivities are embodied, we need to ask how such identities are
sustained, how power ows through the capillaries of society in particular
settings, and what role new technologies of the self and of society play in
this circulation of power. Foucault would have understood well our

contemporary fascination with GIS, its technologies of surveillance,

forms of knowledge engineering, and commitment to the categorizing and
normalizing of nature and social life.

Solvency Epistemology of Maps

The alts epistemology is necessary to understand the uidity
and relationality that cartography inherently possesses
Kitchin et al 9 (Rob Kitchin, ERC Advanced Investigator and PI of the
Programmable City project, Chris Perkins lecture of geography at Manchester
university and Martin Dodge prof of geography at Manchester University 2009
Thinking about maps, rethinking maps) Crystal
Maps do not then emerge in the same way for all individuals. Rather they
emerge in contexts and through a mix of creative, reexive, playful, tactile
and habitual practices, affected by the knowledge, experience and skill of
the individual to perform mappings and apply them in the world . This
applies as much for mapmaking as for map reading. As such, the map does
not represent the world or make the world: it is a co-constitutive
production between inscription, individual and world; a production that is
constantly in motion, always seeking to appear ontologically secure .
Conceiving of maps in this way reveals that they are never fully formed
but emerge in process and are mutable (they are re-made as opposed to mis-made, mis-used
or mis-read). In terms of cartographic research, this conceptualization of maps
necessitates an epistemology that concentrates on how maps emerge
how maps are made through the practices of the cartographer situated
within particular contexts and how maps re-make the world through
mutually constituted practices that unite map and space . As Brown and Laurier
(2005: 19, original emphasis) note, this requires a radical shift in approach from
imagined scenarios, controlled experiments or retrospective accounts to
examine how maps emerge as solutions to relational problems; to make
sense of the unfolding action of mapping. Their approach is the
production of detailed ethnographies of how maps become; mapmaking
and use are observed in specific, local contexts to understand the ways in
which maps are constructed and embedded within cultures of practices
and affect. In their study they examined how maps are used in the context of navigating while driving
between locations through video-based ethnography. Their work highlighted how a map, journey and social
interaction within the car emerged through each other in contingent and relational ways within the context of the
trip.

Solvency Capitalism
Counter cartography fights the structures of capitalism, nonrepresentational mapping opens up the possibility for
similarity, solves the impacts
Stallmann 12 (Timothy, 2012, free lance cartographer under the instructions of
John Pickles, Alternative Cartographies: Building Collective Power, p. 63-65)
Maps are not, have never intended to be, exact mirrors of the Earths
surface. Simplification, generalization and data refinement are key tools in the process of Western scientific cartography. It
is at the same time important to understand that traditional cartography
still functions very much through a logic of representation. Map icons, for example,
may or may not be designed in order to resemble, but they consistently are designed in order to represent.

Representational maps work because they function as part of (material)

chains of resemblance which co-constitute the territory which they claim
to represent. This logic of representation is what makes it possible to point
at a map and say something like: this is Raleigh , that is the Ferry from Hatteras to
Ocracoke, or the darker purple areas have a higher median income. These statements depend on institutions, practices,
relationships, bulldozers, annexation lawsuits, and census forms which discipline both spaces and people.

Representational cartography attempts to make invisible the institutions,

practices, relationships, and people who do the work necessary to keep
chains of representation smoothly functioning. The institutions, practices, technologies and
bodies underlying representational cartography claim, in Donna Haraways language, the power to see and not
be seen, to represent while escaping representation.12 What escapes
representation is oftentimes the object of counter-cartography the ways
these systems function to maintain and increase a hierarchical distribution
of wealth, how they distribute life chances in ways which make it harder for marginalized communities to exercise autonomy,
how they violently impose the territorial will of the few on the many, and their perverse capacity honed to perfection in the
history of science tied to militarism, capitalism, colonialism, and male supremacy to distance the knowing subject from everybody

Counter-cartography, growing out of social

movements which situate themselves in opposition to the unfettered
power of individual states, of multinational corporations, of border
regimes, neoliberalism or capitalism, opposes both the material of chains
of representation and the this-is-that-is-there logic of maps which they
make possible. Where representational cartography makes statements about a defined territory, non-representational14
counter-cartography aims to ask questions and open conversations. A nonrepresentational map is not a map which says nothing, nor is it one which
has no connection with any outside. Rather, non-representational mapping
uses relations of what Foucault calls similitude.15 Graphic objects on the
map plane have relations of similarity with material objects, but also with other
and everything in the interests of unfettered power.13

graphic objects, with words and with ideas. Similitude explodes the unidirectional real representation arrow of the Western map
into a multitude of connections both within and outside the map plane.

Solvency Preserves Culture

Alt- thinking of maps as a being in a state of constant change
tears down the monolithic structures that wash out cultural
complexities
Kitchin et al 12 ( Rob Kitchin, is a professor and European Research Council
Advanced Investigator at the National University of Ireland Maynooth. Justin Gleeson
is the Director of the All-Island Research Observatory (AIRO) based in the National
University of Ireland, Maynooth and Martin Dodge doctorial professor at the
university of manchester in the school of environment, education and development,
Unfolding mapping practices: a new epistemology for cartography , pg 483-484)
Dora (2009) moves beyond a conventional reading of atlases as a collection of
instead examining the performative and social, visual and
tactile, encounters between atlases and their users. Her analysis of three different atlases conceptualises them as memory
Della

visual representations,

theatres engaged with through an embodied performativity; the repetition of ordinary acts such as tracing with a finger and visual

She argues that an atlas does work

in the world through physical and imaginative encounters with its
materiality a two-way conversation that is at once visual and tactile (2009, 243) that enables meditative and
memorisation practices to take place (gazing, pointing, leafing through, collecting, colouring, annotating; 2009, 249). Such
encounters, she argues, beckons the atlas and the multiple mappings
contained within into being; into a continuous state of becoming; of
inscription and re-inscription, assembly and re-assembly . In turn, she
argues, that understanding maps as uid objects recasts the history of
cartography as a history of interactions and co-authorships between mapmakers and map-users (2009, 240). Such a particularistic history provides a
rich alternative reading to rather monolithic, teleological and sometimes heroic accounts
of scientific advances in cartography that typically wash out the complex
contingencies and embodied materialities of mapping production and use.
scanning that evoke and create memories of mappings and places.

Solvency Ideology
The way maps are constructed is implicit in western thought
that allows territory to be claimed, the alternative breaks
down the metaphysical space by tearing down the ideology of
space to restructure maps
Janz 01 (Bruce B. Jenz, is Professor in the Department of Philosophy at UCF,
graduate faculty in the Texts and Technologies Ph.D. program, and director of the
CAH Center for Humanities and Digital Research, THE TERRITORY IS NOT THE MAP
PLACE, DELEUZE AND GUATTARI, AND AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY, 392-393, philosophy
today)
The
project of this essay is to consider ways in which we might think of African
philosophy outside of the metaphors of maps used by both modernist and
also some postmodernist writers, the first to delineate and define area
and establish ownership and citizenship, the second to clear space and
allow for possibilities. The first project of mapping, which has been the explicit or
The concepts of the refrain and of nomadic philosophy give us a clue to a way to rethink African philosophy.

implicit project of the majority of African philosophy, leaves African philosophy forever at the edge of Western

defining its territory by that already claimed. The second project,

meant to resist that sense of entitlement, ends up avoiding discussions of
subjectivity even as it tries to avoid any hint of essentialism . We find out what we
thought,

might choose, at the expense of knowing what we do choose. The result in the first case is a map that has little

The alternative, I would like to

suggest, is to rethink both the metaphysical and the postmodern
addiction to the notion of space , and instead suggest that the concept of place holds more hope.
The title to this essay is an obvious play on words. The map is not the territory is a
common expression that indicates the limits of representation . It
suggests that we can never fully nor properly represent or capture the
world. Jorge Luis Borges imagines a map that is a 1:1 representation of the territory it is supposed to
legitimacy, and in the second a map that has little use.

represent.2 Of course, if we broaden our conception of a map, we can imagine maps that are much larger than the
territorymaps of subatomic reactions, the genome, and so forth. These maps define the boundaries, internal
interactions, and identity of the territory in question. Maps, at least the ones common in the modern age, start with
abstractions, and fit the territory into a numerical or conceptual grid .

To suggest that the map is

not the territory is to recognize that the territory is more than the
abstractions of the map. In turning the metaphor around, I want to turn
the function of maps themselves around, and with it, turn around the way we think of
African philosophy. Instead of mapping it, either explicitly through a set of
trends or some other device that allows us to determine whos in and
whos out, to defend borders and claim territory, I want to start with the
notion of territory instead. In short, I want to argue that place, the place
we find ourselves in and which has meaning to us, precedes space, the
bounded and abstractly defined territory. Deleuze and Guattari will serve as an unexpected
door into this topic. Unexpected, because they are heirs of Western philosophy, and explicitly draw on Western
themes. Unexpected also because of some comments made in their final collaborative project about
geophilosophy, about the origins of philosophy. Nevertheless, they suggest a way to think placially that may be of
value to African philosophy

Solvency Global Relations/Social Constructs

Cartography not only effects global relations and views but
also types of truths and social construction that we accept
Perkins and Dodge 9 (Chris Perkins Geography, School of Environment and
Development University of Manchester Martin Dodge Geography School of
Environment and Development University of Manchester HOW DO WE MAP THE
GEOGRAPHIES OF CARTOGRAPHY?
http://icaci.org/files/documents/ICC_proceedings/ICC2009/html/nonref/27_3.pdf)
Crystal
The form of the cartographic product, its visual qualities and scale, what
is mapped and how it is mapped are clearly important . So is the
organizational context, and the ways in which the mapping is called into
being through different technological modalities . Organizational culture and remit
respond to outside pressures and are mutable not fixed. Technology changes and disseminates in an uneven fashion
through the neo-liberal global economy. The people involved in the mapping process, and the tasks in which they

The particular social,

political, environmental, cultural and economic contexts are all important,
but it is the links between these factors that together constitute the
unique geography of mapping. The ows between actors in this sociotechnical network affect how mapping works and moving information,
images, words, numbers, material objects and finance characterize the
immanent actor-network of all contemporary mapping. This field of study is of course
deploy cartography also strongly affect the roles played by the map in society.

also strongly associated with the place being mapped and with the time when the mapping is being carried out.

Mapping practices in 2009 are probably more varied than ever before, with a
greater diversity of tasks in which mapping plays a role . The same technological
changes that facilitated standardization have also encouraged new kinds of local variation, and new subjectivities,
to such an extent that it can be argued that geographies of cartography perhaps matter more now in the era of

Mapping is itself increasingly

mobile, animated and embodied. Users are producers. We can map
ourselves and see ourselves moving on our own maps. The spaces in which
maps are deployed themselves inuence the kinds of meanings that might
be derived from the mapping process (see Del Casino and Hanna, 2005).Thinking
about mapping is also mutable and placed, responding to, but also
inuencing other factors in the mapping world. A social constructivist orthodoxy now
democratized cartography, Web 2.0 and the map mash up.

pervades research into the history of cartography, inspired by the influential work of Brian Harley and scientific
orthodoxy in thinking about contemporary mapping is increasingly being challenged by a plethora of new and
critical approaches.

On one level mapping may still function as a truth bearer,

and practical tool, but is increasingly being rethought as representation,
social construction, inscription, hybrid, proposition, act ant and
practice(see Dodge et al, 2009 for a recent collection). Careful reading of how mapping is
deployed suggests the ontological fixity of the image is no longer tenable
(Kitchin &Dodge, 2007). Instead it is persuasive to regard maps as called in to
being to do different kinds of work according to contingent contexts,
which change over time, place and according to the medium through
which they are interpreted

Framework

Debate = Mapping
Debate is inherently a cartographical practice, but like with
any maps, theres more than an objective truth in our
arguments. Rather we must recognize that arguments are
manifested through the relationships people have with them
Kitchin, National University of Ireland, Department of
Geography, Dodge, University of Manchester, Department of
Geography, 7 [Rob, Martin, Rethinking maps, Progress in Human
Geography, Volume: 31 Number: 3, page 7-9,
http://eprints.nuim.ie/2755/1/RK_Rethinkingmaps.pdf, PAC]
Starting from a position of having specialized tools (scientific instruments or
software) and resources (boundary and attribute data, previously mapped
information), and a degree of knowledge, experience and skills, John
works to create a map. The map thus emerges through a set of iterative
and citational practices of employing certain techniques that build on
and cite previous plottings or previous work (other spatial representations) or
cartographic ur-forms (standardized forms of representation). This process is
choreographed to a certain degree, shaped by the scientific culture of
conventions, standards, rules, techniques, philosophy (its ontic knowedge),
and so on, but is not determined and essential. Rather, instead of there being
a teleological inevitability in how the map is conlook, the map is contingent and
relational in its production through the decisions made by John with
respect to what attributes are mapped, their classification, the scale, the
orientation, the colour scheme, labelling, intended message, and so on, and the
fact that the construction is enacted through affective, reexive,
habitual practices that remain outside cognitive reection. Important here
is the idea of play of playing with the possibilities of how the map will
become, how it will be remade by its future makers and of arbitrariness, of
unconscious and affective design. John thus experiments with different colour
schemes, different forms of classification, and differing scales to map the same
data. Making maps then is inherently creative it can be nothing else;
and maps emerge in process For example, using mapping software the first
stage might be to plot administrative boundaries. In doing so, decisions have to be
made in terms of the administrative units to use (postcodes, enumeration areas,
electoral divisions, counties, and so on), and the scale of the display. Next, these
units need to be populated with data. To be able to do this the data need to
allocated to a zone and sorted into categories that differentiate rates of population
change. There are technical solutions to classification that can be performed using
specialized algorithms. However, John still needs to determine which algorithm is
most suitable given the structure of the data (eg, to use the default setting,
choosing fixed intervals, mean standard deviation, percentiles, natural breaks and
so on). These technical solutions are not fixed and essential in their practice but
are also subject to play and precognitive judgement through the evaluation of

different algorithms in order to determine which work best. Alternatively, the

classification can be devised through a manual, iterative playing with the data in
terms of class boundaries, number of classes, and so on (which in fact was the case
with Figure 1). Both cases, technical and manual, consist of practice (of running the
algorithm or playing with the data), and these practices vary over time, by context,
and across people. In terms of the visual display, a colour scheme needs to be
devised. Similarly, there are technical soluRobinson et al., 1995);3 in other cases
the colour ramp is chosen by the cartographer. Finally, there are considerations
concerning where the legend appears, whether labels appear on the map and
where, and so on. While some of these practices seem prosaic, the procession of
decisions and actions grows the map. Each might seem banal or trivial,
but their sum the culmination of a set of practices creates a spatial
representation that John understands as a map (and believes that others will
accept as a workable map based upon their knowledge and experience as to what
constitutes a map). When a spatial representation understood as a map is
printed for inclusion in a policy document (see Figure 1), for example, we
would argue that its creation is not complete it is not ontologically secure as a
map. Although it has the appearance of an immutable mobile its knowledge and
message fixed and portable because it can be read by anyone understanding how
maps work it remains mutable, remade every time it is employed. Like a
street geometrically defined by urban planning, and created by urban planners, is
transformed into place by walkers (de Certeau, 1984), a spatial representation
created by cartographers (the coloured ink on the paper) is transformed into
a map by individuals. As each walker experiences the street differently, each
person engaging with 8 Progress in Human Geography 31(3) a spatial
representation beckons a different map into being. Each brings it into
their own milieu, framed by their knowledge, skills and spatial
experience, in this case of Ireland and Irish social history. For someone familiar
with the geography of Ireland, their ability to remake the map in a way that allows
them to articulate an analysis of the data is likely to be far superior to someone
unfamiliar with the pattern of settlement (to know what the towns are, what county
or local authority area they reside in, what their social and economic history is,
their physical geography is, and so on). For someone who does not
understand the concept of thematic mapping or classification schemes, again
the map will be bought into being differently to people who do, who will
ask different questions of the data and how it is displayed. While all
people who understand the concept of a map beckon a map into being,
there is variability in the ability of people to mobilize the representation and to
solve particular problems. Moreover, the beckoning of the map generates a new,
imaginative geography (an ordered, rationale, calculated geography) for each
person, that of the spatial distribution of population change between the 1996 and
2002 census.

K Before Politics
Status quo epistemology of what the map represents is
problematic the aff is key to break down these social
hierarchies and instead help us read in-between the lines of
ocean exploration
Harley, Professor of Geography at the University of Wisconsin,
Milwaukee, Cartographer, and Map Historian at the Universities
of Birmingham, 89 [John Brian, Spring 1989, MPublishing, University of
Michigan Library, Deconstructing the Map, Reprinted from Cartographica, v.
26, n. 2 (Spring 1989), 1-20., accessed 6-25-14, J.J.]
The notion of deconstruction [6] is also a password for the postmodern enterprise.
Deconstructionist strategies can now be found not only in philosophy but also in
localized disciplines, especially in literature, and in other subjects such as
architecture, planning and, more recently, geography. [7] I shall specifically use a
deconstructionist tactic to break the assumed link between reality and
representation which has dominated cartographic thinking, has led it in
the pathway of 'normal science' since the Enlightenment, and has also
provided a ready-made and 'taken for granted' epistemology for the
history of cartography. The objective is to suggest that an alternative
epistemology, rooted in social theory rather than in scientific positivism, is
more appropriate to the history of cartography. It will be shown that even
'scientific' maps are a product not only of "the rules of the order of geometry and
reason but also of the "norms and values of the order of social ... tradition." [8] Our
task is to search for the social forces that have structured cartography
and to locate the presence of powerand its effectsin all map
knowledge. The ideas in this particular essay owe most to writings by Foucault and
Derrida. My approach is deliberately eclectic because in some respects the
theoretical positions of these two authors are incompatible. Foucault anchors texts
in socio-political realities and constructs systems for organizing knowledge of the
kind that Derrida loves to dismantle. [9] But even so, by combining different ideas
on a new terrain, it may be possible to devise a scheme of social theory with which
we can begin to interrogate the hidden agendas of cartography. Such a scheme
offers no 'solution' to an historical interpretation of the cartographic record, nor a
precise method or set of techniques, but as a broad strategy it may help to locate
some of the fundamental forces that have driven map-making in both European and
non-European societies. From Foucault's writings, the key revelation has been the
omnipresence of power in all knowledge, even though that power is invisible or
implied, including the particular knowledge encoded in maps and atlases. Derrida's
notion of the rhetoricity of all texts has been no less a challenge. [10] It demands a
search for metaphor and rhetoric in maps where previously scholars had found only
measurement and topography. Its central question is reminiscent of Korzybski's
much older dictum "The map is not the territory" [11] but deconstruction goes
further to bring the issue of how the map represents place into much
sharper focus. Deconstruction urges us to read between the lines of the

map"in the margins of the text"and through its tropes to discover the
silences and contradictions that challenge the apparent honesty of the
image. We begin to learn that cartographic facts are only facts within a specific
cultural perspective. We start to understand how maps, like art, far from being
"a transparent opening to the world," are but "a particular human way of
looking at the world." [12] In pursuing this strategy I shall develop three threads
of argument. First, I shall examine the discourse of cartography in the light of some
of Foucault's ideas about the play of rules within discursive formations. Second,
drawing on one of Derrida's central positions I will examine the textuality of maps
and, in particular, their rhetorical dimension. Third, returning to Foucault, I will
consider how maps work in society as a form of power-knowledge.

Need ontological exploration and epistemological critique of

claims to objectivity
Harley, American Geographical Society, Office of Map History,
Director, 90 [JB, Summer 1989, Cartography, ethics and social theory,
CARTOGRAPHICA VOL 27 No 2 , page 8-9, PAC]
As far as the history of maps is concerned (my standpoint), the ontological
exploration is also an epistemological critique. It leads to questions: what
is the nature, and what are the grounds, the limits, and the criteria by
which we write and we judge the writing of cartographic history? Elsewhere
David Woodward and I have argued that we need to become more self
conscious about the historical tradition of which we are part.36 It may now
be stressed, though, that in achieving these ends, links with postmodern
scholarship do not entail a retreat from critical standards nor a
substitution of superficiality for depth. Indeed, an engagement with
postmodernist thinking can only equip us to unmask the very duplicity of text that
Fraser Taylor refers to in the work of Jorge Luis Borges.37 The point I am making is
that the act of deconstruction is a way of avoiding the myths that
sometimes drive cartographic history. Thus a leading American cartographer,
belonging to the 'Never Doubt it's Science' school of thinking, writes in a Preface to
an officially sponsored ICA publication, Cartographical Innovations, that
"cartography now has an indispensable addition to its long and glorious history."38
We can glimpse here the unconscious process of myth-making, through
which the invention of a progressive positivist past is used to justify a
progressive positivist present.39
In the responses to my paper a number of suggestions were made as to how
we might write a different sort of history of cartography. Michael Blakemore
writes that "there may indeed be a case for more biography ... Too much of the
history of cartography is sanitized by the removal of personality and motive."40
Certainly it is not my intention to banish cartographers or their institutional
contexts from the process of mapping,41 and I agree with him that we
need to know far more about the 'extra-scientific' factors that have
contributed to the development of cartography and recently GIS as a
discipline. In the words of one philosopher of science such factors include "the

political infighting, the namecalling, the parody and ridicule, the arrogance, elitism,
and raw use of power."42 But at the same time, there are dangers in merely
compiling 'interesting biographies' or oral reminiscences from grand old
cartographers that could result more in canonization than criticism.43 Any selfrespecting history must systematically embrace the structures or contexts
within which individuals acted to produce their maps. This
'contextualization of representation' is a thread that runs through a wide
spectrum of historical scholarship. For instance, iconology seeks to place the
image or text into the matrix of thought of the society that created it;44 realism, as
understood by historians of science, assumes that there are unseen forces that both
influence, and are influenced by, the actions of individuals;45 structuration theory is
concerned with reciprocal interaction of agents and structures in society;46 and
hermeneutics pursues the meaning of texts within a wider context of conventions
and assumption.47 To cite these is not an attempt to obfuscate the argument with
yet more arcane theories but to reinforce the point that there is already a territory of
common ground extending across disciplines. All sorts of scholars with
seemingly different philosophical perspectives are converging on the view
that knowledge is a social product, a matter of dialogue between different
versions of the world, including different... ideologies, and modes of
representations. The notion that there is 'a' scientific method so exible
and capacious that it can contain all these differences and adjudicate among
them is a handy ideology for the scientist... committed to the authority of science,
but it seems mistaken in theory and practice.48 My worry is that while other
disciplines are broadening their perspectives, developments in
cartography have tended to narrow them, at least until very recently.49
International practice in this respect is varied but cartography is often defined to
exclude the processes of data collection in mapmaking, such as land and
hydrographic surveying, aerial photography, and, most recently, remote sensing.50
In a widely used textbook in the United States cartography is defined as "any
activity in which the presentation and use of maps is a matter of basic concern"51
but other texts suggest a yet narrower focus with design and production of thematic
maps gaining ground in the academic curriculum at the expense of other types of
maps including the products of national survey organizations.52 Cartography has
lost its hold on the lived-in world. Matthew Edney is thus right to observe that
surveying or indeed other agents of information gathering cannot be excluded
either from cartographic history or from the study of contemporary mapping.53
Looking back over developments since the 1960s, it is clear that it is this divorce
between the social relevance of map content and the technology of mapmaking that underlies the present crisis of representation in cartography
and the history of cartography. The shift of focus in cartography, almost
exclusively to the technical side, may in part have been a practical necessity
a matter of survival but it also reected a conscious political strategy.
Cartography was to acquire the status of a sub-science. Yet, it is arguable that the
search for institutional power lost, rather than gained, status for
cartography in the scientific community. How many other 'sciences' are
merely manipulators and generalizers of other people's data? The

severing of links with the world one purports to represent is no less than
abdication, intellectual as well as ethical . The adoption of new technologies
can perhaps reverse the trend by restoring some links between the 'real' world and
the image but it has to be recognized that the hard decisions about social content
have already been made long before the substance of the map arrives in the
cartographer's office. Whether the end product is a draft map or a digital tape, the
power game over just what is to be privileged in the world is already
largely over for the cartographer.

Discursive analysis of spatial politics should precede policy

decisions. Resist naturalizing hierarchical spatial imaginaries.
Michael SHAPIRO Poli Sci @ Hawaii 92 Reading the Postmodern Polity p. 88-89

The kind of discursive practice implicit in spatial arrangements is rarely

available as part of political understandings because in most
contemporary policy talk, the shape of the arena within which policy is
conceived is taken for granted. These arenas, the resultants of spatial
practices, are not an audible part of policy talk. They exist at a silent level, or, to turn to
a lexic metaphor, they are a series of power inscriptions that do their effective work without being read. They
belong, in effect to a political rhetoric that is implicit in society's spatial practices, as part of its "ground plan," which
situates the sets of eligible speaker/actors who can produce meaningful and effective policy utterances and actions.

And, in general, they contextualize and render coherent the discourses

that bestow meaning and value on things, actions, and relationships . The
5

shape of a society's spaces-leisure space, work space, public space, military space, and so forth -tends to remain

One is of course that the shaping of such spaces

takes place so slowly that few can perceive a process of actual boundary
establishment or movement. However, part of the inattention to spatial predicates of policy
discourse is positively administered. Dominant forms of social theory, for example both
liberal and Marxist, fail, with some exceptions, to encode the spatial
dimensions of human association.6 For the dominant tendencies in both these theoretical
largely implicit for a variety of reasons.

traditions, space is either natural or neutral; it is either the empty arena within which political association and
contention develop or it is the sanctified, historically destined places whose boundaries should remain inviolable.
Yet there are good reasons to resist this naturalizing of space .

At a minimum, careful attention

to the irredeemably contextual contribution of a speaker's or writer's
situation to the meaning of utterances should provide a clue . The meaning and
value that statements confer are inseparable from the mapping of persons within which the statements are
deposited. Intelligibility is intimately connected to standing, to the sites and locations from which meanings are

And the spaces from which discourse is produced are just as much
constituted as sets of practices as the discourses themselves. Social
relations thus form a complex in which spatial and discursive practices are
inseparable. 7 Those who use a discourse -an institutionalized practice through which meaning and value is
shaped.

imposed, reaffirmed, and exchanged-generally fail to discern the historically developed, presupposed practices,

This is the case, in part,

because, as Jacques Derrida has pointed out, our utterances seem to be
wholly present to us: "The subject can hear or speak to himself and be
affected by the signifier he produces without passing through an external
detour, the world, the sphere of what is not 'his own '." Nevertheless, the rhetorical
spatial among others, that ventriloquate themselves through the discourse.

contributions of space can be registered. At least their in- direct culects are available to the gaze. What is often
required is that one manage to suspend the usual aggressive practices through which everyday life is constructed.

Our critique pushes the boundaries of epistemological comfort

zones allowing for interaction from inside and outsidewe can
within and outside the system
Crampton, University of Kentucky, Geography, Associate Professor,
10 [Jeremy W, Mapping: A Critical Introduction to Cartography and GIS, page
178-179, PAC]
The second step is to put this critique into practice. Therefore this book is written,
as best as I can, in a critical spirit. But from whence is it launched? Here I have to
acknowledge my own positionality as someone who does critical
cartography and GIS. But this here is hard to locate; I exist between two
worlds in a kind of exile (Said 2000), not only because of my British background
but because I have lived in America for over 20 years. As Said experienced, there is
still a sense of alienation from ones adopted country that cannot be shaken off. But
this is doubled, or mirrored, by the fact that I also sit somewhat uneasily
between the two worlds of critical social theory and mapping/GIS. There is
a very real danger and actuality of being dismissed by both sides, my
theoretic qualifications are never sufficient for critical geographers, but
are too sufficient for GIS users. This is not to claim an obscure outsider
status; obviously I occupy a specific and privileged intellectual position .
But neither is it truly an insider status; for many academics, writers, poets,
and artists their degree of freedom is highly constrained and surveilled, and
not just in other countries but also in the United States. What I experience is
something like a voice from the edges, a question of belonging. Edward Said
in his lifetime was at various times accused of being both too close to the
Palestinian cause and of not being authentically Palestinian. As is perhaps the
case for many people, I retain both a proximity to and a distance from the subject
under discussion. And I think it is the same for a practice of critique. So in this book
I have tried to act as a kind of translator, believing that this would be most
appealing to readers who find themselves, not quite comfortably, in one or more
camps. This kind of shuttle diplomacy might act as a way of bringing thought to
bear on itself, and of learning to think differently. Every translation is after all
an invitation for a re-translation. Like many students I encounter, you might find
that you occupy several positions at once in Figure 1.1. Perhaps you are attracted to
the possibility of acquiring a recognized GIS Certificate, but also the possibilities of
bottom-up user-produced maps. The clash of motives here may usefully spark
that questioning at the heart of critical practice. If we recall the three
principles of critical geography outlined earlier, that is, it is oppositional,
it is activist /practical, and it is embedded in critical theory, then a number
of chapters attempt to put these principles into practice. For this book I chose three
topics which seem to me to be important, and in which GIS andcartography play
significant and problematic roles. These are governing with maps (Chapter 6),
geosurveillance (Chapter 9), and the construction of race (Chapter 11). Other
chapters, speaking to other issues, are possible and even necessary. That is the flaw
in this book or any book that is also the opening for further seeking.If we agree
with David Harvey that cartography is a major structural pillar of all forms

of geographical knowledge (discussed below) then one of the first things

we will want to know is the nature of the forms of knowledge produced for
these three domains. A critical approach will also want to problematize
these areas, to work through their implications, contradictions, assumptions,
historicities, and deployments. Thirdly, I have tried to situate both the source and
the target of critical cartography and GIS. Any account which tells the story
from a purely disciplinary perspective will, it seems to me, omit some of the
most interesting and radical practices of that critique. The fact is that
mapping today is escaping the discipline. The rise of people-powered
mapping and the geoweb at the same time that we have seen the rise of
the political netroots and people-powered politics is not coincidental. They
stem from the same cause and desire to create alternative forms of
expression beyond those encompassed by the traditional power-holders
(whether the geographical knowledge elites or Big Media). Critical cartography
and GIS then, does an end-run around the accreted power structures such
as academic experts,textbooks, and official bodies of knowledge. In Chapter
12 for example, I tried to trace some of these non-disciplinary and non-academic
critiques in the context of map art and the poetics of space. In order to achieve
its goals must critique place itself on the outside? If much critique is
reexive and internal the degree to which one can oppose from within is
not an uncontroversial one. For some, opposition can only take place from
the outside, from a purer position, detached and uncorrupted. Work within the
system will only lead to becoming a part of the system, becoming co-opted. For
others this very claim for detachment, of escape from the object of
analysis, is only another sign of the impossibility of escape from the
power relations of mapping and GIS. Again this is a question of positionality, and
you may find yourself both within and outside the system at different
times. I know I do.

Political Spillover
Redefining cartographic practices and imagery spills over into
the political
Craine and Aitken 09 [Jim Craine and Stuart C. Aitken; The Emotional Life of
Maps; Rethinking Map; 2009; Stuart C. Aitken - Department of Geography, San
Diego State University San Diego, USA and Department of Geography and The
Norwegian Centre for Child Research, Norwegian University of Science and
Technology, Trondheim, Norway; Jim Craine - Department of Geography, California
State University, Northridge, USA; BM]
There is today an unprecedented convergence of the analogue map with other, previously distinct imagery,
including that produced by GIS, and through computer animation. Digital mapping programs can
now directly interface with computer storage and retrieval to the extent that real-time electronic display surfaces

only reinforce contemporary societys substantive orientation to visuality

(Jakle 2004). And there is a possibility to go beyond the representation, to give
an affective push that opens political possibilities. One possible potential for a
broader understanding of affectivity in GIS spatialities is the digital reimagining of the traditional analogue map so that we may more fully
engage it, perhaps enabling an even more emotive rendering that surpasses the
affective qualities of the static map. Geographers can now stretch their
imaginations around what was unrepresentable the terra incognitae, the
monsters and strange beings on the periphery of the known. Perhaps this might
soften the starkness of border lines and walls, and produce a rethinking, a
re-imagining of the possible from within rather than an imposition of the probably from
without and from above. The technology of virtual embodiment suggests the
possibility of more vibrant cartographic representations, ones that
engage the emotions. The outcome, perhaps, is a completely different kind of
cartography, a tender-mapping, an emotional geography of lived experiences. This is the continuation
through digitization, geovisualization and GIS of a journey out of which the Western infatuation with remotely
sensed images, recreated spaces, exotic places, fast motions and fervent emotions has operated for several
hundred years but, now, with a twist into the non-representable, the virtual, the real.

Epistemology 1st
Epistemology important
Michael J. Shapiro 1997. [Violent Cartographies, pp. 172]
the intelligibility of action
is dependent on its location within a narrative with historical depth. Using
the metaphor of the theatrical character, he argues that as individual
agents we are at best only coauthors of our narratives: "We enter upon a
stage which we did not design ... [and] we find ourselves part of an action
that was not of our making."6 Maclntyre's recognition of the centrality of narrative goes a long way
The second insight derives from Maclntyre's various demonstrations that

toward avoiding the empty abstractions that analytic philosophy's model of the self produces in its commitment to
universal, contextless bases for judgment. However, he fails to recognize the depth and contentiousness of the
narrative aspect of identity. And his spatial imaginary is too narrow, for it is focused on the immediate location of
the speech act rather than the complex set of boundaries and divisionswhether consensual or contentiousthat

Maclntyre treats
narratives in terms of their forward aims, their projections toward a future
world. This teleological frame obscures what is at once more basic and
more contestable in the narrative context of the actor. While it is the case
that, at the level of immediate public intelligibility, people's actions take
on much of their significance through the temporal extension of stories,
which help justify the goals of the actions, it is also the case that actions
participate in other kinds of stories; they belong to people in the sense
that they reaffirm who they are, where they are, and how it is that they
have become part of an assemblage or a "people" in a collective sense . The
identity stories that construct actors as one or another type of person (e.g.,
Jew versus Arab, native versus immigrant) and that territorialize identities (e.g., resident versus
nomad, citizen versus foreigner) are the foundations for historical and contemporary
forms of antagonism, violence, and interpretive contention over the
meaning of actions. To claim membership in a particular tribe, ethnicity, or
nationthat is, to belong to a "people"one must claim location in a
particular genealogical and spatial story. Such stories precede any particular action aimed at
constitute the order as a whole. Seeking to restore an Aristotelian basis for virtue,

a future result and provoke much of the contestation over claims to territory and entitlement and thus to collective
recognition.

To the extent that they are part of the reigning structure of

intelligibility, identity stories tend to escape contentiousness within
ongoing political and ethical discourses. To produce an ethics responsive
to contestations over identity claims and their related spatial stories, it is
necessary to intervene in the dominant practices of intelligibility.

Perm

Perm DA Coverup
Coverup Disad- The plan results in the degredation of
nonwestern nations and short circuits the solvency of the alt
Sparke 7 (Matthew Sparke prof of geography and international studies at
Washington University Everywhere but Always Somewhere: Critical Geographies of
the Global South The Global South, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Winter, 2007) Crystal
Inuential as they are, however, the cartographic cover-ups and carveups
of the global South have never succeeded in obliterating the efforts of the
colonized to map back and reterritorialize their human geographies by
representing them in other more grounded, embodied and accountable
ways. In this sense the geographical formulation of the global South itself
can be cast as a form of reterritorialization articulated in the interests of
repossession. As such it builds upon multi-layered foundations that include all the reterritorializing work of
the 'post-colonial' nation-states forged by independence movements against territorial imperialism, as well as the
original "Third World' envisaged as a non-aligned world bloc at Bandung, and, in diverse geographic traditions that
tie the earliest anti-colonial resistancefforts to contemporary First Nations renegotiations, the 'Fourth World' too.4

Over time all these anti-colonial reterritorializations have been subject to

over-mapping. The 'less developed world', 'Highly Indebted Poor
Countries', 'basket cases', 'rogue nations', 'the arc of instability',
'wilderness': the list of geographic misrepresentation is long. But despite
all these misleading cover-terms, critical geographies of the global South
have persisted in rallying and representing struggles for repossession.
Secondly, therefore, persistent geographical responsibility means
retracing these heterogeneous human geographies of the global South
that have been articulated in the face of the anemic geographies of
dispossession

Perm DA Perpetuation
This is not about directly supporting the construction of
physical borders but perpetuating the mental constructs of
borders that create the mindsets that make borders necessary
Schlee 3 (Gunther Schlee Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, Vol.
73, No. 3 (2003) REDRAWING THE MAP OF THE HORN: THE POLITICS OF
DIFFERENCE) Crystal
The other day' Donald Donham showed me his draft introduction to a collected volume entitled Remapping
Ethiopia. In this introduction Donald expresses some ideas which are dear also to me, pointing out that in the case
of Ethiopia '[t]he very shape of the country-the iconic outline that symbolises the nation2-has changed as Eritrea

The present contribution will have a yet clearer

geographical focus than that planned volume (since published as James et al., 2002) in
which the term 'mapping' is taken up sometimes literally but also in
various metaphorical senses. Of course I am aware of the difference between the surface of the
earth and a map. And also a boundary is not a simple given but a mental construct .
Some boundaries are visible-the German/German one consisted of a fence and other
fortifications, and the Kenyan/Ethiopian one is a straight cut-line , which
undulates like a white ribbon across the hilltops. But most boundaries are not visible in
most places and in social reality might amount more to a transitional zone
than to well-defined lines. But apart from this necessary caution I want to
speak about maps and boundaries at the lowest possible level of
abstraction. The shape of a national territory can never be seen. From a
spacecraft we see continents and mountain ranges but no boundaries, and
if we come close enough to see cut-lines or other boundary markers, we
can no longer see a surface large enough to cover the whole territory.
Nevertheless from weather forecast maps, advertisements and other forms of visual representations, we are
all so familiar with the territorial shape of the nation-state we live in-and
those of many other such units-that these shapes have come to stand as
emblems for the respective national identities.
has become its own country.'

Perm DA Epistemology
The alternative is a distinct epistemological change from the
aff as to what knowledge surrounds and applies to the map
making process and maps themselves
Kitchin and Dodge 7(Rob Kitchin prof of geography at National University of
Ireland and Martin Dodge prof of geography at the University of Rochester
Rethinking maps Progress in Human Geography 31(3) (2007) Crystal
Such a turn also clearly has epistemological implications with regards to
cartographic research and work, refocusing attention across the broad
spectrum of cartography (practioners, technicians, historians, critical theorists,
map users) on understanding mapping practices how maps are (re)made
in diverse ways (technically, socially, politically) by people within particular
contexts and cultures as solutions to relational problems. Examining these
practices can be undertaken in multiple ways (ethnographies, participant
observation, technical measurement), as long as they are sensitive to
capturing and distilling the unfolding and contextual nature of mapping.
Here, there is an attempt to observe and acknowledge what cartographers
do (undertake contextual science) not what they say they do (undertake
objective science) and how people bring maps into being to solve relational
problems in ways that extend beyond a nave understanding of map use
(ie, collaboratively, in relation to places and other sources of knowledge, within
context, etc). For professional cartographers this means taking seriously
the conscious and unconscious decisions they make, the way creating a
map unfolds in citational, habitual, reexive and playful ways; and the
diverse and context-dependent ways in which maps are brought into being
by people as they live their lives (see Brown and Laurier, 2005). Such
research, we believe, will open up productive ways of framing and
reexively refining cartographic theory and praxis, rather than simply
critiquing the work of cartographers without providing epistemological
suggestions (other than to acknowledge or reduce ideological bias as with much
critical cartography as presently formulated).

Perm DA Presumed Neutrality

Mapping is not neutral but controlled by oppressors and used
to subjugate and colonize individuals
Kitchin et al 9 (Rob Kitchin, ERC Advanced Investigator and PI of the
Programmable City project, Chris Perkins lecture of geography at Manchester
university and Martin Dodge prof fo geography at Manchester University 2009
Thinking about maps, rethinking maps) Crystal
the process of mapping
was not a neutral, objective pursuit but rather was one laden with power .
He contended that the process of mapping consists of creating, rather than simply
revealing, knowledge. In the process of creation many subjective decisions
are made about what to include, how the map will look and what the map
is seeking to communicate. As such, Harley noted, maps are imbued with the
values and judgements of the individuals who construct them and they are
undeniably a reection of the culture in which those individuals live. Maps
are typically the products of privileged and formalized knowledges and
they also tend to produce certain kinds of knowledge about the world. And
in this sense, maps are the products of power and they produce power. In
contrast to the scientific view that positions maps in essentialist terms,
Harley cast maps as social constructions; as expressions of
power/knowledge. Others, such as Denis Wood (1992) and John Pickles (2004), have extensively
Harley (1989) drew on the ideas of Michel Foucault among others to argue that

demonstrated this power/knowledge revealing the ideology inherent in maps (or their second text) and how maps
lie (or at least provide selective stories while denying their selectivity) due to the choices and decisions that have

This social constructivist

critique sometimes also articulated structural explanations for mapping,
which sought understanding beneath the apparent surface of observable
evidence. For example, David Harveys (1989) Marxist analysis of the role of mapping in timespace
to be made during their creation, and through how they are read by users.

compression examined the role of global images in the expansion of European colonial powers, and situated these
as reflections of a changing mode of production. Drawing on linguistic structural thought Denis Wood (1992)

the power of maps lay in the interests

they represented. Mapping in this view always has a political purpose, and
this interest often leads to people being pushed off the map . Wood
argued that mapping works through a shared cultural reading of a number
of different codes in every map, which may be analysed in a semiotic
process to reveal the power behind the map. These interests all too often
led to subjugation, oppression, control and inequality . Through economic
relations, legal evidence, governance or social practice the power of maps
continues to be used to control. It has been argued that many of the social
roles played by cartographic knowledge stem from the modernist project,
and that a mapping mentality is integral to the modernist enterprise itself
(Cosgrove and Martins 2000). By examining different categories across which power
might be articulated contextual studies can reveal how maps reect but
also constitute different kinds of political relation. Colonialism, property
ownership, national identity, race, military power, bureaucracy and gender
have all been theorized as playing key roles in mapping relations (see Anderson
1991; Haraway 1992; Pickles 2004). For example, local knowledge has been translated into
employed Barthean semiotics to persuasively argue that

tools to serve the needs of the colonizer, with new territories scripted as
blank spaces, empty and available for the civilizing Western explorer to
claim, name, subjugate and colonize (Edney 1997). Projection and design have
been used to naturalize the political process of imperial control and sell
imperial values to citizens at home. The continuing progress of colonial
adventures is mapped out nowadays in our news broadcasts and on the
Internet, but the imperial rhetoric of control, governance, management of
territory and creation of new imperial landscapes remains the same (cf.
Gregory 2004). The colonial project relies on the map, and in turn the map
relies on colonial aspirations.

AT: Africa Perm

We are a pre-requisite- Only by reshaping our spatial historical
understandings of US cartographic construction can we begin
to change the colonial violence from US military intervention
Bamba 10 [Abou B. Bamba, Assistant Professor of History at Hobart and William
Smith Colleges, emphasis in African history (colonial and postcolonial), U.S.Francophone Africa Relations, Development Studies, Modernization Theory,
Transnational History, Imperialism, Historical Cartography and GIS. Rebirth of a
Strategic Continent: Problematizing Africa as a Geostrategic Zone, African
Geographical Review. 2010, Vol. 29 Issue 1 Page 93-94, Published 2010]
revisit the making of
past Africanist geographies and their attendant truth claims. Perhaps that
would put us in a better position to see that the current surge in American
interest in a strategic Africa has a long genealogy. Equally, we might better
understand that such interest has far more to do with the continents
strategic position in the current War on Terror, the paranoia vis--vis
Chinas rising role in Africa and in the world in general, and Americas new
search for oil security than it has to do with any humanitarian motive that
the Department of Defense is exhibiting to the general public. Some concerned
scholars have begun to raise the alarm over what is likely to become a
blanket militarization of American relations and aid vis--vis the
continent (Moseley 2009, see also Amosu 2007, 711713). With a keen familiarity with the
spatial historical scholarship on Africa and a renewed engagement with
parallel geocartographic ways of seeing Africa, academic geographers and
cartographers will undoubtedly play a critical role in the public debates
about the place of the continent in an ever globalized world. With their grounded
As debates about the establishment of AFRICOM heat up, it might be insightful to

knowledge of Africa, it is imperative that Africanists come down from the Ivory Tower and be a part of these
debates, lest they be sidelined once again when the history books are written to narrate the story of the rebirth of
a strategic continent.

African borders and nation states are entirely conceptualized

in western notions that need to be conceptualized into a new
form of ethnic conciousness
Amadife and Warhola 93 (Emmanuel N. Amadife associate prof at KSU and James
W. Warhola prof at University of Maine, Africa's Political Boundaries: Colonial
Cartography, the OAU, and the Advisability of Ethno-National Adjustment
International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, Vol. 6, No. 4 (Summer, 1993)
Crystal
Current national borders in Black Africa represent a hindrance to the
universally sought goals of social peace and economic prosperity. Causes
for this political circumstance include not only the pre-colonial sociopolitical circumstances in Africa and the difficult path of nation-state
formation on the continent, but also the very character of post-colonial
nationalism. Each of these phenomena is in itself highly complex; their historical interaction
has produced a political situation that calls for a fundamental

reconceptualization of what form a rational political order in Black Africa

might assume. Increasing challenges to the current system of African
nation-states are raised by ethnonationalist and other secessionist forces
seeking, at minimum, greater regional autonomy, or, at maximum,
establishment of a new nation-state. Present global trends strongly
suggest that pressure by ethnic groups upon nation-states will not
subside in the near future; both the origins and nature of these demands
point toward heightened, politicized ethnic consciousness for the
foreseeable future. Africa enjoys no exemption from these developments, despite the characteristically
different type of nationalism emergent in Africa during the decolonizing, and post-colonial eras. The tenuous
and desultory character of postcolonial nationalism in many African
countries provides an additional condition in response to which border
readjustments might be proposed. The postcolonial nation-state
framework was conceived and implemented as a long-term political
solution. But after a generation of independence, it appears to be a major
part of the continent's political problems. The key issues that adumbrate
this situation are: what was the genesis and what is the nature of ethnic
identity and its politicization in contemporary Africa? How can the
problems arising out of ethnic divisions in Africa be resolved?1 What do
these conicts signify for the maintenance of African borders, given the
OAU's longstanding disinclination from boundary adjustments? Is its
stance defensible given currently evolving ethno-political realities across
the globe? Each of these questions, in turn, raises challenges to inflexible adherence to current border
arrangements. Discussion of national boundaries and the conditions under
which they might be redrawn would do well to commence with a
consideration of the nature of the modern state. Both the conception and
the realization of the nation-state was a thoroughly Western phenomenon,
derived directly out of European experiences accumulation of intellectual
forces and social processes occurring over a period of centuries. In the
twentieth century, the nature and role of the modern state, especially as it
relates to its larger international context, has been a focus for intense
examination in comparative political science.11 Whatever the scholarly disagreements on
the nature of the modern state, the problematic of statehood is increasingly evident in postcolonial Africa .
Globally, the nation-state itself is coming under increasing pressures, both
from below (the increase of ethnonationalist movements and demands)
and from above (increased number and political scope of regional
organizations). In this regard Africa clearly reects larger global patterns.
A major stream of thought holds that in order to arrive at a more satisfactory
understanding of contemporary political life the state itself must be
reconceptualized and recognized as a centerpiece of comparative political
analysis. This would appear to be particularly appropriate for an
understanding of the problems besetting Black African political life since
decolonization. In post-colonial Africa the modern state has been
conspicuous for its abject failure to serve as a competent vehicle for
organizing and serving community life. In this regard, the most
fundamental political theoretic questions involve the appropriateness of
the modern-state conception; this question, in turn, immediately raises inquiries

about the appropriateness of borders, since specific, mutually recognized

boundaries are a fundamental characteristic of the modern state. It is
worth noting that preliterate communities, clans, and even empires rarely
if ever possessed the degree of juridical boundary specificity of even the
most troubled modern state. Academic observers and political leaders in
Africa and abroad have recognized for some time that state control in
Africa is among the weakest in the world.12 This characteristic, often
labeled the "marginality of African states," shows no sign of abating as
the 20th century draws to a close. Most importantly, ethnic consciousness
and the potential for conict along ethnic lines have contributed directly
to the marginalization of African states, exacerbating problems of
governability. Africa, however, is not unique in this; ethnic conflict appears destined to be a critical issue in
most regions of the globe in the 21st century, and has been the subject of growing scholarly attention.13

AT: Middle East Perm

Arab essentialization of the middle east ignores the various
groups involved in that region
Culcasi 10 (Karen Culcasi prof of geology and geography and West Virginia
university CONSTRUCTING AND NATURALIZING THE MIDDLE EAST The Geographical
Review 100 (4) October 2010) Crystal
At first glimpse the ethnic/linguistic identifier Arab may seem to be a
reasonable trait with which to define the Middle East, for many of the
countries considered part of the Middle East core have Arab majorities.
Ethnicity and language have played a role in defining some world region
(Latin America, for example) yet such traits facilitate the essentialization of places.
Even though a strong Arab identity is present in many of the core
Middle Eastern countries, the Arab ethnic/ linguistic identifier is
problematic for several reasons. Most obvious is that it excludes the non-Arab
states of Israel, Turkey, and Iran, which are almost always considered part
of the Middle East. Defining the Middle East as Arab also ignores large
non-Arab populations such as the Kurds and Berbers, who reside in many
different countries. Furthermore, although many states in the Middle East have
an Arab majority, an Arab identity does not unify them. Arabs from
Morocco to Egypt to Iraq differ immensely in their history, local practices,
and dialects. Political schisms have also been common between Arabmajority states. One of the most divisive of these schisms was Iraqs 1990 invasion of the fellow Arab state
of Kuwait. From the late 1950s until the early 1970s the Arab nationalist movement began to unify Arabs across

today Arab states have developed their

own national identities. Therefore, to stress the Arab character of the
Middle East is to ignore immense diversity in the region, both between
Arabs and between all other ethnic/linguist groups.
international borders, but the movement waned, and

Only by reject the current colloquial understanding of MiddleEast in favor of Arab Homeland can we begin a transition into
better scholarship
Culcasi 12 [Karen Culcasi, Professor in the Department of Geology and Geography, West Virginia University,
Mapping the Middle East from Within: (Counter-) Cartographies of an Imperialist Construction, Sep 2012, Vol. 44
Issue 4, p1099-1118]
The Middle

East is an exonym, or a toponym that has been stamped on

a place by European imperialists and subsequently accepted and used by
across much of the world (Monmonier 2006:99100); however it is not a label that is
readily adopted by local inhabitants. The banality of maps of the Arab
Homeland and the rarity of maps of the Middle East construct a
cartographic discourse that counters dominant western norms that so
readily embrace the idea of the Middle East. It is ironic that in the USA
most people speak so unreservedly of the Middle East and Middle Easterners,
yet the referentor the signified (Barthes 1972) does not use similar terms. Indeed the
term Middle East is used far more often, and carries much greater significance in the western world than it does
within the region. The term and the idea of the Middle East are so deeply embedded in discourses in the west

it is quite reasonable to suggest that

within our own academic or professional communications as well as in our
everyday lives that we stress the constructedness of the Middle East
and adopt less imperialists terms that reect the local geography of the
people who reside in this western constructed place.
that is unlikely to vanish in the near future. Nevertheless,

Literally no one has any idea what the fuck the Middle East is and should
be replaced with the Arab homeland the AFF has already justified the
borders of the Middle East No comeback
Culcasi 12 (Karen Culcasi prof of geology and geography and West Virginia
university Mapping the Middle East from Within: (Counter-) Cartographies of an
Imperialist Construction Antipode Vol. 44 No. 4) Crystal
The Middle East and the Arab Homeland, like any world region, are
ambiguous geographical entities that are created through a variety of
discursive and material processesranging from cartographic practices to
the establishment of supranational organizations (Harvey 2001:224226;
Lewis and Wigen 1997; Paasi 2001). As geographical constructs, the location of
these places is fluid and variable. While it is important to underscore that
there is no one singular spatial definition of either the Middle East or
the Arab Homeland, according to prosaic western and Arab cartographic
delineations these places do greatly overlap. As Figure 1 summarizes,
maps and definitions of the Middle East produced in the USA since the
1950s generally consider the states of Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Syria, Jordan,
Lebanon, Israel/Palestine, Saudi Arabia, the UAE (United Arab Emirates),
Oman, Yemen, Bahrain, Qatar, and Egypt as core states; while the
peripheral states of North Africa and Southwest Asia (Morocco, Western
Sahara, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Sudan, Pakistan and Afghanistan) are
often included as part of the region, but with little regularity.4 Though the
non-Arab states of Israel, Iran and Turkey (and sometimes Cyprus too) are
commonly considered part of the Middle East, according to normative
cartographic discourses within Arab States they are never included as part
of the Arab Homeland (see Figure 2). By contrast, North African states like
Sudan and Morocco are always included as the core of the Arab Homeland.
Recognizing that both the Middle East and the Arab Homeland are
ambiguous and uid constructions is important, but, as I highlight
throughout this paper, it is how and why these places are constructed that
is so imperative to understand (Forsberg 2003). From my examination of
hundreds of maps, I found that the Middle East is nearly nonexistent, while
the Arab Homeland is unequivocally a more common regional designation.
The Arab Homeland is a normative and powerful internal cartographic
discourse that creates a decidedly non-imperialist way of dividing and
conceptualizing the world. The consistent construction of the Arab
Homeland is a subtle form of geopolitical resistance that is counter to the
dominant western divisions of the world that generally recognize the
Middle East.

A/T

AT: We Need Maps

Justifying maps is just another way of propping up the colonial
state causes violence towards the other
Wood 12 (Denis, is an artist, author, cartographer and a former professor of
Design at North Carolina State University, The Anthropology of Cartography, Pg
285 http://www.deniswood.net/content/Anthro%20Cart.pdf)
Other arguments - that we needed maps to get around - were almost
laughably dismissible. Who did? and, Since when? No, all these arguments were too
imsy to stand up against the weakest attack. They were clearly bogus. In fact I found the whole
'Maps enable man to rise, so to speak, above his immediate range of vision ... .' class of arguments inherently troublesome, the
whole idea - on which all the fest of the arguments rested _ that maps were representations of the world. In the first place, what if
they were? I mean, how was rising 'above his immediate range of vision' supposed to ' provide the knowledge to carry on his work

never got how th is was

supposed to work. At the very least there were a number of missing
terms. And even if the representational idea did hold for trees and rivers
later I would realize it didn't even hold for them - right off I could see that
it didn't work for property lines, for political boundaries at all . I mea n, I'd seen the
world from the tops of tall buildings, from airplanes: it was mostly roofs and fields and patches of green and brown. And,
okay, even if I abstracted and labelled these, named the rivers and the
streets, I still didn't have the legislative district boundaries, the school
zones over which people fought so ferociously. I still didn't have the
property lines. I did n't have the city limits. Because it explained nothing, the idea of
the map as a representation for me was suspect from the beginning. It
didnt explain what the map offered that photographs, that paintings, that
prose didn't; it didn't explain how knowledge was supposed to arise from
its contemplation; and it didn't explain the presence of insensible th ings. It d idn't explain anythi ng.
intelligently'? Y01lIJad an overhead view ami all of a Slldden Y01lllad knowledge? I

AT: Policy Making - Grassroots

Grass roots cartographic practices help change oppressive
organizations and practices
Pickles 95 (John Pickles prof of international studies at north Carolina at chapel
hill 1995. Representations in an Electronic Age: Geography, GIS, and Democracy
Ground Truth: The Social Implications of Geographic Information Systems) Crystal
GIS thus operates at several levels and the term GIS refers to several
distinct types of object: a research community that transcends disciplinary
boundaries; an approach to geographic inquiry and spatial data handling;
a series of technologies for collecting, manipulating, and representing
spatial information; a way of thinking about spatial data; a commodified
object that has monetary potential and value; and a technical tool that has strategic
value. Academic developers and users of GIS have a tendency to focus primarily on
the technical and organizational issues raised by the use of electronic information
and imaging. But because of the high cost of its development and use, GIS
has emerged above all as a tool and product that changes the ways
certain groups and organizations operate. That is, it is a technology (like all
technology to one degree or another) closely tied to the concrete material and
ideological needs and interests of certain groups. As such, it is an
important element in changing social relations in market economies; in
producing new demands, commodities, and forms of domination in the
workplace; in developing new systems of counting and recording
populations; in defining, delimiting, and mapping space and nature; and in
providing new tools and techniques for waging war. In each of these domains
GIS is part of a contemporary network of knowledge, ideology, and
practice that defines, inscribes, and represents environmental and social
patterns within a broader economy of signification that calls forth new
ways of thinking, acting, and writing.

AT: Policy Making Government

Government policies force maps into static notions instead of
varied documents of becoming
Kitchin and Dodge 7(Rob Kitchin prof of geography at National University of
Ireland and Martin Dodge prof of geography at the University of Rochester
Rethinking maps Progress in Human Geography 31(3) (2007) Crystal
When a spatial representation understood as a map is printed for inclusion
in a policy document (see Figure 1), for example, we would argue that its
creation is not complete it is not ontologically secure as a map. Although
it has the appearance of an immutable mobile its knowledge and message
fixed and portable because it can be read by anyone understanding how maps work
it remains mutable, remade every time it is employed. Like a street
geometrically defined by urban planning, and created by urban planners,
is transformed into place by walkers (de Certeau, 1984), a spatial
representation created by cartographers (the coloured ink on the paper) is
transformed into a map by individuals. As each walker experiences the
street differently, each person engaging with a spatial representation
beckons a different map into being. Each brings it into his or her own milieu,
framed by that individuals knowledge, skills and spatial experience, in this
case of Ireland and Irish social history. For someone familiar with the geography
of Ireland, their ability to remake the map in a way that allows them to
articulate an analysis of the data is likely to be far superior to someone
unfamiliar with the pattern of settlement (to know what the towns are, what
county or local authority area they reside in, what their social and economic history
is, their physical geography is, and so on). For someone who does not
understand the concept of thematic mapping or classification schemes,
again the map will be bought into being differently to people who do, who
will ask different questions of the data and how it is displayed. While all
people who understand the concept of a map beckon a map into being,
there is variability in the ability of people to mobilize the representation
and to solve particular problems. Moreover, the beckoning of the map
generates a new, imaginative geography (an ordered, rationale, calculated
geography) for each person, that of the spatial distribution of population change
between the 1996 and 2002 census.

AT: View From Nowhere

Mapping is not a view from now where but impacted by every
person that comes in contact with it
Kitchin et al 9 (Rob Kitchin, ERC Advanced Investigator and PI of the
Programmable City project, Chris Perkins lecture of geography at Manchester
university and Martin Dodge prof fo geography at Manchester University 2009
Thinking about maps, rethinking maps) Crystal
Cramptons solution to the limitations of Harleys social constructivist thinking is to extend the use of Foucault and
to draw on the ideas of Heidegger and other critical cartographers such as Edney (1993). In short,

Crampton

outlines a non-confessional understanding of spatial

representation wherein maps instead of being interpreted as objects at a
distance from the world, regarding that world from nowhere, that they be
understood as being in the world, as open to the disclosure of things.
Such a shift, Crampton argues, necessitates a move from understanding
cartography as a set of ontic knowledges to examining its ontological
terms. Ontic knowledge consists of the examination of how a topic should
proceed from within its own framework where the ontological assumptions
about how the world can be known and measured are implicitly secure and
beyond doubt (Crampton 2003). In other words, there is a core foundational knowledge a taken for granted
ontology that unquestioningly underpins ontic knowledge. With respect to cartography this
foundational ontology is that the world can be objectively and truthfully
mapped using scientific techniques that capture and display spatial
information. Cartography in these terms is purely technical and develops
by asking self-referential, procedural questions of itself that aim to refine
and improve how maps are designed and communicate (Crampton gives the
(2003: 7)

examples of what colour scheme to use, the effects of scale, how maps are used historically and politically). In
these terms a book like Robinson et al. (1995) is a technical manual that does not question the ontological
assumptions of the form of mapping advocated, rather it is a how to do proper cartography book that in itself

Harleys questioning of
maps is also ontical (e.g. see Harley 1992), as his project sought to highlight the
ideology inherent in maps (and thus expose the truth hidden underneath) rather than to
question the project of mapping per se; it provided an epistemological
avenue into the map, but still left open the question of the ontology of the
map (Crampton 2003: 90). In contrast, Crampton details that examining cartography ontologically consists of
questioning the project of cartography itself. Such a view leads to Crampton, following Edney (1993), to
argue for the development of a non-progressivist history of cartography;
the development of a historical ontology that rather than being
teleological (wherein a monolithic view of the history of cartographic practices is adopted that sees
cartography on a single path leading to more and more complete, accurate and truthful maps) is contingent
and relational (wherein mapping and truth is seen as contingent on the social, cultural and technical
relations at particular times and places). Maps from this perspective are historical
products operating within a certain horizon of possibilities (Crampton 2003: 51).
perpetuates the security of cartographys ontic knowledge. In this sense,

(See also his chapter in this volume that discusses the ways different forms of mapping inframe racial identities

It thus follows that maps created

in the present are products of the here-and-now, no better than maps of
previous generations, but rather different to them. Defining a map is
with important ramifications for how humanity is made visible.)

dependent on when and where the map was created, as what constitutes
a map has changed over time. For Crampton (2003: 51) this means that a politics of
mapping should move beyond a critique of existing maps to consist of a
more sweeping project of examining and breaking through the boundaries
on how maps are, and our projects and practices with them; it is about
exploring the being of maps; how maps are conceptually framed in order
to make sense of the world. Several other cartographic theorists have
been following similar lines of enquiry to Crampton in seeking to transfer
map theory from ontic knowledge to ontology and it is to them that we
now turn.

AT: GIS Good

Not questioning the map and exploration leads to an
acceptance that the map is a fact, not a processleads to a
legitimacy of unacceptable parts of the squo
Winlow, Cultural and Historical Geographer at Bath
Spa University, 2006 [Heather, March 1, 2006, Mapping Moral
Geographies: W. Z. Ripleys Races of Europe and the United States, Annals
of the Association of American Geographers, EBSCOhost Academic Search
Complete, accessed 6-25-14, J.J.]
Harleys work on the deconstruction of the map (now well known among
geographers) provides some means of understanding how the power of the
map was harnessed to legitimize and reinforce racial taxonomies. Maps
are often regarded as neutral and scientific and are seen as mirrors of
nature accurately reecting the world (Harley 1992, 234). The fact that
maps became an acceptable part of academic discourse meant that their
legitimacy went unquestioned for many years. It is now widely
acknowledged among human geographers that maps are cultural texts
reecting the wider social, cultural, and political milieu of society. Harley,
Wood (1993), Pickles (1992, 1995, 2004), and Crampton (2001) have urged that
cartographers need to reevaluate mapping within this context. Pickles
(1995, 2004) and Crampton (2001, 2003) have further emphasized the need for
ongoing research agendas in critical cartography in relation to continuing
technological developments. The development of scientific cartography
since the postwar period, through for example geographic information
systems (GIS), has meant that the social and cultural production of maps
continues to be written out (Pickles 2004, 280).2

AT: Objective Mapping Good

Objective Maps lock in technocracy - Accepting maps as
absolute truths gives them their authority to shape the world.
Maps appear to have objective power because we allow them
todiscourse key
Zubrow, University of North Carolina Institute for the
Environment Research Associate, 2003 [Alexis, June, Mapping Tension:
Remote Sensing and the Production of a Statewide Land Cover Map, Human
Ecology, Vol. 31, No. 2, page 281-307, JO]
The WISCLAND1 map as representation seems all encompassing, almost seductive
in the singular and complete story it tells about the state. At every point, we know
the one and only identity of the land: ambiguity has been erased. Since this story is
so powerful, how can alternative views be seen? The view of the map as a snapshot
or even as a means of transmitting knowledge from "reality" to the reader via the
cartographer has been criticized by many in the geographic and cartographic
community (Crampton, 2001; Harley, 1989a, 1989b; Turnbull, 1993; Wood, 1992).
However, maps are no longer seen as neutral arbiters of the truth. They
are seen as representations that systematically establish their own
authority. Authority is established through the extensive network of
individuals , institutions, and technologies that are brought to bear to
construct the land cover map. Everything from experts (professors,
technicians, graduate students), to satellite instrumentation, to government
bureaucracies (NASA, Wisconsm State Cartographer's Office, DNR, etc), to
processing technologies are part of the chain of events that produces the
map. These multiple scientific and governmental organizations imbue the
map with authority.
Instead of being a singular presentation (from the cartographer to the reader),
maps exist through discourse (Crampton, 2001; Harley, 1989a). Different
readers bring varying interpretations and expectations to the use of the
map. We can imagine three hypothetical readers: a remote sensing
scientist, a land manager, and an ecologist. The remote sensing scientist
might see a patch of red pine on the map as a defined duster in spectral
space, primarily indicated by its uniform reflectance in the near infrared bands. A
land manager may see this same patch as a monoculture forest that can be
either harvested or managed through a series of common techniques. The
ecologist may see the red pines as the canopy overshadowing a diverse
ecosystem characterized by undergrowth and soil conditions. All three are
presented with the same data, but through their own interaction with the data, they
ostensibly create three different maps: a map of reflectance, of management, and
of heterogeneous ecosystems.

AFF

Link / Alternative

Perm
Perm do the k then the aff- Cartographic process work within
the political process
Weiner et al 2 (Daniel Weiner, Trevor M. Harris and William J. Craig April 4, 2002
Community Participation and Geographic Information Systems1
ftp://ftp.itc.nl/pub/pgis/PGIS%20Articles/Community_Participation_and_GIS.pdf)
Crystal
Community can be defined by physical proximity to others and the sharing
of common experiences and perspectives. The word has become synonymous with
neighborhood, village, or town, although communities can also exist in other formsfor example, through
professional, social, or spiritual relationships. Communities can thus be virtual (Kitchin, 1998; Graham, 1998).

Public participation in this book refers to grassroots community

engagement. Jane Jacobs (1961) has eloquently documented how neighborhoods attain vitality through the
collective efforts of individuals who care about their common place. Castells (1983) has provided evidence that

For several reasons,

communities formalize themselves and create official organizations with
which the state can negotiate. Participants in such organizations see
opportunities to achieve individual goals through collective action (Olson
1965). Politicians are responsive to community organizations when they
represent sufficient numbers of committed voters (Grant and Omdahl, 1993).
Planners in particular pay attention to public participation and community
organizations (Jones, 1990) because community input is critical for defining
local issues. Planners accept that community developed solutions are
feasible because they tend to be reasonable, realistic, and sustainable.
Public participation is important in community planning, but has been
practiced in ways that range from evasion to full empowerment . This range may
community-based action has occurred in a wide variety of cultures and is universal.

be seen as a ladder of increasing participation. On the lowest rung, citizens are (sometimes) provided with

At the top rung, the public has a full voice in the final
decision, usually through a community organization. Geographic
information systems can assist community organizations regardless of the
rung they are placed on, and assist them to climb the ladder further.
Better information will help develop appropriate responses, and the
technology will support the creation of map products and analysis. GIS can
also help a community organization climb the participation ladder, and the
state may be willing to share more power with a credible partner . Similar
community organizations see one organization's status grow, and are
more likely to enter into collaborative efforts with them . However, even the most
requested information.

homogeneous community contains individuals whose goals differ from those of the group, and who may be
marginalized by this process.

Alt Doesnt Solve

Kitchin and Dodge 7(Rob Kitchin prof of geography at National University of
Ireland and Martin Dodge prof of geography at the University of Rochester
Rethinking maps Progress in Human Geography 31(3) (2007) Crystal
In other words, they consist of genealogies of how cartography has been naturalized and institutionalized across

A de-ontologized
cartography is on the one hand about accepting counter mappings as
having equal ontological status as scientific cartographic (that there are many valid
cartographic ontologies) and, on the other, deconstructing, reading differently, and
reconfiguring scientific cartography (to examine alternative and new forms of mapping).
While we think Cramptons and Pickles ideas are very useful, and we are
sympathetic to their projects, we are troubled by the ontological security
the map still enjoys within their analysis. Despite the call for seeing maps
as beings in the world, as non-confessional spatial representations,
postrepresentational or de-ontologized cartography, and nonprogressivist
or denaturalized histories of cartography, maps within Crampton and
Pickles view remain secure as spatial representations that say something
about spatial relations in the world (or elsewhere). The map might be seen as
diverse, rhetorical, relational, multivocal and having effects in the world,
but is nonetheless a coherent, stable product a map. While in some
respects Crampton and Pickles demonstrate that maps are not, in Latours
(1987) terms, immutable mobiles (that is, stable and transferable forms of
knowledge that allow them to be portable across space and time), they
nonetheless slip back into that positioning, albeit with maps understood
space and time as particular forms of scientific practices and knowledges.

as complex, rhetorical devices not simply representations .

Alt = Western
The k is rooted in western knowledge that assumes an equal
access to map making knowledge
Pickles 95 (John Pickles prof of international studies at north Carolina at chapel
hill 1995. Representations in an Electronic Age: Geography, GIS, and Democracy
Ground Truth: The Social Implications of Geographic Information Systems) Crystal
In writings concerned with the spatial and economic applications of GIS
the absences and silences are particularly instructive. Whole domains of praxis within
which GIS might make some contribution are elided, and Martin (and much GIS) remains silent about them. Instead ,
the gaze of the strategic planner, the commercial manager, or the military
strategist is presented as an appropriate application this is the kind of technocratic
myopia that led Gunnar Olsson from 1972 on to charge that spatial analysis was an inherently conservative form of

In this myopic vision, there is rarely room for

insurgent GIS, or for GIS socioeconomic applications other than those that
permit us to gain greater levels of clarity and control over the social and
economic domain. Moreover, Martin (as do many others writing about GIS) fails to ask questions about
current trajectory of GIS research and practice. No attention is given to the question of the
scale and cost of technology and its relation to the specific types of
socioeconomic application. No reference is made to the growing amount of
Third World literature on pc-based GIS for local action groups, or the use
of computerized databases to monitor and control polluting state
enterprises in centrally planned economics, or to the ourishing of
disparate efforts by progressive GIS users to develop networks of local,
small-scale systems to provide information that challenges corporate and
statist interest that Martin seems to see as major users of socioeconomic
applications. Martins book typifies a strong thread in the emergence of GIS as a disciplinary discourse and
analysis (Olsson, 1974, 1972).

social practice. The book represents only an implicit and indirect picture of the representational economy emerging
within the contemporary GIS and its relationship with an economy of control. In this economy, socioeconomic
applications are aimed at organizational efficiency and control of geographic territory (be it the jurisdiction of a
health, police, or military authority, or the market area of retailers or direct marketing agencies). Implicit is the view
that if date and technology availability permit the manipulation of spatial data for particular ends, then the ends

Missing is any analysis of the

ethical and political questions that emerge as GIS institutions and
practices are extended into socioeconomic domains. That Martins book is intended
themselves are justified (or of no concern to the geographer).

to be a text on the socioeconomic applications of GIS for students and GIS users (like the bulk of texts dealing with

lacks any treatment of ethical, economic, and political issues, raises

serious questions about the possibility for the emergence of critically and
socially responsible behavior within the particular episteme and its
associated practices. Like Martin, GIS authors more generally have grounded
their analyses in terms of value-neutral observation, science as the mirror
of reality, and theory and the product of data collection and testing, and
have not chosen to engage in disciplinary and social theoretic debates of
the past two decades that address the intellectual, social, political, and
technological impacts of this form of instrumental action. In speaking about
GIS), but

planning and applied geography, Robert Lake (1993) explicitly ties the development of GIS to this resurrection of
a rational model of planning and a positivist epistemology:

Impact Turns

!/T Maps Good generic

Maps are necessary to society, laundry list.
CCA (Canadian Cartographic Association The Canadian Cartographic Association
was founded in 1975 with the aims of: Promoting interest in maps and related
cartographic materials Furthering the understanding and knowledge of maps by
encouraging research in the field of cartography, both historical and current
Providing for the exchange of ideas and information and for the discussion of mutual
concerns, through meetings and by publications Advancing education in
cartography and in the use of maps. Three decades later, the aims remain the
same, though the CCA now considers its constituency to extend beyond
Cartography to embrace closely related fields such as GI Science. Membership is
open to anyone with an interest in any aspect of mapping and members are drawn
from the ranks of government, industry, and education, and from the general public.
Accessed 7/30/2015) No Date
Cartography is a complex, an ever-changing field, but at the center of it is
the map-making process. Viewed in the broadest sense, this process includes everything from the
gathering, evaluation and processing of source data, through the intellectual and graphical design of the map, to
the drawing and reproduction of the final document. As such ,

it is a unique mixture of science,

art and technology and calls for a variety of in-depth knowledge and skills
on the part of the cartographer. Sometimes one person directs this entire sequence of
cartographic activities, but this occurs only in relatively simple cases. In the creation of a map, it is much more

Cartography is
much more than just map-making, however. It is also an academic
discipline in its own right. It has its own professional associations (regional, national and
common for the various tasks to be split up and accomplished by several individuals.

international), journals, conferences, educational programs and its own identity. As a discipline, it embraces not only
cartographers who make maps, but also cartographers who teach about maps and cartographers who do research

Once seen as the products of a relatively straightforward practical

exercise, maps are now viewed as complex intellectual images offering a
rich potential for scientific investigation. Whether the thrust of the research is cognitive,
on maps.

mathematical, historical, perceptual or technological, cartographers are exploiting this potential to the fullest.

Cartography today has two essential characteristics. First of all, it is

important. Maps perform a fundamental and indispensable role as one of
the underpinnings of civilization. Few activities relating to the earths
surface, whether land use planning, property ownership, weather
forecasting, road construction, locational analysis, emergency response,
forest management, mineral prospecting, navigationthe list is endless
would be practicable without maps. And never has this role been more
vital than it is today. Humanity faces severe problems, many of them
environmental in nature, and effective mapping is crucial if solutions are
to be found. In conjunction with the great data gathering capabilities and analytical power of remote sensing
and geographic information systems (GIS), cartography, in many instances, provides the key to finding solutions.

Positivism is essential to an understanding of cartography

everything is objective and can be verified by science thats
the most effective approach and anything else is useless
Harley, American Geographical Society, Office of Map History,
Director 2002 (JB, 2002, The New Nature Of Maps: Essays In The History Of
Cartography, p 5-6, accessed 7/1/14)
Before examining Harley's own ideas, we should identify the attitude, described by
him as "positivism," that he claims to be bringing under critical scrutiny. His
opponents are said to maintain that cartography can be, an usually is,
objective, detached, neutral (in all disputes except that between truth and
falsehood), and transparent - four terms which in this context probably mean much
the same. Also, cartography is or can be exact and accurate. It can
progress, and often has progressed, towards greater accuracy. The
accuracy of maps consists of mirroring their subject matter. Harley's word,
mirror, presents a difficulty, because it is hard to imagine any so-called
positivist using it in this sense: what might be said is that accuracy
depends on the degree of resemblance between two sets of space
relations, one within the map itself and the other on the surface being
mapped. Whether the foregoing characteristics are sufficient to make cartography
a "science" is an issue that (despite Harley's interest in it) may be left to civil
servants and educational administrators. Nor will detailed consideration be given to
Harleys judgments on the moral integrity of the map-making profession. The
standpoint adopted here is that of a map historian interested in philosophical
questions, not that of a present-day cartographer or patron of cartographers.
According to Harley, most practicing map makers are positivists. Some readers may
want proof of this. Before about 1930, cartographers made few general
pronouncements of any kind about their subject, and even after that time it is hard
to discover the stridency, hysteria, ideological fervor, and vigilantism that Harley
claims to find (though, unusually for him, without quoting examples) in cartographic
discourse. However, positivism in some sense does seem an appropriate
doctrine for practicing cartographers, whatever its limitations on a purely
philosophical plane. Harley does not reject cartographic positivism in its
entirety. At one point he denies that maps themselves can be true or false
but immediately adds the proviso "except in the narrowest Euclidean
sense." He expands this phrase by admitting that an accurate road map
will help a traveler reach his destination. This is surely a major concession.
Harley does not disagree with what cartographers say about the part of cartography
that interests them. His point is that there are other aspects of the subject to which
these opinions are irrelevant. Cartographers, he seems to think, are less tolerant in
this respect than he is. They not only ignore the nonpositivistic element in their
subject but also refuse to accept its existence. His own belief, in its stronger form, is
that "an alternative epistemology, rooted in social theory rather than in scientific
positivism, is more [not equally] appropriate to the history of cartography is seldom
[not not always] what cartographers say it is."

Objective science is the valid epistemologyrefusing to reject

any other truth results in extinction
Coyne, University of Chicago, Ecology and Evolution, Professor,
PhD, 06 [Jerry A. Sep 6 2006, The Times [UK] Literary Supplement: A plea for
empiricism,
https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/intelligently_sequenced/conversations/topics/
757, PAC]
But after demolishing creationists, Crews gives peacemaking scientists their own
hiding, reproving them for trying to show that there is no contradiction between
science and theology. Regardless of what they say to placate the faithful, most
scientists probably know in their hearts that science and religion are
incompatible ways of viewing the world. Supernatural forces and events,
essential aspects of most religions, play no role in science, not because we
exclude them deliberately, but because they have never been a useful way
to understand nature. Scientific truths are empirically supported
observations agreed on by different observers. Religious truths, on the other
hand, are personal, unverifiable and contested by those of different faiths. Science
is nonsectarian: those who disagree on scientific issues do not blow each
other up. Science encourages doubt; most religions quash it. But religion is not
completely separable from science. Virtually all religions make improbable claims
that are in principle empirically testable, and thus within the domain of science:
Mary, in Catholic teaching, was bodily taken to heaven, while Muhammad rode up
on a white horse; and Jesus (born of a virgin) came back from the dead. None of
these claims has been corroborated, and while science would never accept them as
true without evidence, religion does. A mind that accepts both science and religion
is thus a mind in conflict.Yet scientists, especially beleaguered American
evolutionists, need the support of the many faithful who respect science. It is not
politically or tactically useful to point out the fundamental and unbreachable gaps
between science and theology. Indeed, scientists and philosophers have written
many books (equivalents of Leibnizian theodicy) desperately trying to show how
these areas can happily cohabit. In his essay, Darwin goes to Sunday School,
Crews reviews several of these works, pointing out with brio the intellectual
contortions and dishonesties involved in harmonizing religion and science.
Assessing work by the evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould, the philosopher Michael
Ruse, the theologian John Haught and others, Crews concludes, When coldly
examined . . . these productions invariably prove to have adulterated scientific
doctrine or to have emptied religious dogma of its commonly accepted meaning.
Rather than suggesting any solution (indeed, there is none save adopting a form of
religion that makes no untenable empirical claims), Crews points out the
dangers to the survival of our planet arising from a rejection of Darwinism.
Such rejection promotes apathy towards overpopulation, pollution,
deforestation and other environmental crimes: So long as we regard
ourselves as creatures apart who need only repent of our personal sins to retain
heavens blessing, we wont take the full measure of our species-wise responsibility
for these calamities. Crews includes three final essays on deconstruction and other

misguided movements in literary theory. These also show follies of the wise in that
they involve interpretations of texts that are unanchored by evidence. Fortunately,
the harm inflicted by Lacan and his epigones is limited to the good judgement of
professors of literature. Follies of the Wise is one of the most refreshing and edifying
collections of essays in recent years. Much like Christopher Hitchens in the UK,
Crews serves a vital function as National Sceptic. He ends on a ringing note: The
human race has produced only one successfully validated epistemology,
characterizing all scrupulous inquiry into the real world, from quarks to poems. It is,
simply, empiricism, or the submitting of propositions to the arbitration of
evidence that is acknowledged to be such by all of the contending parties.
Ideas that claim immunity from such review, whether because of mystical faith
or privileged clinical insight or the say-so of eminent authorities, are not to be
countenanced until they can pass the same skeptical ordeal to which all
other contenders are subjected.

Claims of social construction ignore the specific validation

processes that tie theories to objective realitythe only
alternative is unverifiable and equally constructed.
Dr. Sowell, Stanford Hoover Institution Senior Fellow, 10
(Thomas, Ph.D., Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, graduated from
Harvard and received doctorate at UChicago in economics, Intellectuals and
Society, loc 2732-56, kindle, AA)
The seeming sophistication of the notion that all reality is socially
constructed has a superficial plausibility but it ignores the various validation
processes which test those constructions. Much of what is said to be
socially constructed has been in fact socially evolved over the
generations and socially validated by experience. Much of what many
among the intelligentsia propose to replace it with is in fact constructed
that is, created deliberately at a given time and placeand with no
validation beyond the consensus of like-minded peers. If facts, logic, and
scientific procedures are all just arbitrary socially constructed notions,
then all that is left is consensusmore specifically peer consensus, the kind of
consensus that matters to adolescents or to many among the intelligentsia. In a
very limited sense, reality is indeed constructed by human beings. Even the world
that we see around us is ultimately constructed inside our brains from two very
small patches of light falling on our retinas. Like images seen in the back of a view
camera, the image of the world in the back of our eyes is upside down. Our brain
turns it right side up and reconciles the differences between the image in one eye
with the image in the other eye by perceiving the world as three-dimensional. Bats
do not perceive the world in the same way humans do because they rely on signals
sent out like sonar and bounced back. Some creatures in the sea perceive through
electrical fields that their bodies generate and receive. While the worlds
perceived by different creatures through different mechanisms obviously
differ from one another, these perceptions are not just free-oating
notions, but are subjected to validation processes on which matters as
serious as life and death depend. The specific image of a lion that you see

in a cage may be a construct inside your brain, but entering that cage will
quickly and catastrophically demonstrate that there is a reality beyond
the control of your brain. Bats do not fly into brick walls during their nocturnal
flights because the very different reality constructed within their brains is likewise
subject to validation by experience in a world that exists outside their brains.
Indeed, bats do not fly into plate glass windows, as birds sometimes do when
relying on sightindicating both differences in perception systems and the
existence of a reality independent of those perception systems. Even the
more abstract visions of the world can often be subject to empirical
validation. Einsteins vision of physics, which was quite different from that of
his predecessors, was shown at Hiroshima to be not just Einsteins vision of
physicsnot just his truth versus somebody elses truth, but an inescapable
reality for everyone present at that tragic place at that catastrophic time.
Validation processes are the crucial ignored factor which allows many
intellectuals to regard all sorts of phenomenawhether social, economic or
scientificas mere subjective notions, implicitly allowing them to
substitute their own preferred subjective notions as to what is, as well as
what ought to be.

!/T AT: Fluidity Good

The uidity of maps allows for the more insidious and invisible
ways of their function to go unnoticed
Harris and Hazen 9 (Leila Harris and Helen Hazen Rethinking maps from a
more-than-human perspective Naturesociety, mapping and conservation
territories) Crystal
Highlighting power as key to their theorization, Del Casino and Hanna reference the work of Judith Butler to detail

Reading maps and mappings as performative

draws attention to the reiterative processes through which map meanings
and effects are constantly remade. This analytic necessarily also draws
attention to the ways that relations appear as stable or natural, even as
they are constantly unfixed and remade. For instance, even if a map is
remade with each reading, use, or engagement, there are still ways in
which maps appear to cement or stabilize particular socio-spatial
relations. This is consistent with discussions of maps in terms of their
tendency to convey certainty and control, provide reassurance, or cement
particular power dynamics (e.g. Perkins 2006). Particularly through the ubiquity of
maps that allows them to appear so commonplace, everyday, and
apolitical, there are key ways in which sociospatial relations may appear
as natural and stable, as effects of reiterative citation, even as the maps
themselves, or their power effects, are not precertain, given, or fixed.
Taken together, we read recent contributions in critical cartography as
refocusing and extending an interest in power dimensions of mapping.
How might maps serve to naturalize certain relationsrelations of power,
particular political economic relations, or territorial partitioning
particularly given that maps are so authoritative, so everyday, and
seemingly apolitical? Given that maps are reproduced in diverse spaces
and times, how does attention to the spatiality and temporality of map
production, uses, and engagements affect the condition and effects of
particular maps and mapping practices? Further, how are maps central to
understanding uses and experiences of space (again, particularly given their ubiquity,
the performative effects of maps.

everydayness, and seemingly apolitical character)?

!/T Redefining = Imperialist

Current efforts to redefine mapping practices and subsequent
epistemology reifies the white imperialism that perverted it in
the first place. A new methodology from the subject position of
the oppressed is the only way to solve
Dogde, Perkins, Kitchins 2009 [Dodge, Perkins, Kitchin; Rethinking Map;
2009; Martin Dodge - School of Environment and Development, University of
Manchester, UK; Chris Perkins - School of Environment and Development, University of
Manchester, UK; Rob Kitchin - National Institute for Regional and Spatial Analysis and
Department of Geography, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Ireland ; BM]
A major methodological element of map studies should be to explore the political economy of contemporary

In the late 1980s social constructivist research began to interrogate

the power of mapping and its historical implication in capitalist modes of
production (see for example, the classic studies by Harley 1989; Harvey 1989; St Martin 1995). Similarly,
there were a number of studies on the use of cartography in the
propaganda of nation states and others (e.g. Monmonier 1996a). However, a politicaleconomic approach is very rarely taken in studies of contemporary
mapping, despite the fact that the vast bulk of mapping, measured in terms of
volume, scale and spatial coverage, is still produced and owned by
government institutions and large corporations. This concentration of
spatial power is likely to remain the case into the future as well,
notwithstanding the current fashion and fascination with open maps
made with volunteer effort. So tracing the monetary and political structures
underlying the production of maps used in everyday practice is
worthwhile. The fact that we seem to have more free access (i.e. underpinned by
advertising revenue) to detailed mapping than ever before, via Internet portals masks continuing
limits to availability of large-scale data that stem from official and corporate
secrecy (cf. Lee and Shumakov 2003). Decisions on where capital is being invested
to produce updated and new maps, data and delivery systems affects, in practical and political
terms, how the world is going to be envisioned cartographically in the
future, but is opaque to scrutiny. Who controls what gets mapped when you enter a mundane geographical
mapping.

search query on the Web, or type a postcode destination into the find menu on your satnav, or text locate on your

Tracing out patterns of capital investment, government subsidies,

licencing fees and profits that circulate continuously, but unseen, through
maps can reveal the wider power structures in which everyday mapping
practice is situated, many of which are several steps removed from moments of use.
phone?

A/T

AT: Foucult
Foucaults analysis perpetuates racism
James, 1996 Joy, Erasing the Spectacle of Racialized State Violence, in Resisting
State Violence, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1996, p. 26-28
Foucault weaves a historical perspective that eventually presents the
contemporary ("Western") state as a nonpractitioner of torture . l His text illustrates
how easy it is to erase the specificity of the body and violence while centering discourse on them. Losing sight of the violence

Foucault
Punish depicts the body with
no specificity tied to racialized or sexualized punishment. The resulting
veneer of bourgeois respectability painted over state repression elides
racist violence against black and brown and red bodies. Foucault states
that the "historical moment of the disciplines was the moment when an art
of the human body was born" (137). Failing to concretize this "art of the human body," he leaves unaddressed
these questions: which body serves as prototype? who bore this representative
model or type? Ostensibly talking about the body while ignoring its
uniqueness, Foucault explores issues of policing that are restricted to
behavior . If one asserts that the "introduction of the 'biographical' is important in the history of penalty .... Because it
establishes the 'criminal' as existing before the crime and even outside it" (252), one might also note that the
biographical is intricately tied to the biological-that is, the "criminal" is
identified not only by his or her act but also by his or her appearance .2
Consider how Foucault's discussion of nonconformity as offense masks the body: What is
practiced by and in the name of the sovereign, who at times was manifested as part of a dominant race,
universalizes the body of the white, propertied male. Much of Discipline and

specific to the disciplinary penalty is non-observance, that which does not measure up to the rule, that departs from it. The whole
indefinite domain of the non-conforming is punishable :

the soldier commits an "offence" whenever

he does not reach the level required; a pupil's "offence" is not only a minor infraction, but also an
inability to carry out his tasks. (178-79) Nonobservance and nonconformity are often
understood as biologically determined, given that the departure from the
norm shows up not only in behavior but visually in terms of physical
characteristics that are racialized. Foucault's exclusive focus on actions
suggests undifferentiated bodies. Physical appearance, however, can be
considered an expression of either conformity or rebellion . Because some bodies fail to
conform physiologically, different bodies are expected and are therefore required to behave differently under state or police gaze.

Greater obedience is demanded from those whose physical difference

marks them as aberrational, offensive, or threatening. Conversely, some bodies appear
more docile than others because of their conformity in appearance to idealized models of class, color, and sex; their bodies are

To illustrate: a white male

executive in an Armani suit is considered more docile, civilized, and in
need of less invasive, coercive policing than a black male youth in a
hooded sweatshirt and off the- hip baggy jeans. (In contrast, white youths who racially crossallowed greater leeway to be self-policed or policed without physical force.

dresswith baseball caps turned backwards, "X" t-shirts, low-riding pants-are generally not aggressively targeted by police who
distinguish between fashion consumerism and racial membership.) Noting how physique is constructed as a marker for deviancy
and criminality, Frantz Fanon writes in ''The Negro and Psychopathology" that the "Negro symbolizes the biological danger .... To
suffer from a phobia of Negroes is to be afraid of the biogical." To fear the black is to fear the body; conversely, to revere the black is
to idealize the body. Foucault writes of social fear and policing that are reflected in "binary division and branding," which produces
the polarized social entities of the "mad/sane; dangerous/harmless; normal/abnormal"; this "coercive assignment" of labeling,
categorizing, and identifYing places the individual under "constant surveillance" (I99). Foucault, however, makes no mention of
sexual and racial binary oppositions to designate social inferiority and deviancy as biologically inscribed on the bodies of nonmales
or nonwhites. Therefore, when he reports in Discipline and Punish that "the mechanisms of power" are organized "around the
abnormal individual, to brand him and to alter him," racial and sexual issues are evaded (199-200).

To write that

these mechanisms of dominance rely on the panopticism produced by the

disciplinary and exclusionary practices for the "arrest of the plague" and
the "exile of the leper" (which for Foucault respectively represent the dreams of a "disciplined society" and a "pure
community") without considering the role of race in the formation of that
disciplined society and pure community is to see the United States
through blinders (198). In racialized societies such as the United States, the
plague of criminality, deviancy, immorality, and corruption is embodied in
the black because both sexual and social pathology are branded by skin
color (as well as by gender and sexual orientation). Where the plague and the leper are codified in the black, for instance, the
body, the communist or socialist body, and the black body-were to be sterilized, euthanized,
or eradicated; considered defective or a subspecies of humans, they could
not be normalized under state ideology . The political function of the term normal structures hierarchy
while masking exclusion through the projection of illusory objective norms. For Foucault, "it was no longer the ... attack on the
common interest, it was the departure from the norm" that constituted threat; the "social enemy was transformed into a deviant,

The normalization
process is itself constricted and disciplined by the imaginary of the normthe white, male, propertied heterosexual. Where the criminal or the insane
is constructed as belonging to another race, the black criminal or
madwoman is doubly offensive, marked by behavior and biology that
diverge from the norm. (Although Foucault critiques Cesare Manuel de Lombroso's racist criminology, he does not
utilize antiracist or critical race theory.) In this construction of the unspecified body,
Foucault is able to sanitize state repression as he argues that
manifestations of power or spectacles of violence have been extinguished .
who brought with him the multiple danger of disorder, crime and madness" (299-300).

In the United States, however, they are held on reserve where the threat and promise of state violence makes surveillance effective.
The complexities of the criminalization of dark-skinned people; the destructiveness of gang members who neither perceive
themselves nor are portrayed as members of society; the defunding of youth centers (Foucault's "carcerals") for prison construction;
and the ethnically and sexually marked bodies for state violence in domestic and foreign policy- none is analyzed by Foucault. One
might find rhat some of us are further from the "perfect camp" in which "all power would be exercised solely through exact
observation" and where "each gaze would form a part of the overall functioning of power" than Foucault intimates (qr). Tbis "exact
observation" is enforced by the threat of violence administered by the state, with poor people and people of color as the mosr

The violent state punishments that Foucault generalizes as

past phenomena resurface in our postmodern-era policies.
vulnerable targets.

AT: Crampton/Pickles
Kitchin and Dodge 7(Rob Kitchin prof of geography at National University of
Ireland and Martin Dodge prof of geography at the University of Rochester
Rethinking maps Progress in Human Geography 31(3) (2007) Crystal
In other words, they consist of genealogies of how cartography has been naturalized and institutionalized across

A de-ontologized
cartography is on the one hand about accepting counter mappings as
having equal ontological status as scientific cartographic (that there are many valid
cartographic ontologies) and, on the other, deconstructing, reading differently, and
reconfiguring scientific cartography (to examine alternative and new forms of mapping).
While we think Cramptons and Pickles ideas are very useful, and we are
sympathetic to their projects, we are troubled by the ontological security
the map still enjoys within their analysis. Despite the call for seeing maps
as beings in the world, as non-confessional spatial representations,
postrepresentational or de-ontologized cartography, and nonprogressivist
or denaturalized histories of cartography, maps within Crampton and
Pickles view remain secure as spatial representations that say something
about spatial relations in the world (or elsewhere). The map might be seen as
diverse, rhetorical, relational, multivocal and having effects in the world,
but is nonetheless a coherent, stable product a map. While in some
respects Crampton and Pickles demonstrate that maps are not, in Latours
(1987) terms, immutable mobiles (that is, stable and transferable forms of
knowledge that allow them to be portable across space and time), they
nonetheless slip back into that positioning, albeit with maps understood
space and time as particular forms of scientific practices and knowledges.

as complex, rhetorical devices not simply representations .

AT: Harley
Harleys method ignores the relationship people have with
mapsits not about the maps but rather the bad things
people do with maps
Kitchen, Geography Professor at National University of Ireland,
Maynooth, Perkins Senior Lecturer of Geography at University
of Manchester and Dodge Senior Lecturer of Human Geography
at University of Manchester, 11 (Rob, Chris and Martin, June 2nd 2001,
Rethinking Maps: New Frontiers in Cartographic Theory, p. 10,11, Accessed 6/30/14,
ESB)
Despite the obvious advances of the various social constructivist approaches in
rethinking maps, more recent work has sought to further refine cartographic thought
and to construct post-representational theories of mapping. Here, scholars are
concerned that the critique developed by Harley and others did not go far enough in
rethinking the ontological bases for cartography, which for them has too long been
straitjacketed by representational thinking. As Denis Wood (1993) and Jeremy
Crampton (2003) outline, Harleys application of Foucault to cartography is limited.
Harleys observations, although opening a new view onto cartography, stopped
short of following Foucaults line of inquiry to its logical conclusion. Instead,
Crampton (2003: 7) argues that Harleys writings remained mired in the modernist
conception of maps as documents charged with confessing the truth of the
landscape. In other words, Harley believed that the truth of the landscape could still
be revealed if one took account of the ideology inherent in the representation. The
problem was not the map per se, but the bad things people did with maps
(Wood 1993: 50, original emphasis); the map conveys an inherent truth as the
map remains ideologically neutral, with ideology bound to the subject of the
map and not the map itself. Harleys strategy was then to identify the politics
of representation in order to circumnavigate them (to reveal the truth
lurking underneath), not fully appreciating, as with Foucaults observations, that
there is no escaping the entangling of power/knowledge. Cramptons solution to the
limitations of Harleys social constructivist thinking is to extend the use of Foucault
and to draw on the ideas of Heidegger and other critical cartographers such as
Edney (1993). In short, Crampton (2003: 7) outlines a non-confessional
understanding of spatial representation wherein maps instead of being interpreted
as objects at a distance from the world, regarding that world from nowhere, that
they be understood as being in the world, as open to the disclosure of things. Such
a shift, Crampton argues, necessitates a move from understanding cartography as a
set of ontic knowledges to examining its ontological terms. Ontic knowledge
consists of the examination of how a topic should proceed from within its own
framework where the ontological assumptions about how the world can be known
and measured are implicitly secure and beyond doubt (Crampton 2003). In
other words, there is a core foundational knowledge a taken for granted ontology
that unquestioningly underpins ontic knowledge.

Kitchen, Geography Professor at National University of Ireland,

Maynooth, Perkins Senior Lecturer of Geography at University
of Manchester and Dodge Senior Lecturer of Human Geography
at University of Manchester, 11 (Rob, Chris and Martin, June 2nd 2001,
Rethinking Maps: New Frontiers in Cartographic Theory, p. 10,11, Accessed 6/30/14,
ESB)
Despite the obvious advances of the various social constructivist approaches in
rethinking maps, more recent work has sought to further refine cartographic thought
and to construct post-representational theories of mapping. Here, scholars are
concerned that the critique developed by Harley and others did not go far enough in
rethinking the ontological bases for cartography, which for them has too long been
straitjacketed by representational thinking. As Denis Wood (1993) and Jeremy
Crampton (2003) outline, Harleys application of Foucault to cartography is
limited. Harleys observations, although opening a new view onto
cartography, stopped short of following Foucaults line of inquiry to its
logical conclusion. Instead, Crampton (2003: 7) argues that Harleys writings
remained mired in the modernist conception of maps as documents
charged with confessing the truth of the landscape. In other words,
Harley believed that the truth of the landscape could still be revealed if
one took account of the ideology inherent in the representation. The
problem was not the map per se, but the bad things people did with maps
(Wood 1993: 50, original emphasis); the map conveys an inherent truth as the
map remains ideologically neutral, with ideology bound to the subject of
the map and not the map itself. Harleys strategy was then to identify the
politics of representation in order to circumnavigate them (to reveal the
truth lurking underneath), not fully appreciating, as with Foucaults observations,
that there is no escaping the entangling of power/knowledge. Cramptons
solution to the limitations of Harleys social constructivist thinking is to extend the
use of Foucault and to draw on the ideas of Heidegger and other critical
cartographers such as Edney (1993). In short, Crampton (2003: 7) outlines a nonconfessional understanding of spatial representation wherein maps instead of
being interpreted as objects at a distance from the world, regarding that
world from nowhere, that they be understood as being in the world, as
open to the disclosure of things. Such a shift, Crampton argues,
necessitates a move from understanding cartography as a set of
ontic knowledges to examining its ontological terms. Ontic knowledge
consists of the examination of how a topic should proceed from within its
own framework where the ontological assumptions about how the world
can be known and measured are implicitly secure and beyond doubt
(Crampton 2003). In other words, there is a core foundational knowledge a
taken for granted ontology that unquestioningly underpins ontic
knowledge.

AT: Africa Link

The Horn of Africa is not a geographical term but a political
one
Schlee 3 (Gunther Schlee Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, Vol.
73, No. 3 (2003) REDRAWING THE MAP OF THE HORN: THE POLITICS OF
DIFFERENCE) Crystal
The first such paradox is that the term 'Horn of Africa' sounds like a
geographical term because it alludes to the shape of a north-eastern
protrusion of that one-homed continent. But in fact it is not a geographical
term; it is a political term. An example of a proper geographical term would be
'Sahel'. The Sahel comprises parts of many different countries, which fit a
geographical description. The 'Horn of Africa' only comprises entire countries . The
north-east of Kenya forms a wedge between Ethiopia and southern
Somalia and is inhabited by people who speak Somali or Oromo, the
largest language of Ethiopia. But in none of the rival definitions of the
Horn of Africa have I found the north of Kenya or any part of any other
country included. The Horn of Africa is always defined by an enumeration
of entire states, it is a supra-state region composed of states. That is why
it is a political concept and not a geographical one. There is a narrower
such definition which comprises Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia and the various
fragments of Somalia, and a wider one, much less accepted, which also
includes the Sudan-again, the whole of Sudan, all the way to Darfur . Let me
discuss briefly the Sudan in this context, before I turn to the Horn in the narrower sense.

AT: African Conict

There is no explicit correlation between African borders and
conict
Sparke 7 (Matthew Sparke prof of geography and international studies at
Washington University Everywhere but Always Somewhere: Critical Geographies of
the Global South The Global South, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Winter, 2007) Crystal
In contrast, several authors contend that boundary arbitrariness does not
necessarily lead to litigious or belligerent outcomes (Boyd, 1979). They argue that
only those groups with strong political identities or nomadic lifestyles are
likely to resist partition and that irredentism is usually no more than a
diversion from political and economic problems (Kum, 1993; Nugent, 1996; Touval, 1969).
Southall (1985) points, for example, to the peaceful partition of the politically
decentralized Alur between Zaire and Uganda. Even the demands of
unified groups, such as the Masai astride Kenya and Tanzania whose chiefs
petitioned the British Colonial Office for reunification before
independence, have been tamed by the process of nation-building (Brownlie,
979; Prescott, 1966). The relationship of split groups to structures of power in
each country also matters. The political marginalization of the Bakongo in
Zaire, Congo, and Angola probably contributed to subduing their original
irredentist claims.7 More important, there is a consensus that weak
African governments are unlikely to challenge each other on irredentist
issues for fear of triggering a chain reaction of territorial realignments
from which none of them can expect to escape unscathed (Clapham, 1996a; Herbst,
1989; Jackson & Rosberg, 1982; Touval, 1969, 1985). Given the large numbers of partitioned
African groups, the rarity of actual occurrences of reunification attempts
is seen as evidence for this view (Boyd, 1979; Touval, 1985). For similar reasons, the
lack of demarcation or delimitation does not have to be a cause for
conict. In fact, the permeability of many of Africas weakest
statesborders may render their arbitrariness largely irrelevant in practice
(Asiwaju, 1985; Griffiths, 1996). From this point of view, the absence of empirical effectiveness
of the African state (Jackson & Rosberg, 1982) somehow guarantees that its
territorial arbitrariness does not result in conict. There should therefore
be little relationship between poor demarcation or delimitation and
conict.

AT: K Solves Relations/Constructs

Maps are power laden but hold no singular truths about the areas they
represent
Harris and Hazen 9 (Leila Harris and Helen Hazen Rethinking maps from a
more-than-human perspective Naturesociety, mapping and conservation
territories) Crystal
Kitchin and Dodge (2007) and Del Casino and Hanna (2005) are authors whose contributions are central to
understanding what we refer to here as the processual turn in critical cartography. Among other points, these

authors argue that we should not think of maps as things with

ontological certainty. Rather, it is more useful to think of the relationships
that unfold as maps are created, the meanings that are cited in selection
of particular technologies or representational techniques by mapmakers,
or as maps are engaged by users. Such an approach refuses to think of
maps as static, or fixed, in terms of their meanings. Along these lines, Kitchin and
Dodge (2007: 331) ask what are the citational practices that are invoked by
cartographers to produce something we recognize as a map? Attention to
this type of question, they argue, forces us to interrogate fundamental
issues: What is a map? How do we recognize a map when we see it? What
are the citational cues a mapmaker might invoke to sediment a particular
notion of a map (drawing on a particular technological and aesthetic
repertoire to produce something recognizable as such)? Not only are there
key relationships that are engaged in the process of map production, but
even once produced the map still does not exist in a stable, or
ontologically-given, sense. The approach these authors offer builds on
earlier work that understands mapping as power-laden (per the work of Harley 1997;
see also Crampton2001; Pickles 1995). Elsewhere, we have applied insights from these
discussions of the power of maps to evaluate conservation
cartographies: What are the relevant power dynamics and asymmetries
with respect to how conservation maps are drawn, by whom, and for what
ends? (cf. Harris and Hazen 2006). Although this remains a solid foundation for our avenues of enquiry here, we
consider that recent discussions related to critical cartographies force us to extend this type of analysis to
acknowledge that maps are never stable, never fixed, and are constantly open to reinterpretation, and assignment

Furthermore, if we break down clear separations between

mapmakers and map users, we also need to be attentive to what this
implies in terms of understanding power dimensions and effects of maps . In
brief, we read these recent interventions as consistent with an interest in
the power effects of mappings, but requiring that we deect analytical
attention away from the intent of the mapmaker ( la Harley) to instead
consider the multiple, diffuse, and unpredictable ways that mapping
practices and products are engaged and remade. Among other elements
of the ways that these contributions revise our interest in power of maps
is attention to the ways that maps are read and invested with meaning in
particular times and spaces. What is the power of the conservation map in
terms of its representational and effective power, and how do diverse
interpretations and power effects shift over time and across space ? For
of shifting meanings.

example, how might conservation mappings and spaces in the global South be invested with different meanings
from those in Northern contexts? Or how might conservation spaces and mappings hold particular meaning in

This reorientation builds on Pickles

interest in maps as multivocal and contested, rejecting a singular notion
of truth that can be uncovered by exposing ideological intent of the
maps production (Kitchin and Dodge 2007: 333).
relation to changing political and economic contexts?