Sample Response:
Maps, Knowledge and Power
My response to activity 8 falls into four sections. The first three provide you with a brief
account of geographers’ interest in the relationship between maps, knowledge and
power, whilst section four highlights some of the issues that you might have flagged up
as a result of exploring the websites which were the focus of this activity.
An explanation of
1. The role played by maps and mapping in geography
2. Understanding maps as social constructions
3. The emergence of ‘critical cartography’
4. Analysing the relationship between maps, knowledge and power
1. The role played by maps and mapping in geography
Maps and mapping are central to the discourse of geography. The question ‘what is a
map?’ inevitably arises within discussions of mapping. Maps have existed as long as
language (perhaps longer). They have existed in various forms throughout every group
of people and are intelligible to nearly all participants in those groups. Recent academic
consensus poses a broad definition of maps as authored, graphic representations of
geographical features, concepts, conditions, processes and events. Map interpretation
was long understood to be a search for geographic features without considering maps
as a manipulated form of knowledge which might contribute to the formation of those
features.
Famed cartographer Author Robinson at the University of Wisconsin-Madison was a
principal figure in strengthening the practice of mapmaking as a science adhering to the
goals of value-neutrality and an ever-increasing precision of representation. This view
of mapping shared with positivism the presumption that science is always progressing.
Maps were therefore evaluated in terms of how accurately they depicted the world, and
cartography eschewed theorization in favour of improving techniques for more effective
communication.
The implication of this communication model is worth mentioning here. It is a clear
separation between cartographer and user, whereby the map was seen simply as an
“intermediary between the cartographer and the user” (Crampton 2001, 237). But maps
are not simply artefacts that carry meaning with them. They are technologies and
assemblages of creating spatialized meaning and filtering that meaning. Mapping is a
practice that begins with and continues through the design, implementation,
dissemination, interpretation, and re-imagination of maps by the user. They are texts
that re-present spatial complexity and help construct geographic imagination.
2. Understanding Maps as Social Constructions
The emergence of ‘critical cartography’ marked an epistemic break with the assumption
that maps are unproblematic communication devices.
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Critical cartography involved 1) critical investigations of maps as practices of powerknowledge; and 2) ‘geographic visualization’ (GVIs) which uses the map's power to
critique explore, analyze and visualize spatial datasets to understand patterns better.
These developments are key components of a ‘maps as social constructions’ approach,
emphasizing the need for us to trace the role played by power in mapping practices.
The activities that you carried out as part of this exercise required you to both critically
investigate maps as practices of power-knowledge and also examine the power of
geographic visualization. In research of this nature, particular attention is paid to how
power operates to employ maps to do work within given contexts.
3. Critical cartography and the relationship between maps, knowledge and power
But, in this context, what does 'critical cartography' mean? Early in the 20th century, the
Institute for Social Research (widely known as the Frankfurt School) investigated the
technological and ideological constraints upon people’s creativity and freedom. They
developed a critical theory that sought to expose such ideologies and challenge existing
power structures. Crampton and Kreiger (2006) describe critique as a “politics of
knowledge” that examines the assumptions that shape and enable our knowledge, as
well as how these assumptions relate to power and the production of truth.
To Michel Foucault, an eminent French philosopher, the role of critique is one of
exploring how knowledge is established and enabled through historically specific power
relations, not revealing the true nature of reality from beneath ideology. To do a critical
cartography, then, is not to find fault with a map but to consider what knowledge is
presupposed by the map, how it comes to represent that knowledge as truth, and how
the map could go beyond those limits and be otherwise.
In the 1980s the scholarship of Brian Harley (1932-1991) posed a fundamental
challenge to the discipline of cartography. Drawing from the work of social theorists
such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, Harley shifted an understanding of maps
as scientific, empirical documents to maps as situated within discourses of powerknowledge. “Our task,” Harley wrote, “is to search for the social forces that have
structured cartography and to locate the presence of power—and its effects—in all map
knowledge” (Harley 1989, 152). The attention to these social forces stood in marked
opposition to a more scientifically-influenced view that maps are interpreted in terms of
how well they communicate or represent a world detached and external to the mapmaker, the map, and its readers. Harley had become sceptical of the accepted valueneutrality of maps and called for an approach that would peal back the layers of ideology
encoded into them: 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 (Harley 1989, 153).
Brian Harley endorsed an “epistemic break” that shifted our understandings of maps as
communication systems to investigating them in terms of fields of power relations and
exploring the “mapping environments in which knowledge is constructed” (Crampton
2001, 236). This involved examining the social contexts in which maps were both
produced and used, a departure from simply seeing maps as artefacts to be understood
apart from this context. The second implication is the presumption inherited from
positivism that it is possible to separate facts from values. As Harley stated: Maps are
never value-free images; except in the narrowest Euclidean sense they are not in
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themselves either true or false. Both in the selectivity of their content and in their signs
and styles of representation maps are a way of conceiving, articulating, and structuring
the human world which is biased towards, promoted by, and exerts influence upon
particular sets of social relations. By accepting such premises it becomes easier to see
how appropriate they are to manipulation by the powerful in society (Harley 2001, 53).
Harley was especially sensitive to the use of maps for political propaganda and cultural
dominance. Mapping is not just the business of disclosing value-free knowledge about
the world, but producing a value-laden knowledge. Harley challenged dominant binary
oppositions such as art/science, objective/subjective, and scientific/ideological to “situate
maps as social documents that need to be understood in their historical contexts”
(Crampton and Krygier 2006, 16).
These critiques have undermined the idea that maps can achieve an unmediated
correspondence with the territory they represent, but instead must employ discourse and
rhetoric to work as they do. Monmonier begins his famous book How to Lie with Maps
with the declaration that, “Not only is it easy to lie with maps, it’s essential.” (Monmonier
1991, 1). Denis Wood was a leading figure in picking up where Harley had left off.
Wood writes that, “It is precisely to the extent that the map culturalizes the natural that
the cultural production the map is must be naturalized in turn, this to make it easier to
accept—as natural—the historically contingent landscape the society that wields the
map as brought into being” (Wood 1992, 79). Maps are now seen as potential sites of
power-knowledge, operating within more general discourses of power. Maps produce
knowledge of geography, people and places. Critical cartography acts to bridge a gulf
between a more technically-focused design of maps and a more theoretically informed
analysis of power in society. Therefore a critical cartography is informed by critical
investigations into space, place, identity, and power. Critical human geography offers
much by way of conceptualizing how these fit into an analysis of maps in theoretically
problematizing representation and power relations.
4. Analysing the Relationship Between Maps, Knowledge and Power
In your analysis of the map on your classroom wall you might have considered the
seeming ‘accuracy’ of the technical and cultural production methods used by Western
cartographers which have been honed over time to provide a spatial inventory according
to standards of ‘objectivity’, ‘accuracy’ and ‘truthfulness’. In your consideration of the
cartographic techniques used to compile these maps you might also have come to the
assumption that Western maps are void of any non-scientific information while showing
the most accurate representation of the landscape.
That said, your examination of the earlier historical maps should have revealed that
mapping is not always ‘objective’ or ‘truthful’. In your examination of these maps you
should have noted practices such as centering the frame of particular maps on specific
territories. In many of these maps the frame of map was often determined by power
interests within the society that generated the map. You may also have noted the
hierarchical placement of map elements indicating different social orders within the
particular place mapped. Some of you who study other arts subjects might even have
been able to ascertain the hidden meanings within maps by arguing that the categories
of literature and art more accurately define a map’s cultural utility. By the looking at the
inherently rhetorical process of map creation, you might have recognized the distinction
between the social purpose (control of territory for the extraction of rents) and content of
the map.
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The map pictured below of an 18th century farm in Essex is a good example of many of
these processes. It is an indication of the use of iconography or symbolism to convey
meaning, the map has a social purpose namely the collection of rents and it indicates
social orders in society (landlord and landholder) via the list of tenanted fields on the
farm in the bottom right of the map.
If you were able to identify relationship such as these in the maps you examined you
may have identified the relationships of power exerted on cartography and the power
exercised with cartography. In this context knowledge is central in the pursuit of power
and therefore cartography is another mechanism that can be used for social, political or
economic gain.
Hopefully by reflecting on this different way of reading maps you might have reassessed
your interpretation of the map on your classroom wall. Take another look at the maps in
your classroom, which countries are centred within the map? Which parts of the globe
are emphasized? If you are interested in reading a potted history of these maps go on to
www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercator_projection and www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GallPeters_projection . For those of you who want a simple summary, in the Mercator
projection distance is true and area distorted. This is a consequence of the map being
produced to aid the navigation of European explored from the mid latitudes. The social
purpose of the map meant that it was an important tool in the discovery of unknown
lands. The map also reflects hierarchies of the time which can be deduced from the
particular emphasis this projection places emphasis on the mid latitudes, particularly
European countries. The other commonly used projection, the Peters Projection, brings
out the equator more and the poles less. Its main achievement was to preserve the true
area of territories. In doing so it played a key role in the demarcation of the political
boundaries of territories once countries were discovered.
It is important to recognise that for the majority of the periods in which these maps were
produced, map making and the control over the information maps contained was a
highly concentrated form of power. Maps were both constructed by and socially
concentrated within the elites and the messages that maps contained were
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disseminated to populations often without the means of deciphering the power relations
expressed within them.
In addition to the insights flagged up above, your examination of the website
worldmapper.org should have given you some understanding of the idea of ‘geographic
visualization’ or the power of map's to critique, to explore, to analyze and to visualize
spatial datasets and to understand patterns better. Depending on which maps you
looked at you will have seen what the world might look like if the countries were
proportionally represented in terms of a wide range of different indicators from religion to
mobile phone ownership. What is interesting here and this is also the case in terms of
the maps which form the basis of the projections found on Google earth, is that the
worldmapper.org base map is similar to those many of you will have found on your
classroom wall. What does this tell you about the continued power of European map
making in framing our understandings of the world? You might like to take a few minutes
to reflect on what implication this has for how societies come in to contact with how they
are placed in the world.
As a result of undertaking this exercise, you should forever question the neutrality of
maps with regards to their ‘objective’ characteristics.
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