CORPORATE CARTO-AGGRESSION

Has anyone noticed the corporate map war on TV ensuing between Verizon and AT&T? Could there be a better instance of the importance of maps? This is carto-propaganda rolled into advertising carto-aggression played out in front of our eyes (for those of you who watch TV)! The maps used by both sides indicate how the map maker and the purpose for which the map is used are paramount. It is also a good illustration of Mark Monmonier's thoughts of "how to lie with maps" or at least present your side (in this case, phone coverage) with maps clearly foregrounded. I hope they continue to break into the regular programming with the carto-entertaiment interludes!

PIRANHAS DO NOT MIND BORDERS

From Jamaica, in summer 1980, my then-wife (known since age two in church nursery) and I flew to Bolivia for a 40-day trek in that country, and Peru, and Ecuador. In Peru we visited Machu Pichu.

In Ecuador we took a bus to Cuenca, the third largest city, and then to Los Banos for the hot springs. From there we learned we could take a bus (really a converted truck) descending into the Amazon basin to the last town by road, on the Rio Napo, a huge tributary of the Amazon River, and then down river by dugout canoe to another forsaken, mud-hole town.

A bit of anecdote and history that I sometimes tell my students about the symbolic importance of maps: Before reaching the last town by road we had to cross the border back into Peru. There at the totally invisible border (this was deep rain forest) the two Peruvian border guards, with shouldered rifles, strode out of the tiny hut to announce in the door of the bus that all foreigners should disembark and retrieve their luggage. We were the only two foreigners probably within 100 miles. I imagined we were going to be held hostage for ransom--and I was wishing at that moment that I had been much nicer to my high-salaried older brother! To our astonishment the border guards asked whether we "tienen algunos mapas"--had any maps?! They searched our luggage looking for maps out in nowhere Amazonia?! Why?

As a typical American ignorant of world history/world geography, I found out much later that the Inca just before Pizarro's arrival had divided the Incan empire between his two sons. The frontier between the two kingdoms went through the area where we were standing. Later, Spain divided its empire into two colonial vice-royalties based on the Incan division--with an undelineated frontier (as frontiers are). Later, the two modern countries of Peru and Ecuador were formed with the same undecided border. That frontier area had been disputed since at least 1840, if not 1829. They had most recently fought a border war in 1941-42.

So, there we were standing--way out in the rain forest of Amazonia--before two Peruvian border guards who were searching for maps made in Ecuador which, of course, showed (I later learned) that that area was part of Ecuador. Peru wanted to confiscate all maps (before the ubiquity of online maps) published in Ecuador! The following year, 1981 (I just tonight learned), the two countries fought yet another border skirmish.

On the river, the dugout canoe, which was the regular river transportation--a river taxi!--carried only two items: people and sodas. Just after the canoe pushed off we all were given coffee cans, for what reason I had no clue (perhaps for toilet?). We soon learned that everyone was expected to bail water the whole time! Our feet were soaking in water because it rained nearly constantly--we were in rain forest, after all. But, I was thinking "sinking boat in big river with hungry, toothy piranhas!" I bailed water assiduously.

We made it back to civilization with no body parts chewed on. I wish I had one of those maps.

ARTICLE ANNOTATION--MAPS IN LITERATURE

Byrd, M. 2009. This is not a map. Wilson Quarterly, summer: 26-32.

In this essay about maps in literature, the author notes that “plot” carries two meanings: the plot of ground or space where the story happens and the plot or action of the story itself. He catalogs a long list of authors, from Hardy to LeGuin, and fictional works with attached maps, from Gulliver’s Travels to that of Pooh’s which shows “where the Woozle wasn’t.” Weaving the essay around Robert Louis Stevenson and Treasure Island, he says, “It may be a map of a real place or an imaginary one. What matters is that we cannot explain a map by a map. …[W]e transform its spaces into something human, and everything human has a story.”

TOPONYMING EAST SEA

The Korea Times carried out a study of maps from 45 countries to ascertain prevalence of usage of the toponyms "East Sea" (preferred by Koreans) and "Sea of Japan" (the usage most prevalent worldwide). It found that 26% of maps it surveyed use both toponyms in this exact form: "Sea of Japan (East Sea)." An additional 3% use only the designation East Sea. Thus, 29% of the maps surveyed use the toponym East Sea in one way or the other.

Since this campaign by Korea to change the cartographic toponyming began only recently, in 2002, I'd say that a 29% usage rate internationally is fairly significant. Korea's campaign has been successful, but not ultimately satisfying to Koreans, as manifest on various Internet forums.

Furthermore, my fairly new (maybe 2007) National Geographic large wall map in my classroom uses both designations in the parenthetical form above. Also, my Prentice Hall high-school world geography textbook (World Geography: Building a Global Perspective, 2005) uses East Sea, in the parenthetical form above, in the four maps which appear in the chapter covering Japan and the Koreas. However, the textbook does not use the two toponyms elsewhere, e.g. in the atlas section; but, perhaps it will update all its maps in later editions.

The practice of using local toponyms, which would partly assuage nationalist sentiments, can be employed by Google maps because they can show local usage depending on where the person and his/her Internet server are located. Thus, Koreans, in Korea, accessing the East Asian region in Google maps would see the toponym East Sea. Not so easily done for printed maps and atlases.

This brings up a serious cartographic problem: Should the Korea Strait also be renamed "Korea Strait (Japan Strait)"? Should the Straits of Florida be renamed "Straits of Florida (Straits of Cuba /Straits of Bahamas)"? Should the Arabian Sea be parenthetically labelled Indian Sea or Pakistani Sea or both? I've heard that in Indonesia the ocean to its west is named the Indonesian Ocean. How about the U.S. renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Sea of Mississippi?

Perhaps if rampant nationalism slowed down there would not be such interest in this cartographic dilemma. Not much hope for that.

CARTOGRAPHIC REIFICATION

Germany had difficulty relinquishing pre-W.W. I “ancestral German lands” (did it not later require lebensraum?); Venezuela claims half of Guyana; Ecuador claims a chunk of Amazonia as large as the territory it now controls; Argentina labels its maps (showing “Greater Argentina”) with the “Islas Malvinas,” even though Britain won the Falkland Islands War; and China draws its boundaries around the islands in the South China Sea, thus overlapping competing claims of other countries. These are examples of “cartographic aggression” and “map-as-symbol-of-the-state” (terms used in How to Lie with Maps, by Mark Monmonier).

When I lived in Taiwan, in 1988, the Taiwan government, in a bizarre exercise, required every copy of an issue of National Geographic, which included a map of East Asia, to be hand-stamped on the cover stating that the Nationalist Government on Taiwan, Republic of China (ROC) (its self-designated names) did not recognize Mongolia as a sovereign state, that it was still a territory of ROC!

States, as part of their sovereign statehood, endow cartographic representations power to reify their territorial integrity.

Yes, maps serve interests and shape reality by re-presenting the world, according to the dictates of the cartographer, who is sometimes the state-sanctioned carto-referee of borders. It is a serious game.

CARTO-PROPAGANDA IN DEEP RAIN FOREST

While crossing the border from Ecuador to Peru, in 1983 (headed to the Rio Napo, in Amazonia), the Peruvian border guards, with shouldered rifles, ordered the two foreigners off the bus, into the guard hut, to search our luggage. They asked one question only: “Tienes algunos mapas?” Did we have any maps? Maps? Deep in the rainforest?

The border dispute between Ecuador and Peru originated when the last Inca divided his empire between his two sons just before the arrival of Pizzaro. The area remained a frontier (etymologically, a region that “fronts”) between the two Spanish audiencias and continued as such with the formation of the modern states of Ecuador and Peru. The two countries fought a border war around 1941, evidently won by Peru. (Ecuadorians peevishly informed us that Peruvians were “monos”--monkeys.)

The Peruvian border guards were confiscating maps published in Ecuador which show the large chunk of Amazonia we were in as part of the national territory of Ecuador. The government of Peru did not want the carto-propaganda to reach the outside world. Cartographically, the two countries are still at war. (It does not help that Chevron has been pumping oil out of the region, to the benefit of Peru--a further affront at the frontier.)

Spatial events which occurred half a millennium previously were being played out deep in the Amazonian rain forest, nearly at gunpoint, on two unsuspecting foreigners.

I wish I could now possess a map of Ecuador showing the contested chunk of rain forest, so I could illustrate that particular rain-forest geography of propaganda.

MAPPERIST DAYDREAMS IN TECHNICOLOR

I like maps. I love maps. Map coloration, it seems to me, is used in three ways: aesthetically, practically, and politically. Color is a big part of what they are, especially when they are enjoyed for their aesthetics. Whoever said maps were merely tools (the carto-bureaucrats, in their map libraries; I know, I worked as one at Ohio University) were not speaking for me, a mapperist by heart.

From childhood to this day I have delighted in the splotches of map colors on my walls, whether at school or home, to just gaze at, stare at, get lost in. My walls are swimming in cartographic sea-blue. My shower curtain (yes!) doubles as a map of the U.S., mostly of some bluish-celadon hue. The map of China on my wall at school is colored vibrant deep purple, fuchsia, teal, etc.

I am now gazing at the map above my computer: a laminated tropical storm-tracking map of Middle America and Southeast U.S. and surrounding bodies of water. This faux-antique wall map/wall art is tinted mostly in two hues: sunburnt orange for the Spanish Main, and aquamarine for oceans and seas, the actual color of the Caribbean Sea. When gazing at this chart, I daydream about visiting Cuba someday (Basta! Enough travel guides already!) or returning to Jamaica, Martinique, or Haiti, whose buildings by the hundreds are washed very nearly this same dusty, mango-flesh tinge.

Color is integral to each map. It induces thoughts. It enhances dreams of transmarine swashbuckling adventure. And the palettes of maps are enjoyable in their own right.

Colorful wall maps make me feel I live in a geographer’s atelier.

POWER OF MAPS

Maps have power. But one of the powers should not be that they deceive us into thinking that they do not exist as part of social context, a context of power relations. When photocopying (maps) this week at school, I was gazing at a large wall map of the school district. An innocent piece of cartographic communication--right? But wait! As I began following the district boundaries delineated on the map, I saw the boundaries separating the inside-the-district from the benighted outside-the-district areas. Part of the district boundary runs down one side of the street where I used to live. Believe me, those excluded people just across the street from my district boundary feel the power of this map, as my school district is considered by many to be the best in the State. They want in. It can affect prices of real estate, too; and determine the whereabouts of large investments. It is true that some legal agreement between the neighboring school districts (one urban, the other rural) had to be settled to create the boundaries of the two districts.

But, it is not a multi-page legal document written in legalese that is taped to walls at schools and at City Hall and referred to by interested residents and real estate agents and developers--IT IS A MAP (that can be read easily). The multiple copies of the map of the district regulate behavior more than the (single copy?) district legal document, written in prose, and available at City Hall. The school district map exists to present simple (official) information. It is assertive; it has power.

CARTOPHAGE THAT TERRITORY

Map historian Brian Harley has said “…cartography [is] primarily a form of political discourse concerned with the acquisition and maintenance of power.” Dennis Wood, in The Power of Maps (1992) quotes Joseph Conrad in The Heart of Darkness about blank spaces on a map being of interest to colonial powers. This leads Wood to quote Harley, that the “thirst for the blank spaces” is “a symptom of a deeply ingrained colonial mentality….In this view the world is full of empty spaces ready for taking....” Wood then states that mapmaking “…is not a disinterested cartographic activity, but the result of the…intertwining of polity and mapmaking….” Next, he says, “Mapmaking societies…reach out, not of course to make maps more comprehensive (much less more truthful), but in the unfolding of the dynamic that their growth and development have helped to set in motion (and in which the cartographic enterprise is an essential and committed partner). In so doing they subsume whatever they can….”

In an act of cartophage (my term) the colonial society and its cartography “devour” the colonized. An instructive example is the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885--part of the “Scramble for Africa”--in which a map of Africa, and thus the actual territory, was divided up. African territory was eaten up--cartophaged--by the colonial powers.

In an interesting article in Early Modern Literary Studies (“Partial Views: Shakespeare and the Map of Ireland,” Sept. 1998), Bernard Klein traces the development of English views vis-à-vis Ireland in plays of Shakespeare, in the 1590s, and English cartography of the same general period. Klein finds that in these two types of social production the Irish moved, in English eyes and maps, from a menacing presence of “wild men and women” living in a shadowy periphery, to forced absence, to visible inclusion in the spatial unit of England, i.e., the subjugated Irish became “English,” at least on contemporary maps.

To conclude: Maps do not only contain knowledge made palatable on cartographic representations, they help to ensnare, dominate, digest, and control.

DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC MAPS?

It is obvious that in fiction-writing cognitive mapping plays an essential role. From the 1884 novel by Edward A. Abbot, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, which is literally about the dimensionality of space; to Mark Twain's placed-based works, set in California, Europe, or the American South; and Philip K. Dick's dystopian sci-fi novels and short stories (e.g., "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?", which was made into the film Blade Runner)--all fiction, like history, must take place some place, even if the place is an entirely fictional landscape. Robert Louis Stevenson claimed that before writing his novel he drew a map of Treasure Island so that he could visualize the plot. Mississippian Eudora Welty said, in "The Writer's Craft," that, "One place comprehended can make us understand other places better. A sense of space [and place] gives equilibrium, a sense of direction" (my insertion). Spatiality is, as are the essentialities of matter and time, one of the attributes of the physical Universe.

NOMADIC IN PROCURED SPACE

Now that I have unmasked my assumed neo-primitive persona, I admit that I once freely visited Opryland Hotel, Nashville, whose mottoes might be: "Lose yourself in our simulated reality, because it's more real than Disney Land!" and, "Make new friends at our many conveniently placed layout maps!" There's a reason that there are so many layout maps (and other nomads crowded around in perplexed silence): It's because wandering lost (and spending money while lost) is the game. They should call it the Wanderlust Hotel.

The maps are themed: cartographic obfuscation. And the architects were obviously in on the ruse: How to place two large hotels and FOUR atria and a gigantic convention center and myriad shops and restaurants under a roof and in such a way that visitors (read shoppers) will always be lost. But, hey, we won't care! Because it's so pleasant with all this natural tropical vegetation (in Tennessee) and streams and cascades and waterfalls (it's good to get out into nature) that.... "Hey! There's another layout map conveniently placed 10 feet ahead! Let's see where we are!" (Perplexed silence.)

After I entered this aMAZEing space and soon enough realized I was missing, I found a creek and reckoned I could meander downstream to find my way out. (I learned this in the mountains of Kentucky.) It stagnated at Bayou Country! Since I felt physiographically comfortable there (and knew how to keep an eye out for gators) and I saw Boudreaux's Bayou Smoothie Shoppe (whose theme should be, "You buy by the bayou"), I had to gladly purchase a smoothie or two--and drink it at the next conveniently placed layout map! You get the idea.

CARTOGASM

Today (July 2007), at the Newberry Library, in Chicago, where I am on a National Endowment for the Humanities three-week fellowship, I saw a beautiful, breathtaking and nearly perfect copy (meaning original specimen) of a Ptolemy Geographia, printed 1486 (only 521 years old!), about 34x24x6 in., with a Ptolemy world map inside.

Allow me to explain the significance of the Ptolemy. Old friend Cristoforo would have had a copy of this same atlas. Actually, there were many editions printed throughout the 15th century, beginning ca. A.D. 1400, when it reappeared after a thousand years, brought from Byzantium. The problem was that Ptolemy, working ca. A.D. 150, underestimated the circumference of the Earth by 1/6 and overestimated Asia by 1/3, stretching it eastward way too far. Columbus used this to justify sailing west to find the Spice Islands (and riches). Anyway, even though the leather-bound book was printed (remember, this was just approx. 40 years after the invention of printing), it was beautifully hand-tinted.

The procedures to "page" and view items are complex and a bit daunting. Sometimes patrons must wear gloves--I don't know when, but they'll certainly tell you. What's neat is that they bring you an item (we, under no circumstances, can ever see the "stacks") and place it, if a book, on whatever size padded cloth book-holder is required. And, you also get padded cloth page holders and de-acidified book-markers. If Homeland Security were run like the Newberry, we could go to bed assured of total safety, with only dreams of cartographic missteps, like Columbus', to disturb our dreams.

The second item I paged just for me. It was a small (about 8x5x1") leather-bound manuscript book (ca. 1600) from Turkey, in Arabic, with EACH PAGE exquisitely hand-written and hand-tinted, in, particularly, medium blue, red, and gold. Besides about 12 paintings, it contains three maps: a world map, Asia, and the New World (which is incomplete, of course). Now here is the kicker: Turkish/Arab/Persian maps placed south at the top! (I coined the neologism--australocentrism--to call this practice.) That's why I especially wanted to see this book and its three maps.

I also paged an Albrecht Durer world map (1515), which attempts to show the globality of Earth in two dimensions. You recall Durer; his early self-portrait etching was the envy and model for every hippie male during the 1960s.