Maps (VIAL, ContCult, Americas)

Geography used to be a required course in most highschools, but for decades now that discipline has languished on the fringes of recognition. As a result, geographical ignorance has spread alarmingly in the United States. For example, at the link below is a map quiz of the Middle East, a region the US has been pouring money, weapons and military personnel into since WWII and in which, for the last 7 years it has been fighting a “hot” war of occupation. How many nations can you identify?

Middle East Map Quiz

Most of us grew up with the Mercator projection, a map developed in the 16th century which attempts to render true outline:

The problem with this particular representation of the world is that in an effort to establish detail of outline, it loses proportion. Note, for example, the relative size of Brazil and Alaska. The Peters project attempts to correct this distortion but in the process loses detail. (Every map of the world is troubled by some degree of distortion simply by virtue of the fact that they render a 3 dimensional object, the globe,  in 2 dimensions. Think about what your head would look like if you wanted to see it from all angles on a flat surface.)

There has also been a tendency in the US to center maps on North America, in effect privileging the western hemisphere over other spaces at the expense of understanding out the world is interrelated. Consider this Pacific Rim map, which encourages us to the see the US in a different context:

Political maps, of course, represent only one category of geographical knowledge. Human geographers map according to trade routes, demographics, and other measures especially pertinent to social considerations. For example, below is a map of the ethnicities of Pakistan:

Note that the boundary dividing Pakistan and Afghanistan bisects a large green area which indicates Pashtun ethnicity. That boundary is known as the Durand Line and was drawn almost completely arbitrarily by the British. As a general rule, wherever there are national boundaries which were established by colonial powers, today you will find violence or at least intractable political difficulties. Another example would be Gaza or the West Bank in Palestine.

Re-mapping is a way to shift our perspective. The world looks very different depending on the criteria for mapping. For instance, here is a resource map:

A map of Cascadia, a bioregion defined by watersheds:

A map used to sell vodka, which invokes a utopian political vision rooted in hemispheric history:

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