The New Nature of Maps by J. B. Harley, edited by Paul Laxton, Johns Hopkins
University Press, 拢30.50, ISBN 0801865662. Apollo鈥檚 Eye by Denis Cosgrove,
Johns Hopkins University Press, 拢31.50, ISBN 0801864917
TRACED in the sand, penned on paper, or stored as digitised pixels, one of
our most remarkable achievements is capturing the 3D world on a flat surface.
Yet this remarkable ability to represent the world in two dimensions often
disguises the true nature of the cartographic process.
J. B. Harley, the influential geographer who died in 1991, went some way
towards laying this process bare. Harley was an iconoclast, subverting
traditional approaches to map-making by drawing together art history,
literature, philosophy and visual culture. It鈥檚 a view that can now be savoured
in his collected essays, The New Nature of Maps, edited by Paul Laxton.
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These essays are forerunners of today鈥檚 anthropological take on maps as
objects of material culture and the way they portray landscapes as social
constructs serving political, economic, moral and military ends. By charting
symbolic space as well as geographical distance, maps, Harley argues, are a kind
of at-a-glance gauge of society and environment. Map-makers create the means of
power and control in what has been called the 鈥淲estern gaze鈥�.
Harley believed that cartographers used to be far too uncritical about their
work. He challenged the view that ever since the Renaissance, Western
cartography had followed a positivist path merely tending towards ever more
accurate representations of reality. He felt that maps do not banish
subjectivity through geometry and measurement. As he saw it, this led to the
misguided notion that all early, especially non-European, maps could be judged
by modern Western standards, and thus proved to be inferior. He argued that this
denied the true power of maps as political documents and tools for ideological
manipulation.
In Apollo鈥檚 Eye Denis Cosgrove takes this issue further by exploring Western
civilisation鈥檚 fascination with conceiving and representing the world as a
globe. Adopting a fashionable biographical approach, he builds a genealogy of
global images and maps from classical antiquity to the present, from the Greek
oikoumene to the NASA photograph of Earthrise over the Moon.
Both authors are aware that mapping the globe was an act of
colonisation鈥攃artographers imposing their own vision of the world on other
peoples and cultures. Harley shows that early European maps of the Americas
depended on indigenous knowledge, yet also pushed local peoples to the boundary,
disenfranchising them from their ancestral lands.
Early maps thus became the epitome of the colonial encounter. Hardly
mentioned, however, are the sophisticated indigenous images of the world,
infused with myth and notions of sacred space, represented on bark paper, carved
in stone or preserved in the oral tradition. Images like these are guided by
ideas not amenable to measuring rods. And the information in them, whose
remnants today are often the domain of anthropology and archaeology, represent a
loss to the history of world cartography.
Cosgrove points out that European exploration and map-making reshaped
European identities after the 16th century, but the same is true of the
indigenous millions who, if they survived at all, had to live in a newly
configured and alien universe. Mapping the world can be seen as an ambiguous
intellectual and technological triumph. Cartography creates and represents the
worlds its makers desire. And there is always an agenda. In the act of taking
the world鈥檚 measure, we understand how much we have diminished it.
It is ironic that this revolution in seeing and representing the world, which
has had such an appalling cost in terms of human lives and cultural diversity,
eventually triggered a bloody conflict between Europe鈥檚 big colonial powers. In
turn, this ushered in a new cartographic era. The dawn of modern global imagery
is embedded in the First World War. Aerial photography began over the trenches
of the Western front and the symbolic space known as no-man鈥檚-land. It鈥檚 the
ancestor of those images of Earth from space.