Re-reading Geography – Week 2

This week’s readings

• John Krygier and Denis Wood, Ce n’est pas le monde
• Morton Gulak et al., Mental Mapping in the Richmond Region: The Use of the Physical Environment in Building Regional Cooperation
• Lewis Robinson, The varied “mental maps” our students have

Krygier and Wood offer an interesting discussion on the nature of maps through a comic book chapter. They conclude that from representing reality, in all senses of the word, maps are propositions that make claims about reality, and can only ever capture aspects of that reality. By emphasizing certain aspects of space over others (i.e. counting the number of malls as an estimate of urban economic growth at the exclusion of other possible interpretations of city space – like the informal economy of slums), maps essentially create reality, and depend significantly upon the map-maker’s purpose or starting assumptions.

A comic book is an interesting, clever way of clearly and simply outlining key debates around what maps are – one that is itself a kind of representation.

Robinson expands on our understanding of representation in an article that delves into our “mental maps” of the world. Drawing on his experiences teaching geography courses at the University of British Columbia,   Robinson tests his students’ preconceptions of what the world, within and beyond Canada’s borders, looks like.  He discovers that map-making is an act of communication, one laden by our political assumptions of how the world ought to look like.

A chapter from Ellard’s book[1] deepens this analysis of mental maps, tracing our cognitive images of borders and nation-states to our imaginaries of everyday lived space – i.e., “the cartography of our own inner mental spaces”. He traces our contemporary cartographic perspectives to the human species’ – often clumsy – attempts to render geographic space legible.

In contrast to last week’s readings which sought to connect our (“modernist”, “abstract”, “reductionist”) mapping practices to historical transformations in modernity, Ellard sees our propensity to make maps as something innate to the species – for instance, drawing on Yi Fu-Tuan to argue that our upright posture has to do with our preference for straight, vertical and horizontal lines with which we construct our maps.   This has at times made it difficult for us to accurately map out the world in all its oblique or muddled complexity.

Finally, in Gulak et al. urban planners were tasked to draw a map of the Richmond Region, Virginia in an attempt to test the “imageabilty” of roads, state boundaries, key historic sites, among other factors of apparent relevance to the individuals involved. Their work has implications for the use of mental mapping as a research methodology as well as an instrument for land use planning to improve conservation efforts, tourism, heritage site restoration, and regional economic cooperation.

[1] Colin Ellard, You are Here: Why We Can Find Our Way to the Moon But Get Lost in the Mall

Re-reading Geography- Week 1

This is the first of a series of weekly reflections on readings from our class with Dr. Joseph Palis, Cultures of Mapping and Counter-Cartographies (Geog 292). 

[Will try to do this more ofen. Since I promised myself I’d do more  »geography » with this blog =P].

This week’s readings

• Michael Curry, Toward a Geography of a World without Maps: Lessons from Ptolemy and Postal Codes
• Miles Ogborn, Knowledge is Power: Using Archival Research to Interpret State Formation
• B. Harley, Maps, Knowledge, and Power

Drawing on language as an analogy for cartography, Harley contests the positivist ethos that assesses maps according to their “accuracy or inaccuracy” in the degree to which they reflect or represent the “real” world. Maps, he points out, in fact construct that world. Maps are actively political images that communicate ideological messages, often in the service of the powerful – legitimising empires, buttressing the territorial pretensions of nation-states, commodifying and enclosing common land, and asserting the supremacy of private property (or corporate) rights.  And they do so under the guise of “disinterested science”. If knowledge is a form of power, such power derives from presenting itself as value-neutral, depoliticised truth.

Maps also function by rendering invisible that which power seeks to control (or cannot control), in a form of othering that reflects right back on the humanity of the map-maker.   The “hidden silences” or unspoken political assumptions of 18^th-19^th century maps in particular attempted to reinforce the divide between the European self and the Barbarian, black/Asian other,  paradoxically rendering bare the West’s own barbarous colonial conquests.

Harley concludes by emphasising the extent to which cartographic discourse and imperial ideology are linked. Maps have throughout history largely been a “a tool for power not protest” (pp. 301) – at least until now.

For Ogborn, the production of geographic knowledge is vital to state formation. By studying the archival practices of states – the systematic collection of information about populations and territories – we can understand the nature of the state and its organisation of power over space. In my current work on the Bangsamoro peace process, I have attempted to trace the way contemporary discourses around resource control and population management resonate with colonial narratives and state practices in Mindanao’s past. One recognises this process of state construction, for instance, in the discursive production of ethnic groups whose populations were labelled, categorised, and somewhat arbitrarily imposed and deemed representative of specific parts of Mindanao by American colonial authorities. Today, the consolidation of a distinct Moro (indigenous-nationalist), Lumad, or Christian identity is actively used to claim rights over specific districts and municipalities to be covered under the Bangsamoro autonomous region.

Curry, on the other hand, problematizes concepts of topography, chorography, geography, and spatialiaty, which tend to muddle the distinctions between space and place. He argues that discourses of space and place only truly came to our attention with the emergence of the appropriate technologies (maps, data processing capabilities) which, while complicating things further on the scholarly front, are stimulating the production of new forms of data, and ways of interpreting them.

– CJ Chanco

Hope is the belief that human stupidity has limits

Absolute certainty about our assumptions — moral, religious, economic, political, scientific — is the worst kind of hubris.

 

In a world so much more complex than what we make of it, the more we persist in seeing things in black and white, the more reality accords with our blind faith.

 

And in that context the best we can possibly do is keep an open mind and heart to the spaces where life can be improved, stupidity mitigated, violence avoided, power checked, and fear transformed into love. Even in the most unlikely of places.

 

I’m learning day by day to accept the fact that dialogue, deliberation, and democratic dissent work better than any of the alternatives. That speaking out can sometimes be more powerful and productive than shouting down. That tearing apart requires a willingness to build together, and in the absence of that willingness, our words and actions go into the void.

 

And that some people and their dystopian causes are just not worth sacrificing our sanity or personal happiness.

 

Hope is the belief that human stupidity has limits — and that we will see, together, what needs to be seen and done when we are on the edge of the cliff.

 

And there’s no shortage of cliffs.

A response to Sison

An email from Joma Sison, in response to my Jacobin article, Rodrigo Duterte’s One Man Revolution, according to J.V. Ayson:

« The article of CJ Chanco is a verbose piece of rubbish. It uses the stale Trotskyite tactics of making false claims against the CPP (like reducing it to being a mere tool and fool of Duterte and the Right) in order to make the false conclusion that the CPP is anti-Left. What Chanco considers as true Left, socialist and democratic is the Akbayan (a mix of crypto-Troskyites and liberal racketeers) who have acted as servants of the US-Aquino regime and are now mostly in the service of the Mar Roxas campaign machinery. Chanco is averse to the people’s democratic revolution through the people’s war and dismisses it as the object of his umay. Laging masarap sa kanya ang ibat ibang putahe ng pagsasamantala at pang-aapi ng imperyalismo, pyudalismo at burukrata kapitalismo. »

I confess I had some hopes for a mature response. A debate, not a character assassination. I honestly hope, for Joma Sison’s sake, that this email isn’t real, and that the chairman of the one, true and only representative of progressive/left politics in the Philippines has more things to say than what’s been said over and over for the past half century. And that he actually understood the article.

Because this only confirms my main point: that given the lack of a real, inspiring, and engaging, political movement, the most well-meaning of people succumb to the echo chambers of their own propaganda.

It’s worth breaking that bubble time and again to see just how far down the rabbit hole goes. Or to discover that the hole isn’t as deep or hopeless as it seems to be.

For my part, I refuse to see things so black and white. I support their campaigns. I support their calls for social justice. Even their candidates. I do not support their leadership, their political narratives, or their strategy, including a people’s war that seems to pit them against everybody but themselves. And trap people in between.

If this makes me a « Trotskyist Imperialist Petty-Bourgeois Reformist Dogmatist », then so be it. I would add « CIA-Mossad-Iran-China triple agent ».

I wrote that Jacobin article in December, after three years (barely enough time it seems) of study and immersion.

Having seen various versions, strands, and factions of what calls itself the « Left » in this country, I understand now precisely why people see the left as irrelevant, and precisely why people turn to figures like Duterte (or Binay or Roxas) given the sheer lack of sane alternatives. I saw division not solidarity. Manipulation not empowerment. Competition not cooperation. Personal intrigue, even NGO-style labour exploitation, not freedom. Dogmatism not democracy. Co-optation not principle.

I understand how this nation’s most fertile minds in progressive politics have been sucked into the dry spell of Mao’s Little Red Book.

In contrast to this, give me an honest, authentic liberal any day.