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Re-mapping the Arctic: contemporary approaches to practising cartography across diverse knowledge traditions
Abstract
This thesis examines historical and contemporary debates surrounding the way in which knowledge traditions interact in the Arctic. This is done through examining the theoretical and practical history of cartography, both as a discipline, and as applied to the Arctic. In doing so, I make the argument for an inextricable link between cartography and knowledge production across supposedly different ‘knowledge traditions’, through the privileging of performativity as the primary way of making knowledge, and an understanding of human cognition as inherently spatial and narratological. Based on these understandings, I examine debates within geography and wider social science that might assist the practising of cartography under this philosophy – the possibilities for ‘working with multiple ontologies’. For example I explore the opportunity for working with complex adaptive systems, and suggest that a contemporary understanding of how cyberspace is produced in the Arctic fits in with these philosophies. I also examine those debates that might stand in the way of practice that acknowledges these philosophies of complexity – for example debates about the nature of digital materiality, and of the epistemological / ontological divide. These theories and debates are anchored in the Arctic through the use of historical and contemporary examples concerned with the mapping of space and knowledge primarily in the North American Arctic. Ultimately debating a future for practising cartography in the Arctic is situated within the confines of post-colonial critique, so I examine how we define “counter-mapping”, and where the philosophies outlined above fit into this politically strong tradition. In conclusion I suggest that whilst contemporary theory has much to offer an increasingly digital indigenous Arctic, there remains a partial disconnect between theory and practice that can be addressed through reading this debate.
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The paper develops a performative account of the ways in which knowledge and space are co-produced as humans move, develop social networks, and extend their cognitive practices. Such an account enables alternative ways of conceiving what counts as knowledge and as modernity to be held in tension, thus allowing the emergent generative effects of the Argentinean philosopher Enrique Dussel's concept of 'transmodernity'. Working with differing knowledge traditions requires, as Walter Mignolo recommends, thinking " with, against and beyond the legacy of Western epistemology. " What is at issue is the capacity to move beyond the point of 'colonial difference' explored by Mignolo in which Western knowledge gets authorised as universal and the rest get classified as 'people without history'. Only then can we enable differing knowledge traditions to work together without subordinating them and absorbing their differences in the western panopticon. This is not an easy task since the Western knowledge tradition in the form of science is hegemonic, and all other traditions are rendered as incommensurable, but to commensurate them is by definition to subordinate them and rob them of their cultural specificity. Equally, simply seeing them as different interpretations or different world views is too weak in the struggle for authority. To flourish, to have autonomy in the face of hegemony, indigenous knowledge traditions have to have an effective voice and construct their own identities. What is offered in this paper is a performative framework which is strong enough to destabilise the hegemony of western epistemology and generative enough to allow for real difference and the growth of cultural diversity.
Despite significant social, economic, and technological changes, travelling remains a significant part of people's lives in the community of Igloolik, in the territory of Nunavut, Canada. When the snow covers the land and the sea ice, travellers start breaking trails, some of which recreate routes that have been used by generations of Inuit. These routes belong to the individual and social memory of the community, and this knowledge affords people safe and reliable travel to hunting and fishing grounds and between communities. This paper analyzes the characteristics of routes traditionally used by the people of Igloolik and explores the differences between land routes and sea-ice routes, the role of the trail breaker, and the characteristics of oral descriptions of routes. Finally, it addresses the issue of how the perception of trails is changing due to generational differences and the use of new transportation technologies. The study of trails and routes reveals some significant features of the Inuit understanding of the Arctic environment, provides an indication of the history of land and sea use in the area, and shows how verbal descriptions of the territory in particular and oral knowledge in general may remain unchanged or with little variation through time.
Maps served as both instruments and representations of expanding European influence into Africa during the nineteenth century. They contributed to empire building by promoting, assisting, and legitimating the projection of European power. Through the use of cartographical elements such as color, cartouches, vignettes, boundary lines, and blank spaces, mapmakers participated in the conquest and colonization of Africa.
This paper describes how new cartographic and information technologies were used to record and represent Inuit geographic and environmental knowledge in Igloolik, Nunavut. The method proved a powerful tool to document an approach to geography that is mainly oral. It was also helpful in documenting how people relate to a highly dynamic environment as the Arctic. The method includes the merging of different geographic databases that acquire full meaning when seen as layers of the same map. It also involves the search for new ways of representing, including simulated horizons, photographs of horizons embedded on maps, and recordings of oral descriptions of trails and locations. An example of such method can be seen in the Igloolik Multimedia Project, a CD-Rom that is being currently piloted in the Igloolik high school.
As Indigenous academics researching and participating with various mapping initiatives, we have began to perceive that while many Indigenous communities have a long history of using Western cartographic techniques, including GIS, in their efforts to establish land claims, map culturally important sites and protect community resources, they were not critically aware of the science with which they are engaged. We have established our goal to assist and encourage the development of a critical literacy in cartography within Indigenous communities. We use the term literacy not to imply an ability to read and write, rather we are engaging the part of the word's etymology which recognizes having competence in a system of knowledge. Western cartography is a complex knowledge system with a long history, much of its last 500 years being involved in furthering the colonial exploits of European crowns. Using the work of Paulo Freire (2000) on critical consciousness as a foundation, we have taken this concept a step further to describe a critical cartographic literacy which recognizes that as J. B. Harley states, "[m]aps are never value-free images ... [c]artography can be 'a form of knowledge and a form of power' (1988)." Our article explores our development of a critical cartographic consciousness in order to aid Indigenous communities in how they engage with one of the most prevalent informational technologies currently in use in many of these communities' modern cartography/GIS. © Jay T. Johnson, Renee Pualani Louis and Albertus Hadi Pramono, 2006.
The art of tracking may have been the origin of science.
This report focuses on the growing interest in the relationship between maps, narratives and metanarratives. Following a brief historical contextualization of these relationships, this report explores their current state in the Geoweb era. Using the distinction between story maps and grid maps as an analytical framework, I review emerging issues around the extensive use of technologies and online mapping services (i.e. Google maps) to convey stories and to produce new ones. Drawing on literature in film studies, literary studies, visual arts, computer science and communication, I also emphasize the emergence of new forms of spatial expressions interested in providing different perspectives about places and about stories associated to places. In sum, I argue that mapping both vernacular knowledge and fiction is central to understanding places in depth.
Is it legitimate to examine human social systems in terms of the principles of complexity thinking? Stacey (2001), for one, says no. This essay explores the possibility that one can employ the principles of complexity by substituting the idea of "storied spaces" for complexity's complex adaptive systems. From this point of view, one can think of human social life as an intricate nested network of spaces - family and work group, organization and community, profession and nation - in which membership depends on the acceptance of negotiated stories by which each grouping defines the nature of the world and how people in the group must respond to prosper. Each such storied space affects its members' behavior through an interplay between its historically grounded dominant narrative, such as national culture, and the antenarrative stories people in it tell as they try to cope with emerging phenomenon. This interplay creates a network of interpretation, meaning and knowledge that characterizes any human grouping. As a specific example, the essay examines what it would mean to took at business organizations as storied spaces, considering particularly how such a theory of organization explains differences between AT&T and 3M.
The Cognitive Basis of Science concerns the question 'What makes science possible?' Specifically, what features of the human mind and of human culture and cognitive development permit and facilitate the conduct of science? The essays in this volume address these questions, which are inherently interdisciplinary, requiring co-operation between philosophers, psychologists, and others in the social and cognitive sciences. They concern the cognitive, social, and motivational underpinnings of scientific reasoning in children and lay persons as well as in professional scientists. The editors' introduction lays out the background to the debates, and the volume includes a consolidated bibliography that will be a valuable reference resource for all those interested in this area. The volume will be of great importance to all researchers and students interested in the philosophy or psychology of scientific reasoning, as well as those, more generally, who are interested in the nature of the human mind.
An investigation of the “occurrent arts” through the concepts of the “semblance” and “lived abstraction.”
Events are always passing; to experience an event is to experience the passing. But how do we perceive an experience that encompasses the just-was and the is-about-to-be as much as what is actually present? In Semblance and Event, Brian Massumi, drawing on the work of William James, Alfred North Whitehead, Gilles Deleuze, and others, develops the concept of “semblance” as a way to approach this question.
It is, he argues, a question of abstraction, not as the opposite of the concrete but as a dimension of it: “lived abstraction.” A semblance is a lived abstraction. Massumi uses the category of the semblance to investigate practices of art that are relational and event-oriented—variously known as interactive art, ephemeral art, performance art, art intervention—which he refers to collectively as the “occurrent arts.” Each art practice invents its own kinds of relational events of lived abstraction, to produce a signature species of semblance. The artwork's relational engagement, Massumi continues, gives it a political valence just as necessary and immediate as the aesthetic dimension.
Deleuze and Guattari discuss the rhizome as being "absolutely different from roots and radicles" 6. The rhizome is explained via principles. 1 and 2: connection and heterogeneity.: "any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be". Principle 3: "Principle of multiplicity" "There are no points or positions in a rhizome, such as those found in a structure, tree, or root. There are only lines". Principle 4: "Principle of asignifying rupture" "There is a rupture in the rhizome whenever segmentary lines explode into a line of flight, but the line of flight is part of the rhizome." Principles 5 and 6: Principle of cartography and decalcomania: Where traditional thought is 'tracing', a rhizome is a map. Tracing involves laying onto reality the pattern of structure, itself a construct. "The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious". They take the term plateau from Gregory Bateson, it refers to a sustained intensity. "We call a 'plateau' any multiplicity connected to other multiplicities by superficial underground stems in such a way as to form or extend a rhizome".
"Write with slogans: Make rhizomes, not roots, never plant!"
The Allgäu had remained relatively unscathed by the war. Only now, in the final days of the war, did the refugees start to arrive. Helmut O. Goeze describes the situation very aptly: Since early April 1945, all the towns south of Sonthofen were teeming with refugees, especially Oberstdorf and Hindelang; all of the hotels and guest houses were full, as were many farmhouses. During the final days of the war some 2000 members of the Wehrmacht and the SS came to Ostrachtal, to the small villages of Hindelang, Oberstdorf and Hinterstein, as well as to the high meadow valleys and alpine huts of the Ostrachtaler Mountains. This area formed a part of the “Alpine Fortress,” which was to be held to the bitter end — a very dangerous situation for the small town of Hinterstein with some 75 houses arranged in three main clusters in the narrow valley: the first village with its chapel, the center one with its parish church, and the last with its old baroque chapel. Further back, atop a large meadow and at the entrance to a ten-kilometer-long, high-lying valley, was an enormous labor camp; later, refugees and children would also find shelter here. There were also anti-aircraft and field guns — a “Wallenstcin’s Camp of the first order.” In total, there were at least 1200 refugees, 2000 soldiers and some 100 workers, as well as countless VIPs in search of a last-minute hideout. By early May 1945 almost all Germany was occupied, rendering the defense of the Alpine Fortress completely meaningless, as was the destruction of bridges and power plants.
List of Illustrations Series Editor's Note by James Akerman Editor's Preface by G. Malcolm Lewis Introduction by G. Malcolm Lewis Ch. 1: Frontier Encounters in the Field: 1511-1925 G. Malcolm Lewis Ch. 2: Encounters in Government Bureaus, Archives, Museums, and Libraries, 1782-1911 G. Malcolm Lewis Ch. 3: Hiatus Leading to a Renewed Encounter G. Malcolm Lewis Ch. 4: Recent and Current Encounters G. Malcolm Lewis Ch. 5: Maps of Territory, History, and Community in Aztec Mexico Elizabeth Hill Boone Ch. 6: Inland Journeys, Native Maps Barbara Belyea Ch. 7: Native Mapping in Southern New England Indian Deeds Margaret Wickens Pearce Ch. 8: Eighteenth-Century Arkansas Illustrated: A Map within an Indian Painting? Morris S. Arnold Ch. 9: Indian Maps of the Colonial Southeast: Archaeological Implications and Prospects Gregory A. Waselkov Ch. 10: Debriefing Explorers Amerindian Information in the Delisles' Mapping of the Southeast Patricia Galloway Ch. 11: Orientations from Their Side: Dimensions of Native American Cartographic Discourse Peter Nabokov Ch. 12: Future Encounters in New Contexts G. Malcolm Lewis About the Contributors Index
Since 2003 our research team has been interviewing Iñupiat elders and incorporating their indigenous knowledge (IK) about the environment into a specially designed Geographic Information System (GIS). We present a synthesis of the climate and landscape change information shared during the IK GIS project. We also summarize observations, which are not geographically specific and thus not expressible as GIS data points. We present several analyses of our dataset to date. These include a frequency analysis of the topically classified geocoded observations based on elder interviews, a summary of the geographic distribution of those observations, and a discussion of non-georeferenced observations. We identify several themes that IK holders and elders felt were crucial to record and discuss. Many of these observations include environmental, cultural, and historical knowledge, and reflect the perception that their world has substantially changed in the course of their lifetimes.
The centenary of the Berlin conference of 1884-85 was an opportunity for historians to reiterate the view that the conference was not convened to partition Africa. It follows from the imperial function of the conference that subsequent colonialism was a short-lived aberration in four centuries of a continuing imperial relationship between Europe and Africa. The established attributes which differentiate imperialism from colonialism provide a framework for understanding the cartographic evolution of Africa. The long-standing view of an eighteenth century cartographic reformation of Africa is challenged. Pre-colonial cartography of Africa is, instead, characterized by methodological continuity, which is still evident in the cartography of the nineteenth century European explorers, whereas the major discontinuity coincides with the beginnings of colonial rule. The cartographic requirements for the implementation of colonial rule on the ground are different from those which foster a more remote imperial relationship. The attributes of imperial cartography are now reasserting themselves in the post-colonial period.
Co-operative resource management holds out the promise of positive social change on two fronts: improved management and the empowerment of local communities. The institutionalization of co-management discourse and practice, however, has unintended political consequences analogous to those identified by recent critics of development discourse. As a result, co-management may actually be preventing rather than fostering the kind of change proponents desire. In this paper, I examine the discourse and practice of co-management and how they constrain the ways people can act-and even think-about wildlife management. I focus on the case of the Ruby Range Sheep Steering Committee, a co-management body established to address concerns about a population of Dall Sheep in the southwest Yukon.
This book provides an essential insight into the practices and ideas of maps and map-making. It draws on a wide range of social theorists, and theorists of maps and cartography, to show how maps and map-making have shaped the spaces in which we live.
Relations between explorers of early Canada and their English publishers are sufficiently complex as to call into question the customary straightforward equation that readers draw between explorers' eyewitness experience and the narrative account of them, issued some time after their return to England. Captain Cook's first published narrative is the notorious case in point. Narratives of exploration played important roles in the establishment of imperial claims. The case of the publishing house of John Murray, good friend of Sir John Barrow, Second Secretary to the Admiralty for much of the early 19th century, offers an examination of much of the discursive shaping of the Canadian Arctic during the British Navy's search for a Northwest Passage. Archival materials pertaining to two of Murray's books, from John Franklin's first Arctic Land Expedition (1819-22) and from George Back's voyage to Hudson Bay (1836-37), place on view the process by which narratives of exploration evolved through the authorization of them by the Admiralty (Sir John Barrow) and the preparation of them by a publisher (John Murray) into published commodities.Key words: George Back, John Barrow, John Franklin, John Murray Publishers, publishing history, HMS Terror, Northwest Passage
Cartographers can broaden their field by developing methods to understand cultural processes in historical and contemporary maps. Inuit maps have been noted for their high level of accuracy. A cultural interpretation of this characteristic accounts for implied linkages between mapping and other forms of Inuit environmental behavior and thought. Inuit maps as acts rather than as artifacts are one form of environmental mimicry. The act of making accurate maps reinforced the value of mimicry in traditional Inuit society.
What does the history of exploration look like when approached from a different disciplinary perspective, that of the history of books? Focusing on the long eighteenth century, this essay reframes exploration histories that typically retrace continuities between explorers, by focusing instead on the discontinuities in the changing conditions of authorship and publication. Specifically, the essay considers the convergence of exploration and book history at three critical junctures: at the turn of the eighteenth century (Dampier), in the mid-to-late eighteenth century (Cook), and in the early nineteenth century (Ross). What if we shifted the ground of inquiry away from the geographic routes these explorers retraced, to the publication protocols that made their books possible in their particular forms, under changing models of authorship? And what if we expanded our inquiry beyond metropolitan print, to include inscriptions in site-specific media-like stone and ice? By looking at the contingent circumstances of publication, inscription, and authorship within eighteenth-century British exploration, the essay uncouples the seemingly unchanging relations between exploration, publication, and authorship.
The Mackenzie Delta Region of Northwestern Canada is a dynamic environment that is ecologically and culturally significant. This region is experiencing environmental change that is expected to worsen with continued climate warming and additional anthropogenic stressors. In this project, we developed and field-tested a monitoring program that used participatory photography to document local observations. Working with local Hunter and Trapper Committees and the Inuvialuit Joint Secretariat, we adapted a participatory photomapping method to document Inuvialuit observations of environmental conditions using digital cameras and GPS units. Subsequently, photo-elicitation interviews added a detailed narrative to each georeferenced observation. Approximately 150 of these observations were entered into a web-based map. Interviews with cultural experts and potential map users suggest that web-based mapping is an effective way to document and share local environmental observations and concerns. The visual and oral elements of digital multimedia also fit well with Inuvialuit culture, which is based on traditions of orally transmitting knowledge and learning by watching and doing. Overall, this research highlights the effectiveness of using georeferenced photos to document and share Inuvialuit observations and indicates that participatory photomapping monitoring programs can significantly improve capacity to detect the impacts of environmental change and contribute to northern planning and decision-making.
Th e point is sometimes made that, like language, material culture is a ubiquitous feature of human life. Indeed, material culture may be regarded as one of the defi ning charac-teristics of being human: it has long been a convention to assert that to be human is to speak, and to make and use tools (Miller and Tilley 1996: 5; cf. Gibson and Ingold 1993). But whereas the systematic study of language has been codifi ed in the academic discipline of linguistics, or deconstructed in literary and translation studies, it is inter-esting to note that no equivalent discipline has emerged to address the systematic study of human artifacts. Th e study of material culture has, rather, been scattered across a number of disciplines and, as a result, is presented as a somewhat "undisciplined" fi eld of academic inquiry. In the inaugural editorial of the Journal of Material Culture , something of a mani-festo for contemporary material culture studies, these undisciplined possibilities were embraced by the editors as an advantage. As well as off ering an array of new issues to ex-plore, and methodologies to draw upon, this would encourage "the cross-fertilization of ideas and approaches between people concerned with the material constitution of social relations," and ensure a commitment to "a politics of inclusion" (Miller and Tilley 1996: 5–6). Th us conceived, material culture studies is said to thrive "as a rather undisciplined substitute for a discipline" (Miller 2010: 1), unfettered by the conservatism that can blight established disciplines, "with their boundary-maintaining devices, institutional structures, accepted texts, methodologies, internal debates and circumscribed areas of study" (Miller and Tilley 1996: 5). Th e interdisciplinarity of approaches to material culture studies seems to be born out in practice: among the contributors to the Journal of Material Culture are to be found geographers and historians, archaeologists and museologists, sociologists and psycholo-gists, art historians and students of design, as well as anthropologists. Yet, despite this 3085-195-P3-018-1pass-r03.indd 370 3085-195-P3-018-1pass-r03.indd 370 8/10/2012 3:55:16 AM 8/10/2012 3:55:16 AM MATERIAL CULTURE 371 eclecticism, the claim that material culture studies has "no obvious genealogy of ances-tors," "no obvious disciplinary home" (Miller and Tilley 1996: 5), can be questioned and its position in relation to the broader anthropological project reassessed. An objective of the fi rst half of this chapter is, therefore, to trace something of the anthropological pedigree of the study of material culture. To acknowledge this heritage is not to undermine the cross-fertilization characteristic of contemporary material cul-ture studies, but it does enable us to recognize that this is a signifi cant area in which anthropological ideas and approaches have taken root and have been infl uential in shap-ing wider academic debates within, between, and across disciplinary orientations. Due to the limitations of space, this will necessarily be a partial history, and one that fore-grounds the development of the infl uential "school" of material culture studies associ-ated with the Department of Anthropology at University College London (the editorial base of the Journal of Material Culture). Th ere are, of course, other ancestors and lineages that a more comprehensive account would need to explore, not least greater attention to distinct Continental and North American traditions. Th e chapter is not, however, in-tended primarily as a historical contribution. Hence, the second part goes on to discuss some of the more important trends and debates within material culture studies today.
Over the past decade research examining the human dimensions of climatic change in the Arctic has expanded significantly and has become the dominant framework through which the relations between northern peoples and climatic change are understood by scholars, policy makers, political leaders, and the media. This paper critically examines the assumptions, exclusions, and orientations that characterize this broad literature, and suggests revising and expanding the terms upon which it is carried out. It focuses in particular on the exclusion of colonialism from the study of human vulnerability and adaptation to climatic change, the framing of Indigenous peoples and communities in terms of the local and the traditional, and the ways in which efforts to improve the lives of northern Indigenous peoples risk perpetuating colonial relations. The paper argues that these exclusions and orientations lead scholars to systematically overlook the immense importance of resource extraction and shipping as human dimensions of climatic change in the Canadian Arctic, and it examines the implications of such oversights.
This paper focuses on the 'cultural turn' which has taken place in British and to a lesser extent North American and Australian human geography in the last decade. It begins by exploring what constitutes the cultural in what has been dubbed 'new cultural geography'. It then explores contemporary claims that cultural geography has eclipsed or marginalised social geography. The final section evaluates these claims about the demise of the social, arguing that the social has not been evacuated but rather has been redefined. While this paper tells a specific story about a particular tradition and geographical frame of reference, it nonetheless has wider relevance because it provides an example of the differential development of particular sub-disciplinary areas, of the way subdisciplinary knowledges shape each other, and of the way understandings of disciplinary trends are contested.
This chapter discusses the ongoing development of a Web-based Atlas of the Antarctic region entitled the Cybercartographic Atlas of Antarctica (The Atlas). An overview of the design, development, and ongoing implementation of The Atlas is presented. Central to The Atlas development approach is the extensive analysis of the needs of a general public target user group. Through user needs analysis (UNA), specifications are established and prototypes used to test concepts before expensive development tasks are carried out. Constant feedback between process stages is built into this iterative User-Centred Design (UCD) approach. The UCD results provide specifications for many aspects of cartographic design, including interface elements, usage context, and information architecture. The chapter presents preliminary interface designs built on content supported by a prototype mediator-based system architecture. The concluding sections discuss emerging research challenges and directions in terms of cartographic representation, atlas design, and systems development.
Mapping the `new violent cartography', an inter-articulation of geographic imaginaries and antagonisms, based on models of identity-difference, this article begins with the analysis of a piece of photo-journalism, an image of a US soldier in a bombed-out bunker during the war in Afghanistan, and goes on to trace the institutions that are part of the contemporary aspects of militarization and securitization constituting the `war on terror'. The article ends with an analysis of the anti-war impetus of cinema and the cinematic spaces of film festivals.