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Maps Knowledge Power

J B Harley’s “Maps, Knowledge, and Power”

Main Theses

• “Maps have never been value-free representations of place” (Aitchson 30)
• Representations of space “ways of conceiving, articulating, and structuring the human world which is biased towards, promoted by, and exerts influence upon particular sets of social relations” (qtd in Aitchson 30) (278)
• Maps “may be interpreted a form of discourse” (300)
  • in which “the ideological arrows have tended to fly in one direction, from the powerful to the weaker in society” (300-1)
  • Maps “tend to ‘desocialise’ the territory they represent. They foster the notion of a socially empty space.” (303) and thus “lessens the burden of conscience about people in a landscape” (303)

Maps

• 277: “socially constructed form of knowledge”
• 278: “part of the broader family of value-laden images”
  • “refracted images contributing to dialogue in a socially constructed world”
  • They are not either “wrong” or “right,” ie in terms of scientific accuracy
• 278: “became a political force in society”
  • Just putting something on a map is a political statement!
  • Think about boundaries, propaganda, enforcing law and order
  • Helped empire, supervising the population, etc
    • “Maps anticipated empire” (282) b/c you see the land on paper before in actuality
    • Used for exploring, and then for administering and controlling
    • Because maps are so abstract, you don’t really think about the actual consequences of “seizing” someone else’s country (282)
  • As an “intellectual weapon” used by the state to gain and keep power
  • As key part of the nation-state system
    • The state is the “key patron” of mapmakers (284)
  • As weapons: they are “sensitive”
    • They “facilitate the technical conduct of warfare, but also palliate the sense of guilt…the silent lines of the paper landscape foster the notion of socially empty space” (284)
• As property rights
  • Can control your property better w/maps
  • Maps “designed to make permanent a social order” in which you owned land and others didn’t 285
  • As a part of growth from feudalism to capitalism
    • “new geographical division of labor” (285) so everything is “more efficiently exploited”
    • as “graphic inventory” of your land, to seize power over them better b/c you can visualize them (285)
• Seen as scientific
• They impose ORDER on land (282)
• Effects on the People
  • Similar to the regulation of time (285)
  • Commons: now allotted carefully, divided up
• Maps/globes in paintings
  • Affirm the person’s power: this is the land I own, it says, and by extension it proves power
  • Also in photographs, cartoons, movies

Method

• Panofsky’s Studies in Iconology (1839): with iconology as a method that saw two levels of meaning, a surface one (literal) and a “deep” one (symbolic) (279)
  • Maps too!
• Foucault: Knowledge as a form of power
  • Extends it to cartography
• Anthony Giddens, The Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism
  • How the state controls information dissemination
  • “storage of authoritative resources” for the “retention and control of information” 279
• As Literature
  • ie, find the context for the map, just like rhetorical “speech situation”

How Do They Reflect Values?

• “a kind of language” 278
  • or, a kind of “literature,” thus allowing you to talk about authorship, censorship, literacy of maps
  • discourse: “those aspects of a text which are appraisive, evaluative, persausive, or rhetorical, as opposed to those which simply name, locate, and recount” (Robert Scholes)
• Types of Distortion (despite cartography’s contentment with its objectivity, as long as you’re scientific you’re okay 287)
  • Deliberate
    • Mood choices: typography, color, relative sizes, uses of decorative imagery/keys
    • Content selectivity: just “oops” leave things out
    • Censorship: you don’t let others see it, just you (ie, military only)
    • Distorting Projection
    • Strategic Exclusions/Changes (esp for enemy…; ex: nuclear waste dumps NOT in USGS maps 289)
  • Unconscious Distortions
    • Geometry
      • that is, relation to the land they map
      • ie, what’s in the “middle” of the map (probably your own country, eh?)
    • Silences
      • Huts of Irish were left out by English cartographers
      • Mapmakers ignoring poor areas and alleys and courtyards; focusing on the grand areas of the city (why? “civic pride” 292)
    • Bad Projection
      • Or, just the fact that you’re in the middle makes your territory accurately mapped and others not
      • For Europe, it actually made their future colonies look smaller than them
    • Hierarchy Systems
      • Icons used to denote towns: selected according to the relative importance of the towns
      • Thus, you show what you think is important, “often a replica of legal, feudal, and ecclesiastical stratifications” ie status quo 292
      • Ex: castles had larger “size” on the map than the villages, despite villages being much bigger (294)
    • Decoration
      • Emblems, title pages, cartouches, compass roses, borders etc
      • Arches, globes royal emblems, people, coast of arms
      • “Bizarre racism” of some (299)
  • How can they do this? “Symbolic realism” (299)
    • You assume they’re “real”
    • And yet, accuracy is always about authority, Harley notes (300)
      • Accuracy itself demonstrates authority, rather than objectivity

Annotated Bib

Harley�s classic essay on the interested construction of maps remains an important checkpoint for students of imperial or postmodern geography. Emphasizing maps� existence as a �manipulated form of knowledge� (277), Harley differentiates his unique exploration of the visual codes of mapping from previous scholarship on the topic by historicizing maps (by trying to understand the visual cues from the perspective of the original audience of maps) and by trying to outline the specific semiotics of mapmaking itself as an art apart from the broader social science of geography. He begins by situating maps within the larger field of �value-laden images� (278) and by asserting the existence of a �literature� of maps, so that analyses of maps should partake of both literary theory and visual rhetoric studies. Literary studies in particular could illuminate how Eurocentric biases show in maps by both the selection of and the presentation of the map�s content, as well as lead the way in analyzing the particular audiences of maps and their levels of map literacy. Even more specifically, Harley uses a Foucauldian framework to analyze the relationship between map and empire, showing how the production of discourse (that is, the production of maps) made possible European political power over imperial lands. In particular, because of the direct power of visual symbols, cartographical conventions and symbology rapidly begin to appear as geographical facts, and because of the high cost and large amount of human effort required to produce maps, mapmaking provides little opportunity for subversive, alternative, or popular modes of mapmaking to combat this tendency of cartographical symbols to turn into geographical fact. After this initial stage of situating his study of maps within current social science practice, Harley then gives historical examples of mapmaking in order to show how maps have traditionally acted as signs of political power, not only symbolically but also quite practically as means for aiding surveying, warfare, taxation, the centralization of government, etc, and even thus contributed to the rise of nation-states and of modern property laws. Harley explains how maps� complicity with empire formation and expansion stems from the very format of maps; dealing with paper, ink, and scales that used one inch for one mile make trading land as simple and as detached from reality as current military pilots are from the targets of the bombs they carry. Representational hierarchies and carefully calculated omissions can simultaneously code for and cover up racial prejudices, economic imbalances, and institutional power-grabbing.