Bernard Debarbieux - The Politics of Mapping

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SCIENCES

Geography and Demography, Field Director – Denise Pumain

Political Geography , Subject Head – Frédéric Giraut

Coordinated by

Bernard Debarbieux

Irène Hirt

First published 2022 in Great Britain and the United States by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms and licenses issued by the CLA. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms should be sent to the publishers at the undermentioned address:

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© ISTE Ltd 2022

The rights of Bernard Debarbieux and Irène Hirt to be identified as the authors of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s), contributor(s) or editor(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of ISTE Group.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021951707

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-78945-067-5

ERC code:

SH2 Institutions, Values, Environment and Space

SH2_1 Political systems, governance

SH2_11 Human, economic and social geography

SH2_12 GIS, spatial analysis; big data in political, geographical and legal studies

Bernard DEBARBIEUX and Irène HIRT

University of Geneva, Switzerland

The focus on the relationship between mapping 1, on the one hand, and politics or power, on the other hand, is certainly not new, or even recent. For centuries, particularly in the Christian, Chinese and Arab-Muslim worlds, the people who commissioned maps (princes, ministers or heads of state) and the cartographers clearly believed that maps must, first and foremost, serve the objectives of knowledge and the control of territories by sovereigns, armies and state administrations.

In the Western world, the proximity between maps and political power became less visible around the 18th century, when the discourse among cartographers began to focus on the techniques of production, the accuracy of the representation and the scientific value of the knowledge produced. This shift became even more pronounced in the 20th century when the scientific analysis of the map corpus and reflection on map production itself became essentially guided by a belief in the progress of techniques and knowledge. This led to the triumph of verism in the representation of the Earth’s surface, accuracy in the representation of data and optimization in the communication of knowledge. This threefold objective was achieved through the increasing sophistication of modern societies, techniques and policies. A few key figures in cartographic thinking in the second half of the 20th century embodied this ambition. Among these figures, Bertin (1983 [1967]) reflected on the visual and semiological effectiveness of maps. However, from the 18th to the 20th centuries, this discourse on the efficiency of maps was often voiced by authors working directly or indirectly for political authorities, sometimes even within their institutions. The added value maps held for the exercise of power tended to escape critical reflection, since it became consubstantial with cartographic knowledge, on the one hand, and with government know-how, on the other hand.

The emergence of an alternative research program with this type of reflection as its objective can be traced back to the 1970s and 1980s. Referred to as “critical cartography”, it is largely in line with the French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish approaches to the “social and political uses of maps”. This program proposes a critical interpretation of cartographic production in history, highlighting the socially constructed dimension of the map and its capacity to support strategies and relationships of power/knowledge as conceptualized by Michel Foucault. The break with the hitherto dominant approaches is remarkable. The main innovation of the 1970s and 1980s involved breaking away from the modernist and evolutionist narrative to question that which had been largely left out of the field of reflection, namely the political, but also social and contextual dimensions of cartographic commissioning and production. The historian of cartography Brian Harley emerged as a leading figure in this breakthrough (Blakemore and Harley 1980; Harley 1988a, pp. 277–312, 1988b, 2001). The publication of his article “Deconstructing the Map” (1989) had a major influence on thought about the “power of maps”. His work has become a classic despite its theoretical and methodological shortcomings, which are noted by even Harley’s greatest advocates, as Reuben Rose-Redwood (2015) pointed out in the special issue of the journal Cartographica published in 2015: “Deconstructing the Map: 25 years on”.