Fall 2024 | Yale University
Our modern territorial assumptions influence nearly every part of our life. They justify state sponsored war and restrictions on immigration, and they determine an individual’s chances for receiving reliable health care or attending quality schools. They even shape our own identities, from feelings of neighborhood pride to nationality and race. This course uses cartography – especially scientific cartography and its competitors – as a lens for analyzing modern territory and sovereignty. Maps help focus our attention on a number of related problems. How is territory claimed? Why do we trust maps, and should we ever regard them as “objective”? Are nations the cause or the result of the modern nation state? How do ideas about measuring and representing geographic space influence encounters between different cultures?
We will begin by thinking about how maps can be understood as instruments of power. The bulk of the course then explores how questions of territory and identity have aligned with new ways of producing, using, or challenging maps. The first half of the course looks at the relationship between maps and territorial states: the creation of boundaries, the invention of nationalism, and the tensions of internationalism and globalization. In the second half of the course we will then turn to other types of territories, other traditions of mapping, and the various ways that the scientific map has been contested.
General
Readings
September 3: Introduction
PART I: CARTOGRAPHY AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF NATIONAL STATES
September 10: Cartography and Power
J. B. Harley, “Deconstructing the Map,” Cartographica 26 (1989), pp. 1–20.
Mark Monmonier, How to Lie with Maps (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), introduction, chapter 10, and epilogue.
Matthew Edney, “The Irony of Imperial Mapping,” in James Akerman, ed., The Imperial Map (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), pp. 11–46.
Denis Wood and John Krygier, “Maps,” The Encyclopedia of Human Geography (New York: Elsevier, 2009), 10 pp.
September 17: Boundaries
John Stilgoe, “Jack o’ Lanterns to Surveyors: The Secularization of Landscape Boundaries,” Environmental Review 1 (1976), pp. 14–30.
Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), introduction, chapters 1 and 2, conclusion, and epilogue.
D. Graham Burnett, Masters of All They Surveyed: Exploration, Geography, and a British El Dorado (2000), introduction, chapter 6, and conclusion.
September 24: Nations and Nationalism
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 2nd edition (London: Verso, 1991), introduction and chapter 10.
Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994), introduction, chapters 6, 7, 8, and conclusion.
Martin Brückner, The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy, and National Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), introduction and chapter 3.
October 1: Propaganda
John Pickles, “Texts, Hermeneutics, and Propaganda Maps,” in Trevor Barnes and James Duncan, eds., Writing Worlds: Discourse, Text, and Metaphor in the Representation of Landscape (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 193–230.
Guntram Henrik Herb, Under the Map of Germany: Nationalism and Propaganda, 1918–1945 (New York: Routledge, 1996).
October 8: Placing the United States in the World
Susan Schulten, The Geographical Imagination in America, 1880–1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
Alan K. Henrikson, “The Map as an ‘Idea’: The Role of Cartographic Imagery During the Second World War,” The American Cartographer 2 (1975), pp. 19–53.
October 15: From Colonial to Post-Colonial
Timothy Barney, “The Peters Projection and the Latitude and Longitude of Recolonization,” Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 7 (2014), pp. 103–126.
Sumathi Ramaswamy, The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), introduction, chapters 1, 2, and conclusion.
October 22: Territory and Globalization
Peter J. Taylor, “The State as Container: Territoriality in the Modern World-System,” Progress in Human Geography 18 (1994), pp. 151–162.
Charles Maier, “Consigning the Twentieth Century to History,” American Historical Review 105 (2000), pp. 807–831.
William Rankin, After the Map: Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), introduction, chapters 1, 2, and conclusion.
PART II: MAPPING OTHER SPACES / MAPPING SPACES OTHERWISE
October 29: Cartography in East Asia
Marcia Yonemoto, Mapping Early Modern Japan: Space, Place, and Culture in the Tokugawa Period (1603–1868) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
Laura Hostetler, “Contending Cartographic Claims? The Qing Empire in Manchu, Chinese, and European Maps,” in James Akerman, ed., The Imperial Map (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), pp. 93–132.
November 5: Mapping Sacred Geographies
Evelyn Edson, Mapping Time and Space: How Medieval Mapmakers Viewed their World (London: British Library, 1997), chapters 1, 5, 6, 7, 8, and conclusion.
Manoucher Parvin and Maurie Sommer, “Dar al-Islam: The Evolution of Muslim Territoriality and Its Implications for Conflict Resolution in the Middle East,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 11 (1980), pp. 1–21.
Karen Pinto, “Passion and Conflict: Medieval Islamic Views of the West,” in Keith Lilley, ed., Mapping Medieval Geographies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 201–224.
November 12: American Indians and European Conquest
J. B. Harley, “New England Cartography and the Native American,” in Baker et al, eds., American Beginnings (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), pp. 287–314.
William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), preface and chapter 4.
Barbara Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), introduction and chapters 1–5.
November 19: Statistical Mapping and the Politics of Visibility
Tom Koch, Disease Maps (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), chapter 1 and part 2.
Christian Topalov, “The City as Terra Incognita: Charles Booth’s Poverty Survey and the People of London, 1886–1891,” Planning Perspectives 8 (1993; orig. 1991), pp. 395–425. See also the full maps – in color – on the website.
William Rankin, “Race and the Territorial Imaginary: Reckoning with the Demographic Cartography of the United States,” Modern American History.
December 3: Counter-Cartographies and Indigenous Rights
Benjamin Orlove, “Mapping Reeds and Reading Maps: The Politics of Representation in Lake Titicaca,” American Ethnologist 18 (1991), pp. 3–38.
Nancy Lee Peluso, “Whose Woods are These? Counter-Mapping Forest Territories in Kalimantan, Indonesia,” Antipode 27 (1995), pp. 383–406.
Michael T. Bravo, “The Accuracy of Ethnoscience: A Study of Inuit Cartography and Cross-Cultural Commensurability,” Manchester Papers in Social Anthropology 2 (1996), pp. 1–26.
David Turnbull, “Mapping encounters and (en)countering maps: A critical examination of cartographic resistance,” Knowledge and Society 11 (1998), pp. 15–44.
Severin Halder and Boris Michel, introduction to This Is Not an Atlas (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2018), pp. 12–21.