The Politics of Mapping. Bernard Debarbieux

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Название The Politics of Mapping
Автор произведения Bernard Debarbieux
Жанр География
Серия
Издательство География
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781119986744



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Arctic, Australian and Pacific societies (Woodward and Lewis 1998, pp. 1–10), which constitutes a reference for several chapters of this book – that reaffirmed this necessity by relying on the anthropological plurality of the act of mapping. The political dimension of this development is twofold: on the one hand, in epistemological terms, it put an end to what Harley himself had called “scientific chauvinism” (Harley 1987, p. 4) in cartography; in other words, it challenged the Western hegemony over the definition of what a map and what cartographic knowledge is. On the other hand, this “more-than-representational” interpretation deepened the analysis of the expressions of power; this is no longer limited to the study of the map’s commissioners’ intentions or to their social and political effects; it also deals with the relationships of power as they unfold in mapping processes and practices.

      Finally, the range of theories and concepts that have been mobilized to think about and operationalize a critical cartography of state and colonial production has expanded considerably over time. The Marxist critique of the 1970s, which was in some ways the inaugural one, gave way to more detailed analyses of the relationships of power and domination as expressed in cartographic production, while also turning to questions of identity and culture (identity politics), under the influence of cultural studies and post-colonial and decolonial criticism. The problem of gender, on the other hand, has long constituted a silence in the approaches that are part of the “Harleyian tradition”. Indeed, while Harley was particularly sensitive to the intentional and unintentional silences of maps (Harley 1988b), he himself remained silent on the role of women in cartographic production and on one of the most structuring categories of social relations: gender. According to Nikolas Huffman, this blind spot is due to conceptions of society and space that have long since naturalized the masculinist episteme of science, and thus also of mapping (Huffman 1995, pp. 1622–1630).

      The second objective of this collective work is to point out a series of social and technical transformations that force us to move away from the implicit equivalence between mapping, power and the state. In addition to the fact that the political analysis of societies has, on the whole, become detached from a vision centered on the state, fundamental social transformations have taken place over the last few decades in the production and use of maps and geographical information.

      I.2.1. New modalities, new actors: the questioning of cartographic state sovereignty

      The second half of the 20th century saw a major change in this field: the diversification of actors gaining access to the production of maps, which had, since at least the 19th century, been monopolized by state and military institutions. The launch of the first satellites (see Sputnik 1, sent into space by the Soviets in 1957) marked the first challenge to the cartographic sovereignty of states: indeed, outer space is marked by a legal vacuum (it refers to space beyond airspace, the latter being included in the sovereignty of states). Although the producers of satellite images were initially guided by military uses, from the 1970s onwards, remote sensing expanded its civil uses (Landsat, Spot images, etc.). However, data production has remained permanently dominated by the United States and a few other hegemonic actors (Desbois 2015). Hy Dao (see Chapter 7) shows that international governance arising after the Second World War (United Nations (UN) agencies in particular) has also adopted the production of a certain type of data, supposedly to help solve major global issues, including environmental problems.

      The second challenge to the state’s quasi-monopoly in cartographic and geographic information production occurred at the turn of the 21st century, with the digital revolution and the widespread use of the Internet and geospatial technologies. Global players such as Google benefited from the transfer of digital geographic information technologies from the military to the civilian domain (Cloud 2002; Desbois 2015). Not only have they challenged the monopoly of states in the production and dissemination of geographic information, especially on the Internet, but they have also entered the daily lives of individuals. These private companies now possess significant means of cartographic production – or, more generally, of georeferenced information – and contribute massively to the “deluge” of data and images (the famous big data).