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Accepted Paper:
Spatial stories: mapping the social relations of power on 19th century OS maps of Ireland
Angele Smith
(University of Northern British Columbia)
Paper short abstract:
This paper applies an hermeneutic approach to de Certeau's maps and tours to highlight the multiplicity of perceptions, readings and understandings of the landscape. It challenges colonial map doctrines of uncontested and total control over landscape representation and the social relations of place.
Paper long abstract:
In 'Practice of Everyday Life' (1984) de Certeau examines the binary opposition between maps and tours, where the static and fixed portrayal on the map represents the colonial and scientific control over and appropriation of the landscape, while the dynamic and sensory tour is the lived experience of moving through and knowing a landscape. Yet, what this discounts is that the act of 'using' and 'knowing' a map is itself a spatial story. It is a journey of the experience of reading and walking with the map. Applying a hermeneutic approach to de Certeau's maps and tours we are better able to recognize the multiplicity of perceptions, readings and understandings of the map (and the landscape). In doing so, we thus challenge the interpretation of the colonial map as having uncontested and complete control over the representation of landscape and the social relations of place. In the 19th c. the British Ordnance Survey undertook an enormous mapping project of Ireland. The purpose of the survey was to aid the reformation of the county taxation system but the mapping also served the goal of gathering cultural information and producing images of the Irish landscape, its people and its past in the exacting scale of six map inches for every mile. As an army of British soldier surveyors arrived in Ireland, a complex web of social relations and interactions became scripted on the local landscape and ultimately on the map document. Looking at the actors involved in the making of the map, we better understand the multiplicity of the, sometimes conflicting, motivations and perspectives -colonial/national/local - that shaped the map and its use, creating tours or spatial stories of the mapping process.
E-paper: this Paper will not be presented, but read in advance and discussed
Maps and the materiality of movement
EPapers