Paper short abstract:

This paper presents some reflections on the problems anthropologists face in studying the corpus of Native American colonial maps as the expression of a hypothetical "Native American" spatial cognition and explores possible methodological alternatives to this essentialist approach.

Paper long abstract:

To avoid taking an essentialist approach to "Native American cartographic thinking", it seems necessary to focus on ethnographic case studies. But this is rarely possible. We propose to link this methodological question to the examination of the debates that have gone through the iconological approaches attached to the names of E. Panofsky, F.Saxl or E. Gombrich. The suggestion is that the morphological approach proposed by the historian C. Ginzburg who had himself discussed the work of the "Warburgian school", offers a way of analysis for these cartographic images. By creating a context that is both ethnographic and historical, it would then be possible to avoid the pitfalls of naïve expressionism and excessive critical scepticism.