Abstract
Political sociologists have paid closer attention of late to the territoriality of political communities, and have even begun theorizing the theme of territoriality’s legitimation. To date, however, the field has mostly overlooked the topic of maps, the quintessential territorial tool. Thus, we know little regarding maps’ crucial role in shaping modern subjects’ relationship to territory. This article argues that “map-mindedness”—i.e., the effects of map imagery on how subjects experience territory—can be productively theorized by working through the social-scientific concept of “place.” Using a range of modern and contemporary examples, I illustrate how maps can draw on and manipulate political subjects’ experience of place. Maps, I submit, allow political communities to render themselves more place-like, thus bridging the phenomenological distance between these abstract, territorially vast units and their “emplaced” subjects. More specifically, maps solve this “problem of distance” through three ideal-typical processes: 1) they render the political community as a proximate “object in the world”; 2) they present the political community as a body-like target for cathexis and identification; and 3) they mediate the traffic of meaning between the local and the national to produce a multi-scalar sense of place that can be harnessed in the service of the political community. Maps are a potent means of “re-personalizing” politics; their study suggests that territoriality is not only a form of “impersonal rule,” as recent works have observed, but always also implicated in the production of political subjects.
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Notes
For simplicity’s sake, I adopt geographer Robert Sack’s well-worn definition, which holds that “territoriality” is “the attempt by an individual or group to affect, influence, or control phenomena, or relationships, by delimiting and asserting control over a geographic area. This area will be called territory” (1986, p.19; see also: Elden 2010; Gottman 1973; Lyman and Scott 1967). Also, rather than refer to “states” or “nation-states,” I use the more inclusive term “political community.” In Weber’s scheme a “political community” features a more-or-less stable territory; a more-or-less constant group of inhabitants; dominion over that territorialized population guaranteed by the threat of violence; and the presence of extra-economic “values,” a capaciously vague category that encompasses legal as well as cultural phenomena that confer legitimacy on ruling institutions (Weber 1978, pp.54, 901–904). I use “political community” in a more open sense than Weber, to signify groups that meet these conditions but also ones that either aspire toward them or seek to challenge or disrupt another political community’s territorial dominion. Political community in this usage can thus refer just as well to empires as to small, landless ethno-nationalist groups with territorial designs.
Such distinctions also privilege the relationship that formally schooled subjects have with map imagery over what obtains between “commoners” and their “logo-maps,” with the former depicted as rooted in logical understanding and the latter seeming to function by a kind of mystified totemism. They thus overstate the importance of formal education for understanding the map’s representational logic and the roots of its authority.
Map historians and theorists trace its scientism at least back to the Enlightenment (Edney 1994a; Pickles 2004; Turnbull 1996; Wood 1992). In Edney’s account, it originates in late eighteenth-century Britons’ valorization of the measurement, quantification, conversion, and synthesis of data: activities the “mathematical cosmographer” (i.e., cartographer) was thought to partake in (1994a). Others date such scientism much further back (see, e.g., Lukermann 1999; Dalché 2007).
This may stem from ambivalence toward the topic in early sociological texts. For instance, Durkheim’s well-known musings on the spatial segregation of the sacred and profane might seem to presage, at a micro-political scale, a disciplinary focus on territoriality, and yet his L’Année sociologique routinely disparaged others’ efforts to systematize geographical and territorial thinking (see, e.g., Andrews 1984; Berdoulay 1978; Besnard 1983; Durkheim 1972). For his part, Marx conceptualizes the state as an effect of capital and an object of political struggle, but rarely as an institutional actor whose administration of territory merits reflection. Even Weber, for whom territoriality and legitimacy are twin pillars of the political community (e.g., 1978, pp. 901–904), treats the former more as a definitional criterion than an empirical phenomenon. He thus neglects to specify whether and how political communities might be tasked with legitimating themselves qua territorial organizations.
Of note are Loveman’s work on peasant resistance to Brazil’s civil registration laws (2005), Vom Hau’s demonstration of the dynamic, path-dependent relationship of territoriality and legitimacy in Argentina and Mexico (2008), and Soifer’s study of the consolidation of the state educational system across Chile’s territory (2009).
Carroll, for instance, reveals state territoriality in colonial Ireland to be a variously technical achievement blurring the boundary between governance and laboratory science (2006). Appuhn’s magisterial study of Venetian forestry management notably suggests that legitimating narratives (here, popular consensus that surrounding forests were a “public good”) can themselves promote the refinement of territoriality as a set of technical practices (2009).
Given the interdisciplinary nature of science and technology studies, the scholarship under this rubric overlaps with both political sociology and map scholarship and is, therefore, discussed in both of these sections.
This is sometimes true even of studies that attend both to the subjective dimensions of territoriality and to mapping’s role in territorial projects. For instance, Mukerji’s aforementioned works on French territoriality are deeply sensitive to the meaningful quality of land. Yet, although maps play a crucial epistemic and practical role in the realization of state infrastructural projects, they are portrayed as not quite meaningful in themselves. Rather, Mukerji writes, French territoriality was directly “demonstrated” by such projects “more than represented” (1997, p. 298; 2009, p. 5; 2011). Elsewhere, however, Mukerji grants the map’s power to shape subjective experience when she writes that “[c]artography was understood in the period to provide a means of ‘eye travel,’” (2009, pp. 193, 195; see also, Biggs 1999; Jacob 2006).
Anderson is not a map scholar per se, yet his chapter “Census, Map, Museum,” added to later editions of Imagined Communities, is among the few map-specific pieces that many sociologists have likely encountered. His thoughts on mapping are valuable, but Anderson fails to integrate them with his suggestive but fleeting observations on territory (e.g., his chapter on “Creole Pioneers”). Moreover, his analysis is fundamentally time-based, not spatial. Thanks to the output of “print capitalism,” he claims, subjects can imagine themselves living in a simultaneity-of-experience with their co-nationals. As the nation’s population is too large for its members to be actually present in one another’s lives, the nation-state relies on print to mimic the sense of synchronicity and mutual regard that obtains in face-to-face encounters. Anderson’s theory, thus, is about the mitigation of absence through a ruse of temporality.
It is important to note that map-mindedness is not dependent on substantive geographical knowledge. One can be (as the typical US citizen is reputed) a complete geographic illiterate and yet be thoroughly map-minded.
Plester et al., for example, demonstrate that children as young as four can use maps to navigate and accomplish tasks within neighborhood-sized environments (2002, p. 30). Moreover, without instruction, the children were able to identify correctly aerially-shot “photo-maps” of familiar places. In a cross-national comparison, Blades et al. too found that four-year-olds in disparate cultural settings possessed a capacity for map use, readily grasping “perspective rotation and scale reduction” (1998, p. 269). Roughly by the age of nine, children may exhibit a well-developed “survey” or map-like mental model of space, such that they are able to assimilate new information (both spatial and verbal) into this map-minded view of reality (Taylor and Tversky 1996, Uttal et al. 2006). Human beings, such studies suggest, are born with a measure of spatial ability, which can express itself as a remarkable receptivity to map influence.
As Liben writes, summarizing her previous work, “children are advantaged by seeing the same referent space mapped in different orientations or azimuths, […] in different projections, […] at different scales, […] using different graphic media (e.g., satellite imagery vs. perspective drawings vs. aerial photographs), and different symbol systems” (Liben and Myers 2007, pp. 211–212).
Topophilia is evident in such diverse cases as a homemaker’s pride for their dwellings, in proclamations of loyalty to neighborhood or city, and in emigrants’ and exiles’ yearning for “home soil.” The Poetics of Space (1994), Bachelard’s gauzy meditation on topophilia, describes how habitual interaction can transform the house from a brute geometric fact into a home (p. xxxvi).
For example, the German town of Emden and the government of Rio de Janeiro voiced grievances in 2010 and 2011, respectively (Barnes 2011).
This point is made with particular flair in a statement attributed to Sathasivam Krishnakumar, one of the LTTE’s founders, at a speech in Zurich, November 1990: “I was once asked by an Englishman connected with the British Refugee Council: ‘You say Tamil Eelam, but where are the boundaries of this Tamil Eelam that you talk about? Show me.’ I was taken aback by the directness of the question. I thought for a while, searching for an appropriate response. Then I replied: ‘Take a map of the island. Take a paint brush and paint all the areas where Sri Lanka has bombed and launched artillery attacks during these past several years. When you have finished, the painted area that you see—that is Tamil Eelam’” (quoted in Satyendra 1993).
The analysis complements other scholars’ historical reflections on the map’s seductive power, such as its having inspired in ancien régime rulers feelings of possession, mastery, and motion over territory (Jacob 2006; Kain and Baigent 1992; Revel 1991). It also rings true to pivotal historical events like the Berlin Conference, in which European rulers displayed an almost libidinal craving for pieces of mapped African space.
In the Balkans, consider Romania’s neo-fascist Nouă Dreaptă, partisans of a Greater Albania, and agitators for a United Macedonia, all of which lean on somatic map metaphors. In Argentina, the Falklands—or rather, Las Malvinas—receive treatment nearly identical to what Hungarians accord their lost territory. The twin islands’ shape is ubiquitous, appearing in murals, both public and private monuments, graffiti, protest placards, and, frequently, tattoos.
Such performances range from the frivolous (US college marching bands forming the shape of their home state), to the aspirational (protestors in India’s Telangana region forming the outline of that proposed state), to the dystopian (performers in North Korea’s “mass games” forming the shape of a united Korean Peninsula).
Without such immersive activities, warned a Hitler Youth manual, the “‘most important problems for the future of the German border area will always remain theoretical’” (quoted in Cupers 2008, p.184).
In effect, Heimat presents nation-ness as an immanent property of place, “obscur[ing] any chasms between small local worlds and the larger ones to which locality belonged” (Applegate 1990, p. 10) As Herb observes “[w]hen children learn about [a familiar place and] celebrate its splendor through activities … they are taught to recognize (and love) its ‘German’ essence. In other words, they are made aware that what they feel is not personal or local, but thoroughly German” (2004, p. 153). Conversely, Herb writes, “regions cannot be ‘imagined’ without connecting them to place-based experiences. Yet, these experiences are already thoroughly interpreted as national German; they are Heimat…” (2004, p. 154). In an odd twist, the Heimat idea helped shape the early Israeli state, imported to that country by German Jewish geographers well-versed in the concept (Leuenberger and Schnell 2010, p. 808). A Heimat-like logic also underlies the use of Israeli toponyms to inspire in Jewish-American summer-camp attendees place-attachment to Israel (Lainer-Vos 2014).
We may liken this to the pictorial interpellation of the spectator, i.e., the notion that visual artworks have the power to implicate a viewer in given scenes or situations, placing her in specific “subject positions” (e.g., as witness or voyeur) (see, e.g., Benjamin 1968; Mitchell 2005; cf. Tuan 1977), the key difference being that maps bring to bear on this phenomenon the historically-accrued epistemic power of their scientism and indexicality.
To extend this thought, cities, provinces, regions, even cardinal points, may become linked to particular facts, memories, discourses, sensory impressions, or future plans. Both zones and specific points on the map may become inscribed and enlivened by cognitive and affective content. Such associations may then be reinforced by habit. It becomes second nature to imagine one’s position relationally (e.g., “north of where I grew up,” “100 miles east of the coast,” and so forth). Regional designations—referring to someone as a “Southerner” or “West Coast-type,” for example—further naturalize this epistemology in which social meaning is geographically coded. Mundane acts, like calculating whether it is too late (or early) to call a friend on the opposite coast, rehearse this map-mindedness. As the map accrues content and associations, its distances seem to contract.
The Hungarian case presents a complex variant of this. In that country’s ubiquitous irredentist map, the shape of post-Trianon Hungary is nested within its pre-Trianon form (Fig. 3, bottom right). When their country was “mutilated” in 1920, and the image of its reduced territory was first circulated, Hungarians were given a shape onto which they could project both their wounded national pride and their daily personal privations. During this affectively charged post-war period, the distance between place and political community was thus easily bridged. In the coming years, however, the irredentist map would goad Hungarians to project their affect not only from their everyday places out toward Hungary’s current “incomplete” body but also farther out, toward unredeemed territories that, belonging to neighboring states, were not practically accessible to most Hungarians. The case thus combines both the interplay of local and national with the power of the somatized state, to illustrate Hungary’s attempted re-scaling of its citizens’ sense of place.
It is not for nothing that one of international law’s fundamental norms—trumping even that of national self-determination—is the norm of territorial integrity, which itself contains a norm against secession (e.g., Atzili 2012). Where nations can, in principle, always “differentiate down” to a smaller scale, nationalist sentiment and cartographic expression make for a factious combination.
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Acknowledgments
For their suggestions on previous drafts of this work, I thank Mariana Crăciun, Raymond Craib, Mathieu Desan, Fiona Greenland, Kim Greenwell, Robert Jansen, Matthew H. McLeskey, Sumathi Ramaswamy, Hiro Saito, Peggy Somers, George Steinmetz, Geneviève Zubrzycki, and participants in Michigan Sociology’s Power, History, and Social Change workshop. For their insightful comments on my submission, I also thank the Theory and Society reviewers and Editors. Finally, I wish to thank the American Bar Foundation, where I wrote much of this piece while in residence as a Law and Social Science Fellow
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Leslie, C.A. Territoriality, map-mindedness, and the politics of place. Theor Soc 45, 169–201 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-016-9268-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-016-9268-9