“Now That’s a Stretch”

It all started during our third week in South Korea. My employer was visiting the apartment to discuss the (non-)working order of the stereo system when he noticed the map of South Korea we had put up on the wall. He chuckled to himself and made a comment to his wife in Korean. She looked up at the wall and exclaimed in amusement. Noticing us noticing them he explained that our map of Korea was wildly inaccurate: it was missing over half of the peninsula! Reconsidering the map after they had left I began to understand their astonishment, and that understanding has deepened with the passing of more time in the country. The concept of ‘South Korea’ is a political and cartographic invention. For the people here in the Republic of Korea there is no North Korea and South Korea; there is only the north and south of Korea, and a painful history of separation that everybody seems to want to rectify.

My thoughts returned again to the map as I read and digested some of the articles included in my university course readings. One thing in particular which raised an eyebrow was the treatment of cartography in a few of the articles. Several comments implied that maps, as represented by the western cartographic tradition, are empty collections of coordinates, devoid of cultural meaning or narrative, mere vehicles of western imperialism. I felt deeply offended and very angry. And then I wondered why.

“Spatial stories are about the operations and practices which constitute places and locales. The map, by contrast, involves a stripping away of these things”

The history of western cartography is generally considered to begin in Babylon. Although a rival claim is made for Turkey, the oldest example of a map has usually been accepted to be a small tablet showing a stylised, topographical representation of an area in modern Iraq.^³ As Denis Wood points out, many explanations for the development of cartography in various cultures highlight the close relationship between the development of cartography and the development of writing, and link both to the need for record keeping associated with a rapidly increasing population.^⁴ Early examples of maps from Mesopotamia and surrounding areas support this – they include not just large scale cosmological representations but also town and building plans, and the all-important property map. This suggests that from the start cartography has been about two very important and very related things: territory and ownership.

A quick browse through history confirms this: the most significant developments in western cartography came during the cartographic explosion associated with the voyages of discovery in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Few maps survive from the Greek and Roman periods, and medieval maps “long regarded as the nadir of the craft”^⁵ are usually treated as ‘curiosities’ and discussed in terms of their distortion and illustration rather than their place in the advancement of cartography.^⁶ The rediscovery of the cartographic work of Ptolemy^⁷ (an authoritative treatise on the ‘how to’ of mapping) following the crusades nurtured the symbiotic development of cartography and exploration culminating in the discovery of the New World, in which the American Indians were systematically excluded from cartographic representation just as they were systematically dispossessed of their land and autonomy. The further development of cartography can then be linked to the emergence of nation-states, the growth of colonialism, the rise of tourism and the space race.^⁸

Central to the direction that western cartography took was the influence of the competing western ideals of rationalism and empiricism – as Eric Hirsch has noted “it is not accidental that the views of Descartes coincided historically with profound developments in cartography”.^⁹ The ‘curiosities’ of the medieval period were elaborately decorated with narrative – monstrous images, religious iconography and mythical peoples and places – but from about the fifteenth century maps, as the landscapes they portrayed, became “stripped of sedimented meanings”.^¹⁰ According to Michael Jackson “As cartography replaced these icons and legends with abstract scientific data, the narrative experience of the map as a territory across which one actually travelled was lost”.^¹¹ The increasing emphasis on objectivity in the western paradigm has led to the current situation where maps are now simply a “means of enquiry, of examination and control”^¹² and we have a proliferation of what are essentially boundary and ledger maps: carving up the world into territories and resources and designating their location and their vital statistics. Looking at a National Geographic map of the Caspian Sea (‘Promises and Peril’ – listing the various oil reserves of the Nations in the area)^¹³ the reduction of lived reality (and place) to empty co-ordinates (and exploitable resources) is evident.

I ruminated on it for a couple of weeks, and came up with several answers. There were academic issues, rationalisations and critiques. There was the sense of being attacked – the thing that many academics seem to forget when they generalise about the Evil Western Monoculture is that they are talking about a diverse and living culture that belongs to millions of real people. Then there were the maps: the old tattered maps of obscure places stored in my father’s garage, the bright and enticing tourist maps of Korea stacked in the bookshelf, the gigabyte of map files stored on our computer (hours and hours of work by my husband creating an entire alternate world for our Dungeons and Dragons game).^¹⁴ And the millions of English maps of South Korea, describing a place that ceases to exist once you get here.

Hence I decided to focus on the narrative elements in cartography for this piece. The maps needed to be defended from these heinously simplistic accusations. I ordered library books and considered approaches - and then I recalled a book my husband had received as a gift. A book about maps and map obsessions; a book about a map thief and an author’s journey through cartography to find him.

One of the principal contributing factors in the history of cartography has been the human imagination. Whether it be terra incognita or ‘X’ marks the spot, the unknown with all its possibilities (be they monsters, paradise, gold or oil) has haunted map-makers since the first attempt was made to create an image of the world. “Sticks and stones, parchment and gold leaf, paper and ink”^¹⁶ - all have been used to map the world: towns and cities, kingdoms and empires, states and geopolitical communities; but also the heavens, the underworld, the New World, the universe and the sea floor. Regardless of whether anybody has been there or seen it humans have imagined it – The Garden of Eden, El Dorado, Atlantis.

It is significant that rather than refraining from mapping the unknown or the unconfirmed cartographers have historically diverted much of their attention to just those areas. Although the unknown world often began in the margins it was frequently filled with places and peoples drawn from imagination. It was usual to include on a medieval map the location of the Garden of Eden, and in the Beatus maps^¹⁷ the world was always drawn as four continents, despite knowledge at that time of only three, as the apostles were expected to preach to the four corners of the earth.^¹⁸ Describing the task of actually making a map Miles Harvey advises that it’s not as simple as gadgets and formulae - “you will also need to depend on eye-witness reports of sailors, soldiers, merchants, adventurers, braggarts, and scam artists. You will have to consult the work of other cartographers and, when all else fails, rely on educated guesses and the occasional time-honoured assumption”.^¹⁹ Thus the world was mapped, with enthusiasm, with diligence and often without ever leaving home.^²⁰

As soon as possible, though, some did leave home. The migration from Africa, the crossing of the land bridge to North America, the Hebrew quest for the promised land, Alexander the Great, the Peopling the Pacific, the Crusades, Marco Polo, The Age of Discovery. It’s a story older than the bible – the Promised Land, the journey, the discovery of paradise. Mile Harvey refers to the many adventure stories that start with a map and suggests that “if the buried treasure is the forbidden fruit of these stories, the map is the serpent, prodding us to dream of a place beyond the borders of our innocence.” He goes on to point out that the language of cartography and geography is often used to invoke ideas of sin and virtue.^²¹ Certainly man has not been content to merely imagine the detail onto the blank portions of the map: he has gone to considerable lengths to find the unfound, to chart the uncharted, to know the unknown. This is the secret history of cartography: the map (stolen from Portugal by Bartholomeo),^²² the search (for the Indies), and the discovery of something quite different (America). And as we use amazing technologies to map the sea floor, the human genome, and various other terrae incognitae the question begs – we know what we are looking for, but what will we actually find?

The element that permeates and binds the endless cycle of imagining and discovering (uncovering) is the story. Far from being annexed from our embodied culture, maps are extremely stylised images that tell a million stories. The real magic of maps, be they old or new, is their capacity to impart an “absolutely, undeniably marvellous yarn”^²³ without even trying. There is somewhere between five and eight thousand years of cartographic history represented in the humble street map, and the ‘general purpose map’ quietly tells the stories of hundreds and thousands of journeys of exploration with the landforms it presents. There are at least six thousand years of political history embedded in various ways in any standard atlas, not to mention the stories behind every single place name in every single town everywhere in the world. And then there are the stories of the maps themselves: this one is a one-of-a-kind, manuscript map from the eighteenth century rescued from a burning ship;^²⁴ these are tourist maps of communist countries collected in the 1960s, and auctioned by the traveller’s relatives to settle his estate;^²⁵ this is a map with the places I want to visit when I’m old enough to leave home marked in pins; these are street maps of all the places I’ve lived.^²⁶ Then there is the story of the Mercator projection versus the Peters projection, and the story of why National Geographic uses the Mercator projection; the story of the search for the location of The Garden of Eden; and the story of why Korea was divided at the thirty-eighth parallel. If you are looking for narratives, especially narratives of place, look no further than the much maligned map for “It is many-tongued – a chorus reciting centuries of accumulated knowledge in echoed chants”.^²⁷

I had intended to make Harvey’s book my focus, to describe and interpret his perspective as an example of the way maps are meaningful to actual people involved in actual lives within the infamous and monolithic West. His book certainly offered plenty of narrative, but it occurred to me that a mere re-presentation and interpretation of Harvey’s cartographic reality would be incomplete. Once again I returned to the map of South Korea on the wall. Why hadn’t I taken it down? Because it had a story, and the story was incomplete. I read back through my notes, and I pondered phenomenology and its practical application; and then I realised that I needed to write myself into my essay.

“…for what we have here is nothing that can be seen by an eye, but precisely that reality which we know a map alone can give us…”

Looking back through cartographic history some people see lies, some people see mistakes, some people see stories.^²⁹ I see realities. Many people look at examples of the mappae mundi of the Middle Ages and see something so bizarre, so fantastic, so very supernatural as to represent the lowest point in cartographic history. Others see something so elaborate, so poetic, so meaning-full as to represent the highest point in the cartographic history. Either way the image is considered alien, surreal. If you look at a modern map, any modern map, you might be tempted to think it is much more realistic, much more sensible. You would be mistaken. If you look very closely at a map, any map, you will see something else: non-sense. There is very little on any map that is part of any person’s everyday perceived world. The world doesn’t look like that to us, it doesn’t feel like that or smell or sound like that. The map is a fiction. Denis Wood argues a strong case for this, claiming that “The map is always a stretch. It is never “the real thing.”^³⁰ He draws our attention to the question of what is actually being mapped in a political map, and reminds us that while some borders exist as barbed wire fences and guard posts others exist simply as a change in mailbox orientation and still others exist only as lines on a map.^³¹ Maps rarely, if ever, represent the world as experienced by its inhabitants.

And yet they do. One of the main arguments of phenomenology is that reality is not defined or restricted by the sensible world. Phenomenology reminds us that there is always more, the whole is always greater than the sum of the parts – sensory perception is not just about the five named senses, perception is not just about sensory perception, experience is not just about perception, reality is not just about experience. Reconsidering the political map it becomes clear that while maps don’t represent reality they do represent realities, in this case the political reality as experienced by the interest group responsible for the production of the map. The word ‘bias’ has some rather negative connotations attached, but they start to disappear when you consider the possible words you might substitute for bias in various contexts: opinion, viewpoint, paradigm, worldview, cosmology, culture, subjectivity.

There seems to be general agreement among scholars studying cartography as a phenomenon that maps are ideological products of their makers, embodying the assumptions, traditions and interests of various groups and individuals participating in their creation. Denis Wood describes maps as not simply cultural products, but facilitators of cultural reproduction^³² and suggests that what they actually portray is “the reality we know as differentiated from the reality we see and hear and feel”.^³³ What he argues is that maps are built on a history of understanding and thinking about the world in particular ways, and that the entire history of a people’s epistemological, ontological and cosmological contemplation is embedded in their maps. It is from this position that he makes the claim that: “Given their spiritual function, the Beatus Maps are thoroughly accurate”.^³⁴

Revisiting cartographic history (once again) we find that the theory holds: some speculate that the earliest example of a map is not a Babylonian topographical vignette nor an Anatolian town plan complete with erupting volcano but actually a mental image used by our ancestors to navigate place, space and landscape on a variety of scales. The cartographic manual of Ptolemy does not simply dictate the way maps should be constructed but also reveals the way his world was conceived. The mappae mundi with their sea monsters and Gardens of Eden are very potent images of how the known and unknown world were understood by various people in the middle ages, and the prolific ‘Age of Discovery maps’ speak literally volumes about the points of view of the world that endeavoured to discover the world. Modern western feats of mappery like the mapping of the Earth as seen from space, the mapping of the sea floor, and the mapping of the human genome are very clear indicators of the current cosmological beliefs of the west. I use the plural here because, as Harvey has pointed out, maps are many-tongued, and each map is different. There is no monolithic, monotonous, monocultural cartographic tradition, only a mosaic of perspectives, influences, exchanges and collaborations (and on the darker side - appropriations, thefts, suppressions and persecutions). By extension it must be noted that certain realities, certain voices, certain perspectives have been excluded from maps by exclusion from the cartographic process. As with any cultural phenomenon, dissension is often hard to discern after the fact.

To take Wood’s view one step further, maps are not reductions of the world (as suggested by Tilly and Jackson) but expressions of the world as lived. Maps do not show the world of sight, sound, smell taste and touch; nor the world of sensory perception; nor the world of perception; nor even the world of experience: maps represent the world of lived reality. While this or that border may seem to exist only as a line on the map it impacts upon the lives of certain peoples in certain ways, and for those for whom the map was created it exists as no less a border than those etched in barbed wire and punctuated by guard posts.^³⁵ Although the opposite has often been asserted maps are not designed to represent space – they are designed to represent place. They are, in fact, entirely about place – “maps are a form of symbolization, governed by a set of conventions, that aim to communicate a sense of place”.^³⁶

At times the reality of the map is upheld over and above the reality it depicts – altering the map entails a lot more than simply altering a template. Geoff King claims that “Cartographers are the most important members of a community that craves to know the exact shape and extent of its uncertain land. Mapping provides affirmation of their existence”.^³⁷ In these instances the map is treated as primary, as though place is a product of map and not vice verse. Sometimes known fictions are incorporated into the map to reflect the significance of their impact on reality (Hardy’s Wessex; Hobbiton, NZ; Doone Valley, Exmoor). In a bizarre combination of these processes the fictional community of author Garrison Keillor, Lake Wobegone, has sprung to life in various businesses, ventures and even schools all named for the legendary Lake and community of central Minnesota. Keillor’s novel, Lake Wobegone Days, creates the community literally from thin air; a victim of a mapping blunder for which the solution was to fold the map in the middle, thereby removing the extra mile and Lake Wobegone with it. The book has been so treasured and the community so loved that it has been willed into existence: it took me almost an hour to verify that it was, in fact, fictitious.^³⁸

The reality embodied by maps is not simply mathematical, not merely empirical, nor entirely ‘in our heads.’ It is a sum of parts: it is astronomy, philosophy, religion and science; it is politics, history, anthropology and commerce; it is cartographic projection, statistical projection, psychological projection, and cultural projection. But it is also a whole that is greater than the sum of those parts: it is perceived reality, it is subjective reality, it is lived reality – but more than that it is “a reality that exceeds our vision”.^³⁹ And sometimes it becomes hyperreality.^⁴⁰

Every time I looked through my notes to refer to or include something I became aware of the reverse process. By including some things I was excluding others. Regardless of good intentions and despite best efforts you can never describe faithfully, repeat exactly, capture all the nuances or record all the voices. This is the paradox of all academic pursuit. It is also the paradox of the human condition, of reality itself: the paradox of self and other.

The solution: do what you can. Acknowledge your sources, acknowledge your biases, acknowledge your failure. Do your best to create a map that will facilitate others in recreating your journey, or making their own.

What follows is a brief discussion of some of the realities that have been excluded. Harvey mentions several viewpoints in his book, but clearly favours the mystery/journey/story axis. Due to structural and thematic constraints I have excluded a number of perspectives no less valid than those covered here. This discussion is by no means complete. There are as many theories as there are maps.

The most significant perspective missing from this essay is that of empiricism. While the arguments of Tilley and Jackson unwittingly approximate the empiricist position^⁴² the clear and absolute line of western science is distinctly absent thus far. An empiricist perspective would likely discuss the historical relationship between cartography and areas such as astronomy, geometry, geography and physics. It would refer to inventions such as the magnetic compass and highlight the increasing accuracy of maps over time. It would include a discussion of mapping projections such as the Robinson and the Mercator, and new techniques involving satellite photos and remote sensing.

An alternative viewpoint describes maps as makers of reality. This perspective attributes the importance of maps in western societies to bigger populations and territories, and to increased specialisation and complexity.^⁴³ The mapping impetus is reduced to a need to order, secure and control the world.

An elaboration of this theory can be found in psychology. When Harvey discusses ‘cartomania’ separately with two psychologists they both relate map collecting (particularly antique map collecting) to symbolically finding the security associated with knowing ones past.^⁴⁴ In these sense maps are about the security associated with a sense of place and the recollection of childhood.

Another explanation for antique map obsessions is based around the idea of maps as artefacts. This is an incarnation of the idea, as expressed by Denis Wood, that maps contain thousands of years of embedded history and are cultural products possessing considerable ‘cultural capital’. It is this line of thinking that facilitated the making of Graham Arader’s fortune as he turned old maps into pop culture icons.^⁴⁵

The perspective of Denis Wood has been absolutely critical to this essay. While never presenting his argument in full I have repeatedly referred to and drawn on it, and it has provided a strong basis for the elaboration and expression of my own position. Wood’s discussion is wide ranging and difficult to summarise, but the fundamental premise is expressed clearly and vividly in the very first page of his book The Power of Maps – “Maps sweat, they strain, they apply themselves. The ends achieved with so much effort? The ceaseless reproduction of the culture that brings them into being”.^⁴⁶

The ‘official’ cartographic representation of Korea as North Korea and South Korea reflects the division imposed after World War II as complete and actual, because the ideological difference between the two ‘patron’ powers (Russia and America), seemed to the international community to be irreconcilable. By comparison, the Korean perspective is derived from a longer and more immediate history – their own common blood and heritage. The north/south split was an artificial separation imposed externally in the aftermath of the very destructive invasion and occupation of the peninsula by the Japanese in the early twentieth century. It has even been said that the punitive occupation and division that should have been Japan’s lot following WWII was instead visited upon Korea.^⁴⁷ The current impasse between the two political entities of Korea is, for those old enough to recognise a different past, a regrettable but reconcilable disagreement between two brothers with five thousand years of fraternal history to draw upon.

Both realities are true for those who experience them. The current tenuous political negotiations between the United States and North Korea, and the move towards a multilateral process involving South Korea, Japan and China highlight the international need for a distinction between the place called The Republic of Korea, and the place called The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. For the big players in the international community that distinction is best represented by a line on a map.

Delano-Smith, Catherine 1991 ‘Imagining the World’ at the University of Western

Hirsch, Eric 1995 ‘Landscape: Between Place and Space’ in Eric Hirsch and Michael

O’Hanlon (eds) The Anthropology of Landscape: Perspectives on Place and Space. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Dissanayake (eds) Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imagery. Durham: Duke University Press

Tilly, C. 1994 A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths and Monuments. Oxford:

1 The phrase “Now That’s a Stretch” used in the context of the relationship between map and perceptual reality is taken from Wood, 1993 (1): 8.

17 The Beatus maps are Mappae Mundi drawn for inclusion with the Abbot Beatus’ ‘Commentary on the Apocalypse of Saint John’

20 For example it has recently been suggested that Marco Polo may not actually have travelled to the Far East. Harvey, 2001: 21

24 This is the ‘absolutely, undeniably marvellous yarn’ Harvey refers to. It is not proven, but the map in question is thought to have been one of the survivors an ill fated surveying expedition in Pensacola Harbour in 1719. Harvey tells it better; 2001: 247-9

29 Wood actually casts some doubt as to the accuracy of the history of cartography as read. He cites a lack of examples from both the Greco-Roman period and the medieval period and asserts that “The objectivity of modern maps of the world is so taken for granted that they serve as powerful metaphors for other sciences, on occasion even for scientific objectivity itself. The canonical history of Western cartography reinforces that assumption of objectivity.” Wood, 1993 (2): http://www.arts.uwa.edu.au/HistoryWWW/mapping_conquest/3_ThePowerofMaps.html This is precisely the trap that Tilley and Jackson fall into while trying to contest the objectivity of maps.

35 A very clear demonstration of maps as lived experience can be experience by playing the computer game ‘SimCity’ or any similar map based civilisation-building game. While creating reality on the map the player can also watch the ‘Sims’ go about their daily business within the fictive world. Imagine a street map upon which you can actually see traffic flowing and you will get the idea. A comprehensive example can be found in the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons in which the map is the only physical representation of the playing world. Between the players, the Dungeon Master (like a director) and the map reality is created and maintained. The map becomes like a sacred text – embodying concept, history and shared experience, while still being able to describe the terrain in terms of dimensions and locations.

36 The perspective of geographer John Pickle summarised by David T Stephens; Stephens, http://historymatters.gmu.edu/mse/maps/what.html

45 Graham Arader is the self-proclaimed ‘biggest map dealer in the twentieth century’. Harvey, 2001: 47) For a discussion of Arader and his effect on the antique map industry see Harvey, 2001: 46-64

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