Cultural Mapping as Cultural Inquiry

Nancy Duxbury, W.F. Garrett-Petts, David MacLennan, Nancy Duxbury, W.F. Garrett-Petts, David MacLennan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317588009
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

This edited collection provides an introduction to the emerging interdisciplinary field of cultural mapping, offering a range of perspectives that are international in scope. Cultural mapping is a mode of inquiry and a methodological tool in urban planning, cultural sustainability, and community development that makes visible the ways local stories, practices, relationships, memories, and rituals constitute places as meaningful locations. The chapters address themes, processes, approaches, and research methodologies drawn from examples in Australia, Canada, Estonia, the United Kingdom, Egypt, Italy, Malaysia, Malta, Palestine, Portugal, Singapore, Sweden, Syria, the United Arab Emirates, the United States, and Ukraine. Contributors explore innovative ways to encourage urban and cultural planning, community development, artistic intervention, and public participation in cultural mapping—recognizing that public involvement and artistic practices introduce a range of challenges spanning various phases of the research process, from the gathering of data, to interpreting data, to presenting "findings" to a broad range of audiences. The book responds to the need for histories and case studies of cultural mapping that are globally distributed and that situate the practice locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally.

1 Cultural Mapping as Cultural Inquiry Introduction to an Emerging Field of Practice

DOI: 10.4324/9781315743066-1

Nancy Duxbury, W. F. Garrett-Petts and David MacLennan

The Amazon Conservation Team’s manual on the Methodology of Collaborative Cultural Mapping (2008) speaks with a certainty of purpose that has become commonplace among proponents of community-led cultural mapping initiatives. “Mapping, managing, and protecting,” says the Indigenous Brazilian research team, are the three interconnected processes required to safeguard the environment and strengthen culture, and each of these processes takes form through community leadership, collective discussion, and strategic collaboration (p. 4). Self-reflection and sharing, too, are central to the ethos of cultural mapping in Indigenous communities—for the impulse here is both political and pedagogical. The Team’s manual on methodology argues eloquently that “when a community is able to systematically articulate and represent its knowledge of its lands, it gains the necessary tools to establish laws, manage productive systems, implement protection methodologies and improve its quality of life” (p. 4).

Mapmaking and the application of maps in territories have a long history, entangled with exploration, colonialism, and political control (see, e.g., Harley, 1989; Edney, 1997; Hostettler, 2001; Craib, 2004; Pickles, 2004; Santos, 2007), as well as pandisciplinary intellectual efforts to envision, understand, critique, and utilize various forms of information (see, e.g., Tutfe, 1983, 1990; Dalton and Thatcher, 2014). Maps have been used for many purposes: for wayfinding and navigation; for archiving and classifying geographic and ethnographic information; as aesthetic objects; to identify and manage social problems; in strategies of territorial management and control; and “for establishing various claims to truth and authority” (Cosgrove, 2008, p. 9).

In recent decades, the theoretical foundations of mapping and other forms of spatial representation have been repeatedly challenged, creating what some regard as a crisis of representation (see, e.g., Pickles, 2004). Contemporary critiques of cartographic theory and praxis are illuminating diverse relations among physical, conceived, represented, and lived social space (Lefebvre, 1991) and epistemological diversities and knowledges of place (e.g., Santos, 2007; Pearce and Louis, 2008). They are also influencing how mapmakers/users approach the work of community empowerment and governance processes and how they investigate the lived experience of space and place.

What is Cultural Mapping?

Cultural mapping, broadly conceived, promises new ways of describing, accounting for, and coming to terms with the cultural resources of communities and places. The Creative City Network of Canada’s Cultural Mapping Toolkit (Stewart, 2007) defines cultural mapping pragmatically as “a process of collecting, recording, analyzing and synthesizing information in order to describe the cultural resources, networks, links and patterns of usage of a given community or group” (p. 8). From this perspective, cultural mapping is regarded as a systematic tool to involve communities in the identification and recording of local cultural assets, with the implication that this knowledge will then be used to inform collective strategies, planning processes, or other initiatives. These assets are both tangible, or quantitative (e.g., physical spaces, cultural organizations, public forms of promotion and self-representation, public art, cultural industries, natural and cultural heritage, architecture, people, artifacts, and other material resources) and intangible, or qualitative (e.g., values and norms, beliefs and philosophies, language, community narratives, histories and memories, relationships, rituals, traditions, identities, and shared sense of place). Together, these assets help define communities (and help communities define themselves) in terms of cultural identity, vitality, sense of place, and quality of life.

Cultural mapping is a practical, participatory planning and development tool, one endorsed by UNESCO (see “Indigenous Mapping” later in this chapter) and made both methodical and readily available through a growing number of manuals, handbooks, guides, and toolkits (see, e.g., Amazon Conservation Team, 2008; Teaiwa and Mercer, 2011; Pillai, 2013; and Evans, Chapter 2 in this volume, for additional examples). Cultural mapping has been used to create bridges of communication and has served as a catalyst in building (research and societal) relationships and collaborations. In the context of the contemporary “participation revolution” in governance internationally (Benhabib, 1996; Davidoff, 1996; Elster, 1998; Fung and Wright, 2003) and its central belief that a key measure of good governance is the extent and quality of public involvement in governance processes, cultural mapping’s participatory dimension has heightened its attractiveness as a community engagement methodology.

Cultural mapping is also an emerging mode of research (an “alternative discourse”) that can serve as a point of entry into theoretical debates about the nature of spatial knowledge and spatial representations. “A map” as Lynne Liben (2006) puts it, “has a dual existence: It is something and it stands for something” (p. 216). The maps reproduced in this volume stand for cultural assets, memories, patterns, and processes, but they are also things in themselves, influenced by new technologies and by new levels of spatial awareness across many different fields of inquiry. Further, as Kitchin, Perkins, and Dodge (2009) point out, mapping is not only epistemological, it is also “deeply ontological”: mapping is “both a way of thinking about the world, offering a framework for knowledge, and a set of assertions about the world itself” (p. 2). Mapping as a mode of research, then, reflexively “affords the potential to be critically revealing of the processes of enclosure, partitioning, coding and ranking . . . of experience through the research process itself” (Mannion and Ivanic, 2007, p. 19).

Cultural mapping, an inherently interdisciplinary phenomenon, openly invites the study of alternative research methods and their evolving roles in intellectual and community-based work. Perhaps best described as hybrid, mixed, multimodal, or alternative discourse, this visual/verbal research mode (or combination of modes) uses the map and its associated texts as legitimate forms for academic and public inquiry, cultural advocacy, and knowledge mobilization. Cultural mapping may be seen both as a social practice and a methodological point of intersection informing academic research, local governance, and community empowerment and change—with mapping processes creating place-embedded symbolic tools and resources to both support and guide these processes.

The interdisciplinary and collaborative nature of this practice seems intimately connected to changing notions of authorship and agency, an increased interest in intercultural collaboration, the advent of new media technologies, the trend toward community–university research alliances, the spatial turn in social and critical theory,¹ the conceptual framework offered by theories of “situated literacies” (Barton, Hamilton, and Ivanič, 2000), and renewed interest in the rhetoric and practice of community engagement. Its underlying methodological foundations of working with data— creating, selecting, compiling, organizing, assessing, and presenting—are linked to a wide variety of social science, humanist, and cartographical approaches.

Origins, Influences, and Pathways

Although a comprehensive history of this emerging field seems premature, an interdisciplinary literature review allows us to observe the main approaches to cultural mapping and some of the forces that have shaped its development as an insightful form of cultural inquiry. The evolution of cultural mapping intertwines academic and artistic research with policy, planning, and advocacy imperatives and contexts. Five main trajectories of cultural mapping practice or “use-contexts” have influenced its current methodological contours and practices: community empowerment and counter-mapping, cultural policy, municipal governance, mapping as artistic practice, and academic inquiry.

Community Empowerment/Counter-Mapping

This trajectory intertwines cultural mapping in Indigenous communities and territories with broader community development and collective action traditions concerning subversive, radical, and counter–cartographies, or “alternative maps”; community mapping, place mapping, citizen cartographies, and people’s atlases; and mapping for change. All of these counter-mapping traditions generally seek to incorporate alternative knowledges and alternative senses of space and place into mapping processes. As Crawhall (2007) points out, the goal of these types of cultural maps is not only to oppose dominant perspectives but, potentially, to build bridges to them as well:

From its inception, cultural mapping has been understood to act as a bridge between subordinated or marginalised voices and those in a dominant position, usually those who have the power to make certain types of decisions, whether it be the State, influential ethnic groups or the private sector. Cultural mapping is the exercise of representing a previously unrepresented world view or knowledge system in a tangible and understandable geo-referenced medium. (p. 11)

These foundations have propelled practices of cultural mapping in contexts of uneven power relations and in the service of articulating marginalized voices and perspectives in society. They are considered to be part of the traditions of critical cartography (see Johnson, Louis, and Pramono, 2005; Crampton and Krygier, 2006)

Indigenous Mapping

While Indigenous peoples have long engaged in diverse forms of mapmaking (see, e.g., Johnson, Louis, and Pramono, 2005; Pearce and Louis, 2008), the practice of cultural mapping with Indigenous peoples is generally dated to the 1960s in the Canadian and Alaskan Arctic. These experiences were soon taken up by the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs in British Columbia, Canada (Brody, 1981), by Aboriginal peoples in Australia, by Maya in Central America (see, e.g., Toledo Maya, 1977), by Indigenous peoples in the Philippines and of the rain forests of Brazil, and then spread to other areas of the planet (Crawhall, 2007). Collectively, these experiences form the basis for UNESCO’s interest in cultural mapping, which has been explicit for some time, primarily in the context of the cultural rights and cultural security of indigenous peoples² and, more recently, its 2005 Convention on Cultural Diversity and growing interest in intercultural dialogue.

In a 2003 report for UNESCO, Peter Poole pointed out that for Indigenous peoples, mapping has become a tool for recovering control of lost territory, negotiating access rights to traditional resources, or defending recognized territories against indiscriminate resource extraction. Known as tenure mapping, such maps are “generated in the course of conversations within communities and travel over the territory” and typically show local names, traditional resources, seasonal movements and activities, and special places (p. 13). Poole views these tenure maps as cultural maps. The only distinction between tenure and cultural maps, he argues, is in the way they are used: The purpose of tenure maps is to focus on cultural connections that can be placed on a map to emphatically and precisely illustrate the historic and cultural linkages between Indigenous peoples and their ancestral territories, while cultural mapping is focused on cultural vitalization.

In the context of growing recognition that significant aspects of culture are contained in the intangible dimensions of cultural practices and knowledge systems, UNESCO views cultural mapping as a means to “transform the intangible and invisible into a medium that can be applied to heritage management, education and intercultural dialogue” (Crawhall, 2007, p. 6). As the example of the Amazon Conservation Team also attests, the general focus here is on cultural mapping as a tool in community empowerment through facilitating the recognition, safeguarding, and use of cultural resources—especially intangible cultural resources—in the context of development, planning, and, often, cultural tourism strategies. Practice has been advanced through the sharing of experiences among these cultural mapping projects. For example, in a 2006 UNESCO workshop entitled Cultural Mapping as a Tool for Community Involvement in Shaping Future Development, held in Havana, Cuba, participants discussed lessons learned and ethical guidelines that have arisen in cultural mapping projects among Indigenous and First Nation peoples in Canada, New Zealand, the Philippines, Fijian islands, and South Africa. This resulted in the Havana Communiqué on Cultural Mapping (UNESCO, 2006), which articulates ethical and process concerns and good practice guidelines.

UNESCO leadership in this area has influenced mapping initiatives by other development-related agencies and organizations. This is illustrated, for example, in the International Institute for Environment and Development’s 2006 publication “Mapping for Change” (Ashley, Kenton, and Milligan, 2006), a special issue of Participatory Learning and Action based on a conference in Nairobi, Kenya, which demonstrated the widespread practice of community mapping in development situations. Here community mapping is defined as a means to represent “a socially or culturally distinct understanding of landscape and include information that is excluded from mainstream maps” and therefore “pose alternatives to the languages and images of the existing power structures” (p. 7). Within this context, cultural mapping becomes a means for making intangible heritage and local indigenous knowledge systems more visible and understandable. The collective work argues that cultural mapping—contextualized, community-owned and controlled, and allowing communities (especially elders) to “reflect on their own knowledge and listen to each other”—can “reinforce a community’s consciousness of its specific traditions, resources and institutions, and also of land use practices, education, health, conflict prevention, etc.” and thus enable communities to be better prepared to express their rights, visions, and priorities, especially in the face of development pressures from outside parties (p. 7).³

Counter-Mapping

Counter-mapping refers to a mapmaking process in which “communities challenge the state’s formal maps, appropriate its official techniques of representation, and make their own alternative maps” (Manoff, 2014, no page). Nancy Peluso (1995) introduced the term in her work with Indigenous Indonesian communities, which used counter-maps to claim rights to natural resources and to contest existing state-run systems of management and control. Its recent reemergence as critical practice is linked to the rise of place-based social movements and the use of participatory research methods in the social sciences (Manoff, 2014). It is closely linked to practices of alter mapping, the creation of alternative maps, which has come to embrace “any effort that fundament...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Cultural Mapping as Cultural Inquiry: Introduction to an Emerging Field of Practice
• PART I Mapping the Contours of an Emerging Field
• PART II Platforms for Engagement and Knowledge Through Mapping
• PART III Inquiry, Expression, and Deepening Understanding of Place
• Contributors
• Index