Silences on Imperial Maps

By contrast, the emergence and dominance of a new mapping style happened rela­tively quickly in Britain's mapping of the New World. A combination of representing land overseas of which nothing was formerly known, initial total ignorance of the landscape and of its inhabitants, and a less pressing need to patronize local forms of knowledge for political legitimacy may account at least in part for this difference.

There is no denying that for colonial interests in Britain it was more convenient not to think about the presence of native inhabitants. But other factors may also have contributed to the selection of what to represent on the maps, and what to leave off. In his pioneering work on the topic, J. B. Harley invokes Foucault’s idea of an episteme, a kind of structure or way of thinking that leads the brain to pro­cess information in ways that are already familiar and understood.

The phenomenon of map silences can also be seen in eighteenth-century Spanish and Portuguese maps of Japura, an area of the Amazon basin through which the artificial line created by the Treaty of Tordesillas passed. Although home to the Mura people, a group with whom the European colonists came into repeated conflict, Neil Safier notes, “it is nearly impossible to find elements of the Muras’ presence on European maps of the region, despite their being omnipresent in other forms of administrative documentation.”^[644] He further documents that while early eighteenth-century maps would sometimes include ethnonyms of indige­nous groups, by 1789 these names disappear entirely from the latest Portuguese map of the region, as do other local geographic points of interest^[645]—this despite efforts by the Portuguese crown during that same period to obtain fuller con­trol of the region through recognizing the native peoples by granting them full rights as “the newest ‘subjects’ of the crown.”^[646] The silences of the map regarding the region’s inhabitants were not a reflection of Portuguese knowledge—or even acknowledgment—of the region’s inhabitants. Rather, they reflected a bifurcation in the ways in which information on different aspects of the region were compiled.

The growing silences on the maps were contemporary with the emergence of pop­ulation maps that began to include information on population figures with a level of detail that would have been difficult to include on a territorial map.^[647] The pres­ence of the Muras, who long defied Portuguese control, was eventually reflected not on a map but in a population chart, but to learn more of their story one needs to look to yet another genre, poetic verse. A Portuguese military officer recorded their story of displacement in an epic poem.^[648] The question, however, remains: Is the disappearance of people from territorial maps mitigated by their appearance in population charts and epic verse?

The effect of silence regarding the inhabitants and local geographical variation can be chilling, whether on British maps of North America, Portuguese maps of South America, or in other examples of cartographic representation.^[649] The uni­formity of symbol and measurement necessary to scaled scientific mapmaking obliterates not only the inhabitants, but also tends to obscure unique qualities of the landscape, and anything either not quantifiable or not validated through measure­ment, quantification, and representation.

When regional and local distinctiveness is denied through the standardiza­tion of terms through which the landscape can be read, lands are represented as space rather than as place. That the same icon is used, for example, to represent any town communicates a generic quality of sameness, or at most an indication of that municipality’s place in the administrative hierarchy, rather than any indication of unique qualities that might differentiate one town or locality from another. If we further take the map to represent reality, land becomes a “socially-empty com­modity, a geometrical landscape of cold, non-human facts.”^[651] The move from man­uscript to printed maps only exacerbated standardization, with every map of a place looking exactly like every other map of that place in the same print run. Geographic education that relied on these maps propagated the view of land as empty.

Although those who peopled the land might have been described in other genres such as population maps or in literature, the new maps kept that knowledge cordoned off, thus making it easier to ignore the human aspects of the landscape and the implications for repurposing land use. Furthermore, when the inhabitants did receive attention under the new information order, their existence was described in terms divorced from the land rather than grounded in place. They tended to be compared with other groups through similar standardized frameworks, or described according to lists of traits, rather than understood as part of the local economy (in its broadest sense)—which, in the imperial context, was undergoing rapid change in any case.

Central to the imperial enterprise and taken to its extreme, maps that represent only space—and not the unique and potentially sacred qualities of place, let alone the people who inhabit it—can facilitate the degradation of the land, and a disre­gard for those who draw their sustenance from it.