In his fascinating book, All Mapped Out (2024), King’s College London Lecturer Mike Duggan argues that maps and our varied uses of them go well beyond the simplicity found in the OED definition of map: “a drawing or other representation of the Earth’s surface or a part of it on a flat surface, showing the distribution of physical or geographical features.”
Duggan argues forcefully that maps should be interpreted much as is done with other culturally significant forms of creative output; that we should treat maps “in the same way we do books, paintings, and photographs, where tremendous effort goes towards arguing over artistic style, period and value.”
I could offer a simplistic one-sentence definition of book or painting which would fall far short of explaining the intent and interpretation of any given book or painting. I am reminded of my constant efforts with young people to instill within them the ability to evaluate sources of information with a healthy dose of skepticism. Looking back, I am not sure that I asked them to evaluate maps with such vigor. For our case, maps were usually of the political or physical variety and were largely accepted without question.*
In six short chapters, Duggan examines maps through different lenses. First he addresses “the most common use for maps—navigation.” While we all have used maps to go from Point A to Point B, Duggan offers “that it is wrong to assume that we all navigate in the same way.” He adds that “navigation is a social and cultural practice in which who we are, where we are going, who we are with and what form a map takes can affect how navigating with a map unfolds.”
This is especially relevant as we have become dependent upon digital maps. Smart phones equipped with navigation technology have made it a great deal more difficult to get lost nowadays. Getting from Point A to Point B has never been easier as all we need to do is enter Point B into the search bar and off we go. As to Point A, well, we need not even worry about that anymore because Point A is always that ubiquitous flashing blue dot.
In Chapter Two Duggan reminds us that recent events such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine have been largely told through maps. He explores “how we came to trust maps as the primary means of recording and viewing” the world and “how maps have shaped our perception and understanding” of these events. Further, many maps show borders that seem easy to cross without reflecting upon the reality of physical obstacles that obstruct movement like fences and checkpoints, and also the cultural obstacles encountered as we travel. Simply put, the “lines drawn on the map do not always respect the ways of the land or its cultural value.”
Duggan argues in Chapter Three that maps are also “powerful social constructions” influenced by the map’s creator and our use of it. He tracks the use of maps during the recent migrant crisis in Europe to make his point. “Right-leaning governments,” he writes,” used the crisis to bolster the popularist message that they should reclaim their sovereignty and national identity, and therefore keep these people out.” During the Brexit vote of 2016 “maps were used to smooth over the complexity of the migration crisis” and also “used… to feed the narrative that migrants to the UK take jobs, exploit welfare systems and pollute British culture.”
Duggan also provides a concrete example of maps as expressions of power. We have all become familiar with the malign attempt to redraw US House district maps to favor one political party over another. The ability to draw these lines is a blatant exercise of power over the powerless. Most importantly to Duggan’s thesis is his well-defended argument that ALL maps, in perhaps more subtle ways, have this same potential.**
He also examines how place-names and symbols often reflect a Western view of the world that continues to emphasize the overbearing endurance of colonization and European imperialism. Maps produced by Western cartographers often placed Europe or the United States at the center. Duggan also refers to a British map that uses the symbol of a Christian cross to identify ALL places of worship.
While many of these obvious examples drive home Duggan’s point, he offers solid evidence backed up by extensive research that “what maps show cannot be taken for granted, because they are always making a statement about the world from a certain perspective.” He adds that “mapmaking is based on the premise that some things are included and others excluded” and that the “expertise of the cartographer lies in their ability to make selective representations of the world, not to reproduce it.”
He adds that “[t]he power of maps, therefore, lies both in the hands of the powerful and within the representational properties of the map. Together they work to exert power over the powerless.”
Chapter Four demonstrates that “all maps represent the cultures in which they were made” and he encourages us to look “closely at how different cultures are represented on the map.” By looking at maps created by non-Western societies, Duggan shows that there are “other ways to view the world from a cultural perspective that favour lived and grounded experience…” rather than the “scientific” approach using latitude and longitude, scale, and more. In this way, Duggan “show[s] how dominant forms of culture end up on [a] map…” He also discusses the push-back against this often-subtle marginalization of dis-favored groups through an intentional effort that he describes as “counter-mapping.”
I am reminded of my classroom days and this one seems to address Duggan’s larger point. Every American History unit I taught was embellished with maps; on the walls, in our textbooks, and within historical atlases. I also planned at least one mapmaking day for each unit. Students were provided a selection of relevant outline maps and instructed to label and color them with the goal of interpreting the events of that particular unit. In this way, the maps took on personal characteristics unique to the interests of the individual student-mapmaker. Another of Duggan’s observations is that different map users express a diversity of observations over the same map. In this I had students share their maps and then share their individual interpretations. Looking back, it seems that I had at least a sense of Duggan’s remark “that maps are what we make of them.”
“Maps That Make the Money Go Round” is the title of Chapter Five which begins with the Berlin Conference of the 1880s. European imperialists literally divided up Africa for themselves in order to avoid conflicts. This they did without regard to the interests of over 100 million Africans across several different regions with immense cultural differences. The powerful and monied interests of the nineteenth are responsible for the boundaries on today’s Africa maps. In a similar vein, the Treaty of Versailles following World War I called for the political divisions of the Middle East that endure today. Needless to say, the creation of these maps goes a long way to explain the many problems experienced in this part of the world that continue well into the twenty-first century.
Chapter Six explores the future of maps. This begins, of course, with the prevalence of digital maps. While Duggan makes clear that this technology has not completely displaced the use of paper maps, our use of digital maps has come with a price. To his larger observation “that maps are what we make of them…” using digital maps deprives us of our interaction with maps. For, it is the computer that interacts with the map on our personal navigation systems—aka smartphone—and then it just tells us where to go; or, more often than not, tells us where to spend our money. Despite the convenience of digital mapping and the benefits of artificial intelligence, Duggan warns that “research has suggested that people have become poorer navigators, far worse at locating ourselves and places on the map without the aid of a search bar, and less able to understand our location in relation to others.” To me, this diminishment of “our cognitive navigational abilities” seems like one more step on the way to losing track of our sense of self in an increasingly chaotic world.
I am reminded here of the great number of young people unable to read an analog clock. Unlike digital clocks, analog clocks mimic the rotation of the Earth on its axis and the rising and setting of the sun. This not only tells us the time, it also captures the essential movement of time and our place within it. Duggan imagines that a similar atrophy is occurring within our shift to digital maps. We simply no longer have to understand where we are in the larger scheme of things because no matter where that might be, we are always one “Hey Siri” away from home.
One might respond to this that there are many common human activities with which we no longer engage. For instance, I don’t know how to milk a cow or how to churn butter. Yet, I don’t feel diminished by these shortcomings. Further, my awareness and perception of the space I occupy – as well as my perception of the passage of time – seems a bit more important than farm work.
Most relevant to me is that, in an age flooded with mis– and dis-information, we would be wise to remember that there are those out there who have an interest in manipulating our reactions to large swaths of local, national, and global events. To his credit, Mike Duggan has thoughtfully reminded us in his wonderful book that, as with all sources of information, we should be asking ourselves: Who are the mapmakers and what are they up to?
*Now that I think of it, however, and in my defense, I did speak to the motivations of textbook publishers whose primary purpose was to make money by convincing local school boards to choose one book over another. And it was within these books that many of the maps we utilized were drawn.
**Gerrymandering refers to Governor Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts whose state map included, according to the Boston Gazette, a district shaped like a salamander. Take comfort that this was in 1812 and we’re still here.
