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Mapping Spacetime

October 11, 2016 by Rebecca Gray

 

By Harley’s account, our dialogue of historic cartography has long engendered oppressive narratives of non-European peoples and their relationships with space. “European map-makers and map users have increasingly promoted a standard scientific model of knowledge and cognition,” writes Harvey, who continues to note that “this mimetic bondage has led to a tendency…to regard the maps of other non-Western or early cultures (where the rules of mapmaking were different) as inferior to European maps” (Harley 4). Here, Harley illustrates a fundamental difference in the way European explorers of the 17th century onward and their cross cultural contemporaries sought to understand their space. Maps can be defined by any number of parameters: coordinates, landmarks, topography, utility, etc. For me, this raised questions of whether there are gaps in how we understand the our homes and how outsiders understand them, and what those gaps are. Even on top of this, how do we define “home”? Is it our house? Our town? Colby, or a family tree? Can a map communicate the fluid complexities of these concepts over time–or, in other words, can we map spacetime?

 

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