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Relocating cartography
Raymond B Craib
Published online: 01 Dec 2009.
To cite this article: Raymond B Craib (2009) Relocating cartography, Postcolonial Studies, 12:4,
481-490
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13688790903350690
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Relocating cartography
RAYMOND B CRAIB
Modern science is widely considered a purely West European creation.
1
So
Kapil Raj begins a book*Relocating Modern Science*that strongly and,
more often than not, convincingly critiques the manner in which historians
have tended to conceptualize and write about the histories of science. He sees
two dominant strands in the writing on modern science and its purportedly
Western European origins: first, a strand that seeks to find the reasons for the
putative emergence of modern science within the narrow boundaries of West
Europe; and, second, one that takes for granted the Western origins of
modern science and is instead concerned with the modalities of its spread
from West Europe to the rest of the world.
2
The chapters cover a wide swath
of topics and practices, always with an eye toward, first, the circulation and
reciprocal constitution of knowledge and practices (rather than their
presumed diffusion) and, second, the points of encounter and intercultural
exchange among protagonists who do not always figure prominently in
histories of science: low- and mid-level bureaucrats; members of trade
associations who acquired their skills and much of their knowledge in the
field; and native inhabitants (in this case, of South Asia).
For historians of cartography, Rajs book is of particular interest, not only
for its broad analytical and revisionist scope regarding scientific knowledge
and practice but also for the specific focus in two chapters on mapping and
surveying. In Chapter Two (Circulation and the Emergence of Modern
Mapping), Raj examines modern mapping in South Asia as a set of practices
co-constituted or co-produced by both British and South Asian subjects. In
Chapter Six (When Human Travellers Become Instruments) he looks at the
roles of British and Indian subjects, and the use of human beings as
instruments, in the surveying of central Asia. Both chapters highlight the
varied practices and intercultural complexities of the development of
cartographic science and practice. As such, Rajs work constitutes a shift
away from what have been a number of popular trends in writing on the
history of cartography in recent years, in particular axes of domination and
diffusion.
The scholarly trend in recent decades has been to view scientific activities
such as surveying and mapmaking as two cogs in an imperial machine*a
scopic regime*grinding across far-flung colonies and distant landscapes.
3
An expanding imperial state and capitalist class, aided by an avant-garde of
scientists, explorers, and agrarian bureaucrats, gradually brought purportedly
peripheral places under their wing, in the process imposing new ideas of
property, space, and territory on others, reducing them to landlessness, wage
ISSN1368-8790 print/ISSN1466-1888 online/09/04048110 #2009 The Institute of Postcolonial Studies
DOI: 10.1080/13688790903350690
Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 12, No. 4, pp. 481490, 2009
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labor, and colonial servitude. Here cartography appears primarily as an
advanced technology of primitive accumulation and political control. In this
narrative, cartography and its various routines are primarily, if not solely,
technologies and discourses of power. An excavation of such ideas would very
quickly strike the post-structuralist strata of a generation of French
intellectuals*in particular Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida*whose
understanding of politics and ideology was shaped by the decolonization
struggles of the 1950s and 1960s and the political reconfigurations of the Left
that accompanied such movements.
4
This material has served as a foundation
for much subsequent writing on cartography. It was in a series of now seminal
essays that J B Harley eclectically drew on Foucault (and, to an arguably
lesser degree, Derrida) to rethink the history of cartography and reorient the
field in a more critical direction. Harleys oeuvre defies easy summation but it
is fair to say that injunctions to read maps as texts, to deconstruct them, and
to see regimes of power operating within them were pervasive in his later
works for which he is best known.
5
The importance of such work should not be underestimated. For one, it
initiated (or at least dramatically extended) a turn away from a focus on maps
as generally mimetic representations, as unproblematic statements of facts
about the earths surface; rather, it sought to situate maps within a social,
cultural and political world and as products of practices that were integral to
the history of cartography.
6
In the process, authors such as Harley drew
attention to how maps were inevitably laden with ideological and cultural-
specific presuppositions. Objective they might be, at least according to the
epistemological standards established by a given social order, but neutral they
were not.
Second, such work served as a corrective to the celebratory, legitimation
narratives*populated by bold explorers, objective scientists, and mimetic
maps*characteristic of much of the history of cartography. Now the field
was forced to contend with the unwholesome consequences and imperialist
implications of the work of long-revered individuals whose bravery seemed
more like wanton arrogance and their curiosity a form of aggression. This
historiographical thread has matured to such a degree that scholars can in
fact argue over the agency, complicity, and importance of such individuals in
the histories they recount: was the white, male, bourgeois explorer largely an
extension of the imperial structure, taking possession of all he saw by virtue
of gazing out with his imperial eyes?
7
Or was he a conflicted, even reluctant,
agent of empire, financially dependent on his imperial sponsors but hardly a
passive extension of their will?
8
D Graham Burnett provides a useful synopsis
of how far the history of cartography has come in this regard. Discussing Paul
Carters seminal spatial history of Australia, The Road to Botany Bay, he
writes:
[A] previous generation of cartographic historians. . . depict[ed] the history of
European expansion as a gradual unrolling of the map over (or under?) the
non-European world. After Carter such an analysis will not suffice. Within the
progressive image of how colonial territory took shape, he has identified a
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tension. If before Carter European cartography had been imagined to spread
over the globe like a flood of crimson paint radiating from the metropolis, after
The Road to Botany Bay there is an obligation to recognize very distinct
countercurrents in that flood, eddies and backwashes in the tide of empire.
9
The summation is a powerful and important one: empires and nation-states
have for too long been homogenized and constructed as monolithic and
hegemonic enterprises, running under their own momentum and composed of
an array of equally complicit bureaucrats, officials and scientists. Yet we
should not lose sight of the fact that the object of attention is still primarily, if
not solely, the structure of power identified as the impetus to the cartographic
process in the first place, an issue to which I will return again shortly.
The third critical intervention was the questioning of the narrative of
emancipation and progress associated with the European Enlightenment and
modernity, extending to the history of cartography the post-colonial
critiques of the standard Whiggish narratives of science, progress, and
modernity. Here the issue was less about agents than the very foundational
categories upon which a narrative of Western European exceptionalism and
progress had been built and which functioned as justifications, intellectual
exculpations, for the exercise of power and imperial expansion. Taking
Foucault to his logical conclusion, European explorers, mapmakers, and
scientists were neither heroes nor villains but relatively irrelevant to a
narrative that sought to draw our attention (not unjustly) to the fundamental
ways in which historically and geographically specific practices and forms of
representation were inextricably entwined with changing conceptions of
property, the rise of capitalist relations, new forms of enclosure and
classification, and the expansion of state power.
Still, this critical turn in the history of cartography*and in the humanities
more broadly*can create a sense of unease: it was one thing to see the agents
of empire put in their place; quite another to kill them off. The death of
the subject threatened to devolve into a veritable slaughter, and extinction
loomed large. Normalization was the norm, resistance was futile, and the
panopticon was, well, . . . everywhere.
10
Nowhere, or rarely, to be found were
those ostensibly being mapped. The oceanic tides of Europe still washed over
the inert shores of the colonies. And here lies the irony to which Raj devotes
his attentions: whether to praise or to bury him (and the masculine is
intentional here), it is still the European explorer or mapmaker or scientist
who makes spatial history and, more broadly, science.
Raj is thus at pains, and rightfully so, to draw our attention to the roles of
the colonized*their ideas as well as their labor*in the generation of
geographic knowledge. He is careful: he does not do so in order to promote
a kind of nationalist or chauvinist agenda but rather in order to emphasize
the circulatory, dialogic and decidedly unbounded*territorially and
socially*ways in which knowledge developed. Diffusion is not a means
through which to understand the creation of scientific knowledge. Not only is
it historically inaccurate but it is itself a discourse linked to colonial rule, a
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kind of cornerstone in the architectural fiction of command and control that
Thomas Richards has called the imperial archive.
11
Diffusion appears in various guises. At its most basic it suggests that
science developed in the metropole and then emanated outward to the
colonies where it was imposed, with varying degrees of success, upon a
dominated population. The problems with such a narrative are numerous:
knowledge is developed internally, with little sense of connection, and then
simply applied elsewhere; the metropole itself is taken as self-evident and
pre-existing, rather than as something constructed in the process of exchange;
and the colonized are mute and monolithic, at best offering only passive
acceptance or fierce resistance. It is a narrative that fits nicely with the
impression colonial officials and their superiors might have had of themselves
and their labors. So too our mid-twentieth-century neo-colonial officials who
gave diffusion a new lease of life with the intellectual patina of Cold War
modernization theory, arguing that the threat of revolution would be defused
if Western culture and technology were diffused. Locating the causes of
underdevelopment as internal to the nations in question, modernization
advocates cast formerly colonized populations as tradition-bound, static
peoples, outside of history and trapped by an entire range of cultural
baggage that inhibited economic growth, development, productivity and
scientific innovation and progress. Populations were thus objects upon
which to intervene*not only through technology transfers, capital flows and
foreign investment but also through the inculcation of purportedly Western
values and attitudes (thrift, hard work, a respect for rule of law, and the other
usual suspects) via literature, education, and film.
12
Counter-arguments to these celebratory visions of imperial diffusion can
be just as problematic: authors might condemn rather than celebrate such
transfers and practices but they still fetishize difference and take diffusion as
a given. Raj takes a number of authors to task for privileging narratives of
difference, for starting with an assumption that European and Indian
scientific practices were radically different at the time of colonization, and
that Western science was imposed on Indians by the British as part of the
civilizing mission.
13
According to this view, he writes, the spread of
Western science is achieved by means of an often violent imposition of
rational practices on Other scientific cultures. However, the nature of the
putative Other scientific practices, their articulation with the social and
power structures within which they are embedded, their history and
encounter with European scientific practices, are questions rarely addressed
in these writings.
14
The irony is palpable: the persistent emphasis on radical
otherness smacks of colonialism by other means; by opting for the diabolic
rather than dialogic, efforts to critique colonial projects inadvertently
re-inscribe them.
15
Just as worrisome, the very idea of a monolithic set of European scientific
practices is further reified. The typically incisive and eloquent comments of
Jean and John Comaroff regarding European capitalism are just as
appropriate in this instance to the idea of European science:
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[it] was always less rationalized and homogeneous than its own dominant
ideology allowed; always more internally diverse, more localized in its forms,
more influenced by moral and material considerations beyond its control*and,
finally, wrought more by its confrontation with the rest of the world than by
purely endogenous forces. Despite its own self-image and its affinity for
rationalization, it was shot through with the features it projected on colonial
others: parochialism, syncretism, unreason, enchantment.
16
In narratives of diffusion and domination, such complexity, heterogeneity,
and irrationality risk being entirely overlooked, as does the fact that the it
that is European science only acquired its singularity, its cohesion, its
purported universality, retrospectively when narrated as such by its
benefactors and beneficiaries.
17
In other instances ideas of diffusion appear in more subtle ways, in studies
that stress native agency but primarily by emphasizing local adoption, or
selective appropriation, of imported paradigms which are then rearticulated
toward various and unexpected ends. This is clearly a more sympathetic and,
at times, historically accurate understanding of how scientific knowledge and
practice could develop. Even here, however, caution is warranted: for one, the
issue of importation begs the question of what is indigenous and what is
foreign in the first place, and who makes such a determination. How far does
something*a technology, a practice, an idea*have to travel to be an import?
How far does the realm of the autochthonous extend geographically? Or, for
that matter, temporally? An over-emphasis on importation and re-articu-
lation*as a number of scholars have noted*runs the risk of positing too
sharp a distinction between pre-colonial and colonial periods and practices.
18
Rajs own gripe with what one might call the selective appropriation
paradigm is that it does not, in many cases, go far enough: non-western
knowledges and techniques still have little place in shaping the content and
practices of a purportedly Western science or of an emerging world order of
knowledge.
19
They remain derivative or second-order, one step removed from
a supposed European point of origin. Raj provides important counters to
such positions: he notes, for example, that from the very beginning the East
India Company had little choice but to rely on intermediaries from the
subcontinent to do much of anything. Not only were the British vastly
outnumbered but, just as importantly, they had limited experience with
terrestrial surveying. In contrast, south Asians had a long tradition of
conducting cadastral and route surveys that preceded the arrival of the
British. [F]ar from being a geographical tabula rasa, terrestrial surveying,
measuring, and representation were common in South Asia . . . [and] the
development and uses of terrestrial surveying in South Asia were not very
different from those in contemporary Britain.
20
Thus the British drew
extensively on the skills, practices, and knowledge of local inhabitants in
order to survey and map land, going so far as to have translated into English
the existent autochthonous surveying techniques and methods for determin-
ing latitude.
21
Here Raj intersects with a welcome, if long-overdue, shift in emphasis in the
history of cartography in recent years: a recognition that the history of
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cartography needs to pay attention to the role of people other than imperial
scientists, explorers, and bureaucrats in the acquisition, circulation and
creation of spatial knowledge and representations. In a 2002 volume on the
histories of science in the Arctic, Michael Bravo and Sverker So rlin noted
that:
[e]ven the field of science and colonialism, which has done so much to take the
study of science and technology out of its conventional European and North
American centers of gravity, is, when it comes to the agents of knowledge
production, a remarkably Western intellectual endeavor. The emerging literature
on the localized, or situated, character of knowledge and knowledge production
share the same general features in this regard, and even studies of field practices
in places and spaces where people are in abundance, can be carried out while
completely ignoring the human beings who are present in the landscape.
Otherwise where people are introduced into narratives of scientific practice,
they tend to be passed over as mere staffage figures, acquiring their positions in
the narrative by the scientists and not in any integrated account . . .
22
At the time their lament would have been equally appropriate for the history
of cartography, a field of study that continued to privilege Western and
relatively elite protagonists carrying out their activities on a relatively
emptied landscape. Rarely was attention given to the people purportedly
being mapped, who at most would appear as fleeting mirages on the
surveyors horizon destined to be subsumed within empires expanding girth.
They did not, in any case, make their own spatial history.
23
One might of
course argue that their invisibility resulted from the brute fact that they were
simply not part of the process in the first place. Of this I am dubious but even
then it has for far too long been easy to assume, rather than demonstrate, that
such was the case. The notorious difficulty of finding marginal, often
illiterate, people in the archives has become an excuse for writing them out
of the narrative entirely. Moreover, Raj shows quite dramatically that, at least
in his cases, they are not that hard to find.
And Raj is not alone: numerous scholars in recent years, working on
various periods and places, have sought to recognize (to greater or lesser
degree) the historical importance of peoples in structural positions of
subordination*peasants, workers, women, and most (not all) native peoples
living under colonial or national regimes*to the history of cartography.
24
In
its softer form, this has meant increased attention to local knowledge and
practice in the construction of geographic knowledge and maps; efforts to
ensure that the seemingly empty landscapes of empire do not remain as such;
and understanding the inhabitants of those landscapes as more than one-
dimensional figures in an uninspired narrative of domination and resistance
(as if those two poles constituted the only possibilities for non-elite agency).
In its harder form, it has meant going beyond mere inclusion in an existing
narrative in order to instead challenge the basic presumptions, the terms, of
the narrative itself. Diffusion, for example, simply cannot survive intact as an
explanatory paradigm*as a prime mover of a narrative*if one pays serious
attention to the words and practices of historical protagonists other than
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colonial officials themselves (without excluding those officials). Hence Rajs
emphasis on co-production, which both provides a means to, and arises from,
an understanding of the dialogic, the dialectical, and the reciprocal, mutually
entangled processes through which scientific knowledge, cultural categories,
and imperial identities were constructed. Indeed, co-production leads Raj to
question more than just diffusion: he questions the very idea of colonial
knowledge (and European categories) itself. He writes:
The currently fashionable picture paints Indians as mere informants, persuaded
to reveal their traditions to the British conquerors who, in turn, reduced them to
passive objects of what is termed colonial knowledge, opening the way to the
imposition of European categories upon their traditional beliefs and social
practices. The present appraisal points instead to an active, though assymetrical
[sic], indigenous participation both in the making of new administrative
knowledge*knowledge which would not have existed but for the new
context*and in the moulding of British and Indian civilities in such a way as
to render them commensurable. It thus implies a radically different anthropology
from that commonly espoused*which conceives of cultures as organically
unified or traditionally continuous; it treats them instead as negotiated, ongoing,
and mutually entangled processes.
25
In other words, arguing for the importance of subaltern actors in the history
of cartography is not a simple call for unthinking history from bottom up
(proctological history, as Bernard Cohn wryly put it). A narrative of
inclusion will hardly do and the answer is not to add a few peasants or
workers or indigenous people to the traditional narrative and stir, a strategy
of analytical enclosure that perpetuates rather than challenges existing
narratives and their categories.
26
Rather, the point is to more fully historicize
the practices, categories and narratives themselves by not artificially
bounding*geographically or socially*the subjects of study in the first place.
More broadly and more bluntly: the history of cartographic practice needs to
take a social, not solely cultural, turn.
Clearly the power asymmetries were, and continue to be, such that one
cannot ignore the dominant role*the will*of the powerful in the creation of
a certain kind of geographic knowledge, even if in the process of its creation it
was subject to an array of local negotiations, contingencies, and so forth (and
much to Rajs credit, he does not ignore colonial bureaucrats and commercial
agents who played prominent roles in the formation of scientific knowledge
but rather situates them in positions of ambiguity, as part of a messy series of
networks in which science is only a part of their charge). But this social turn
in the history of cartography reminds us that, like most other histories, the
history of cartography is empirically skewed and epistemologically con-
strained when viewed solely from the top down . . . or the metropole out.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Suman Seth for the invitation to write this essay and to Bernardo Michael and
Lindsay Braun for sharing their respective works in progress. As something of a trespasser in
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the history of science, I beneted greatly from comments and reading suggestions provided to
me by participants in the conference Creating Space: Across Histories, Cultures, and
Disciplines, held at Montana State University, in particular Michael Reidy and Helen
Rozwadowski.
Notes
1
Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and
Europe, 16501900, New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007, p 1.
2
Raj, Relocating Modern Science, pp 12.
3
I borrow the phrase from Martin Jays study of vision in French thought. See Jay, Downcast Eyes: The
Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought, Berkeley: University of California Press,
1993.
4
Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Alan Sheridan (trans), New York: Vintage
Books, 1979; The Archaeology of Knowledge, Alan Sheridan Smith (trans), New York: Pantheon Books,
1972; The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, New York: Vintage Books, 1973; and
Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (eds), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality,
Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992. For a very good meditation on, and application of,
Foucaults importance to historical geography, see Matthew Hannah, Governmentality and the Mastery
of Territory in Nineteenth-Century America, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
5
See, for example, J B Harley, Deconstructing the Map, Cartographica, 26(2), 1989, pp 120; many of
Harleys key works have been collected in Harley, The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of
Cartography, Paul Laxton (ed), Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. For a critique, see
Barbara Belyea, Images of Power: Derrida/Foucault/Harley, Cartographica, 29(2), 1991, pp 19.
Harleys contribution to the dramatic transformations in the history of cartography is such that earlier
efforts to reshape the eld tend to be forgotten. For an important reminder, see Matthew Edney,
Putting Cartography into the History of Cartography: Arthur H. Robinson, David Woodward, and
the Creation of a Discipline, Cartographic Perspectives, 51, 2005, pp 1429.
6
See Matthew Edney, The Origins and Development of J. B. Harleys Cartographic Theories,
Cartographica, 40(12), 2005. The cited text comes from p 20. For a critique of the empiricist
paradigm with regard to the history of cartography, see Edney, Cartography without Progress:
Reinterpreting the Nature and Historical Development of Mapmaking, Cartographica, 30(23), 1993,
pp 5468.
7
Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, New York: Routledge, 1992; see
also Robert Campbell, In Darkest Alaska: Travel and Empire in the Inland Passage, Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007.
8
D Graham Burnett, Masters of All They Surveyed: Exploration, Geography and a British El Dorado,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. See also Aaron Sachs, The Ultimate Other: Post-
Colonialism and Alexander von Humboldts Ecological Relationship with Nature, History and Theory,
42(4), 2003, pp 111135. These are not of course mutually exclusive positions but rather interpretative
gradations between poles that privilege, on the one hand, cause-and-effect and, on the other,
intentionality.
9
Burnett, Masters of All They Surveyed, p 11.
10
Thongchai Winichakul concludes his remarkable Siam Mapped by lamenting that perhaps we give
human agents too much power in historical processes: Human beings are too often given the central
role in a historical narrative. They deserve a much humbler place in history*as servants of technology,
perhaps, which is what is really happening now. Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: The History of
the Geo-Body of a Nation, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994, p 173. Before dismissing
Thongchais conclusion as technologically determinist, it is worth recalling that his constituted one of
the rst efforts in Thai historiography to refuse to situate the Thai monarchs as the central gures in the
creation of Thailand.
11
Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire, London: Verso Press,
1993.
12
See the classic texts by W W Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960; Seymor M Lipset, Political Man, New York: Anchor
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Books, 1963; and Samuel Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies, New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1968.
13
Raj, Relocating Modern Science, p 63. His targets include: Matthew Edney, Mapping an Empire: The
Geographical Construction of British India, 17651843, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997; Ian J
Barrow, Making History, Drawing Territory: British Mapping in India, c. 17561905, New York: Oxford
University Press, 2003; and especially Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of
Modern India, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.
14
Raj, Relocating Modern Science, p 61. Rajs concerns are shared by a growing number of historians of
Iberoamerica and Latin America, my own eld of specialization, who have sought, rst, to remind
readers that the history of science is indeed a legitimate subject of study in places outside of Europe and
the United States, and second, to refute the pervasive narratives that continue to see scientic knowledge
as produced in an unproblematic West and diffused outward to various sites around the globe. See
Jorge Can izares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and
Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. For an
excellent sampling of new work being done on the history of science in the Spanish and Portuguese
Empires, as well as an historiographical perspective on the state of the eld, see Daniela Bleichmar,
Paula De Vos, Kristin Hufne and Kevin Sheehan (eds), Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires,
15001800, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009.
15
In his How to Write the History of the New World, Can izares-Esguerra observed that [t]he reader of this
book has most likely been socialized into constructs that assign non-Western attributes to both Latin
America and Spain, where the Inquisition purportedly stied all novelty and people have ever since been
condemned to derivative and second-rate intellectual pursuits [ . . .] In the case of the subjects discussed
in this book, these boundaries have made it difcult for historians even to consider the possibility that
voluminous and even pioneering scholarship (by Western standards) on epistemology could have been
produced in Spain and Spanish America in the eighteenth century. He additionally takes US Latin
Americanists to task for ignoring intellectual history in favor of stories of strife and exploitation . . .
[and] tales of revolutionary violence and, if socially conscious, stories of cunning peasants resisting
treacherous oligarchs. Although his critique is important, it is also a bit overstated and seems to
conate an array of very diverse perspectives into one simple vision: I suspect more than a few of the
authors he may have in mind*he does not note who they are*would address very similar themes (of
strife and exploitation, and so forth) if they were historians writing on the US. See Can izares-Esguerra,
How to Write the History of the New World, p 10 (the critique is reiterated on p 348).
16
John L and Jean Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution (Vol. 2): The Dialectics of Modernity on a
South African Frontier, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997, p 11. A powerful indictment of the
scientic method, precisely along these lines, was made nearly a half-century ago by Paul Feyerabend.
See Feyerabend, Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge, London: New Left
Books, 1975. For a similar argument applied to surveying and mapping, see Raymond B Craib,
Cartographic Mexico: A History of State Fixations and Fugitive Landscapes, Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2004.
17
Although it comes in for critique from Raj, Edneys excellent work has, more than any other, revealed
just how anarchic and disorderly the seemingly rational and orderly mapping of India was by the
British. In the process he has much to say more broadly about the nature of British colonialism in India.
See Edney, Mapping an Empire.
18
For excellent interventions on this point see K Sivaramakrishnan, Modern Forests: Statemaking and
Environmental Change in Colonial Eastern India, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999; Rohan
DSouza, Drowned and Damned: Colonial Capitalism and Flood Control in Eastern India, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2006; and, for a detailed spatial analysis that wrestles with the categories of pre-
colonial and colonial, Bernardo Michael, Separating the Yam from the Boulder: The Anglo-Gorkha War
(18141816) and the Organization of State Spaces in Colonial South Asia, book manuscript in progress.
19
Raj, Relocating Modern Science, p 13. Here Raj is critiquing Bernard Cohns arguments regarding the
codication and transmission of local knowledge by Europeans.
20
Raj, Relocating Modern Science, p 72.
21
Raj, Relocating Modern Science, p 80.
22
Michael Bravo and Sverker So rlin, Narrative and Practice*an Introduction, in Bravo and So rlin (eds),
Narrating the Arctic: A Cultural History of Nordic Scientic Practices, Canton, MA: Watson Publishing,
2002, p 5.
23
Anthropologists in many cases were well ahead of the curve in this regard. See, among others, Keith
Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache, Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, 1995; Hugh Brody, Maps and Dreams: Indians and the British
489
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Columbia Frontier, Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1998 [1981]; James C Scott, Seeing Like a
State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1998; Donald Moore, Suffering for Territory: Race, Place, and Power in Zimbabwe, Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2005; Benjamin Orlove, Mapping Reeds and Reading Maps: The Politics of
Representation in Lake Titicaca, American Ethnologist, 18(1), 1991, pp 2946; and Nancy Peluso,
Whose Woods Are These? Counter-mapping Forest Territories in Kalimantan, Indonesia, Antipode,
27(4), 1995, pp 383406.
24
The literature is growing rapidly and prohibits any comprehensive survey here but a sampling would
include the works cited in note 23 as well as Barbara Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous
Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geogracas, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996;
Robert A Rundstrom, Mapping, Postmodernism, Indigenous People and the Changing Direction of
North American Cartography, Cartographica, 28(2), 1991, pp 112; Craib, Cartographic Mexico;
Valerie Kivelson, Cartographies of Tsardom: The Land and Its Meanings in Seventeenth-Century Russia,
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006; Michael, Separating the Yam from the Boulder; Lindsay
Frederick Braun, The Cadastre and the Colony: Surveying, Territory and Legibility in the Creation of
South Africa, c. 18601913, PhD dissertation, Rutgers University, 2008; G Malcom Lewis (ed.),
Cartographic Encounters: Perspectives on Native American Map Making and Map Use, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1998; Matthew Sparke, Between Demythologizing and Deconstructing
the Map: Shawnadithits New-found-land and the Alienation of Canada, Cartographica, 32(1), 1995,
pp 121; Yanna Yannakakis, Witnesses, Spatial Practices, and a Land Dispute in Colonial Oaxaca, The
Americas, 65(2), 2008, pp 161192; Karl Offen, Creating Mosquitia: Mapping Amerindian Spatial
Practices in Eastern Central America, 16291779, Journal of Historical Geography, 33(2), 2007, pp 254
282; Barbara Belyea, Inland Journeys, Native Maps, Cartographica, 3(2), 1996, pp 116; and Neil
Saer, Measuring the New World: Enlightenment Science and South America, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2008.
25
Raj, Relocating Modern Science, p 138.
26
As Joan Scott has observed, narratives of inclusion tend to elide the process by which subject-positions
are constituted in the rst place. Her position is too discursive for my liking but the point is an
important one: a history of subaltern experience that does not simultaneously challenge the foundation
of the narrative itself is insufcient. Scott, The Evidence of Experience, Critical Inquiry, 17(4), 1991,
pp 773797.
490
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