Mapping and the excerise of power
The first purpose of mapping was to mark territories, to designate an area, to know one’s own location from the other. Dianne Rocheleau argues that mapping is an activity brings with it the power to name, to define, to locate, and to situate (Rocheleau, 2005). Since maps make nature visible and also available to particular modes of economic and political calculus that aims at dividing this natural terrain into territories. It is the concept of ‘territory’ and its representation that relates maps to power. Foucault considered ‘territory’ to be a juridico-political term that referred to the area controlled by a certain kind of power (Foucault, 1980). Moreover Stuart Elden in his genealogical study of The Birth of Territory, considered territory a distinctive mode of social/spatial organization that has been seen “as a bounded space under the control of a group of people, with fixed boundaries, exclusive internal sovereignty and equal external status” (Elden, 2013).
Since mapping is a practice of power (Harley, 2001), then maps are both a tool of struggle and also a terrain of struggles itself (Rocheleau, 2005). Values and social constructs such as ethnicity, politics, religion and social class have heavily influenced the production of maps since earliest times (Harely, 1989). This influence was only discussed by the emergence of critical geography, when geographers like J. B. Harley linked geographic knowledge to power, and thus revealed the political dimensions that challenged the claims of neutral scientific mapping of the modern era (Cramptom & Krygier, 2006). He argued-basing this assumption on Derrida’s work- that maps are rhetorical texts that required decoding its margins.
Maps can be seen as the main tool to conduct what James C. Scott called the process of ‘sedentariztion’ of the spontaneous communities by the state. A process that aims at making the society more legible, to arrange the population in a way that serves the classic state functions of taxation, conscription and prevention of rebellion (Scott, 1998). He argues that the reason why most of the pre-modern states interventions were crude and self-defeating, is due to the fact that they lacked “maps” of their terrains and their people, they lacked a measure that would allow them to translate what they knew into a common standard necessity for a synoptic view (Scott, 1998).
From the beginning of the project of modernity in the eighteenth century, extraordinary intellectual effort was made to “develop objective science, universal morality and law” (Harvey, 1992). Accordingly these efforts were resonated in the modern mapping techniques that claimed neutral objectivity and precise measurements (Harley, 2001). The arrival of the French expedition in to Egypt in 1798, has introduced the country to ‘modernity’ (Raymond, 2000). The most prominent product of this encounter with modernity was the encyclopedic gaze of Le Description de L’Egypte (Oliver, 2012). The whole 23 volume was dedicated for mapping the country, in cartographic and non-cartographic forms. In spite of its acclaimed objective empirical knowledge, the book had various visual and representational techniques by which the scholars established a sense of mastery and control over the land they wished to colonize (Oliver, 2012). Thus this production is not only an act of power since it was charted by the authority in power, and a tool of sustaining power and control over the subjects of knowledge, it is also a product in which power is embedded through knowledge. Mapping was used as a tool of control again, during the making of the “modern state” by Mohamed Ali Pasha in 1844, when the government used its troops internally to map the population and areas of each governorate to control the production of the agricultural land and ensure the sedentartation of the peasants (Mitchell, 1988). It is worth mentioning that there is no evidence that these records were cartographically charted, yet the Egyptian Archives are full of these documents that monitor all the details of the population (Fahmy, 2013; Fahmy, 2002). This mapping process of the existing agricultural and industrial activities in Egypt was soon followed by new plans to rebuild several Egyptian villages under the supervision of French engineers in 1846 (Mitchell, 1988). It was an attempt to enforce a new power, a new order of ruling the state (Fahmy, 2002). This type of mapping was abridged, according to Scott, since it did not represent the actual situation but rather focused on the part that interested the official observer/state (Scott, 1998). Moreover they are not just maps, they are tools that are allied with state power, would enable much of the reality they depicted to be made (Scott, 1998). Accordingly, mapping is not only a tool of control through surveillance and but also a prerequisite of any future plans. The history of Cairo is full of similar patterns. Andre Raymond argues that the map drawn up by Pierre Grand Bey in 1874 to outline the modern khedivial Cairo was no more than an adaptation of the map in the Description de L’Egypte (Raymond, 2000). This constant chain of reproduction of analog maps caused the accumulation of several layers of interests and perspectives of Cairo, in which only the authority represented its perspective. Since maps have always been drawn by the victors and the authorities, then mapping is a weaponry tool that could also be a tool of resistance if there is a counter-map (Said, 1995). The making of this counter-map is in itself a struggle against the hegemonic powers (Rocheleau, 2005).
References:
Cramptom, J. W., & Krygier, J. (2006). An Introduction to Critical Cartography. ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 11-33.
Elden, S. (2013). The Birth of Territory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,.
Fahmy, K. (2002). All the Pasha's Men. Mehmed Ali, his army and the making of modern Egypt. Cairo: AUC Press.
Fahmy, K. (2013). Mehmed Ali. From Ottoman governor to ruler of Egypt. London: Oneworld Publications.
Foucault, M. (1980). Questions on Geography. In C. Gordon, Power/Knowledge. Selected interviews and other writings 1972-1977 (pp. 61-77). New York: Vintage Books.
Harely, J. B. (1989). Deconstructing the map. Cartographica, 1-20.
Harley, J. B. (2001). Maps, Knowledge and power. In P. Laxton, The new nature of maps.Essays in the history of cartography. (pp. 51-83). New York: John Hopkins University Press.
Harvey, D. (1992). The Condition of Postmodernity. An enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers.
Mitchell, T. (1988). Colonising Egypt. California: University of California Press.
Oliver, L. (2012). Blindness Materialized: Disease, Decay, and restoration in the Napoleonic Description de L'Egypte (1809-1828). In D. Leibsohn, & J. F. Peterson, Seeing Across Cultures in the Early Modern World (pp. 125-146). Surrey: Ashgate Publishing .
Raymond, A. (2000). Cairo. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Rocheleau, D. (2005). Maps as power tools: Locating communities in space or situating people and ecologies in place? In P. Brosius, A. Lowenhaupt Tsing, & C. Zerner, Communities and Conservation: Histories and Politics of Community-based natural resource management (pp. 327-363). Oxford: Alta Mira Press.
Said, E. (1995). The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian Self-Determination, 1969-1994. New York: Vintage Book.
Scott, J. C. (1998). Seeing Like A State. How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press.
