Customer Reviews

Maps are Territories: Science is an Atlas

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This book is all over the map, but what exactly does that mean?

Turnbull begins with a quote, "...all theory may be regarded as a kind of map extended over space and time." (Michael Polanyi) How tempting to describe difficult concepts as "like a map." By page two we're dealing with Borges, and a page later Lewis Carroll. Maps are more complex than we ever imagined.

The discussion of Aboriginal-Australian Maps (Exhibit 5) takes us deeper still, as we learn that their dream time and painting contain elements of geographical knowledge which these people equate with magic.

Originally published in 1989, it remains way ahead of its time. Multicultural, lacking any cant, beautifully illustrated, intellectually exciting

One of the more intriguing fancies of Jorge Luis Borges had to do with an empire in which "the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection that * * * a Map of the Empire * * * was of the same Scale as the Empire and * * * coincided with it point for point." (Borges and Bioy-Casares, "On Exactitude in Science".) Of course the map was so unwieldy that it was utterly impracticable and, in Borges's fable, it was abandoned "to the Rigours of sun and Rain." The tale exemplifies what has become a commonplace of cartography: "The map is not the territory". If it were the territory, per standard thought, it could no longer function as a map.

This short (66 pages), attractive, and rather unconventional book challenges that axiom. It poses questions, philosophical and cognitive, about the nature of maps. To what extent are they strictly pictorial (or "iconic") and what extent symbolic (using conventional signs and symbols)? Recognition of just how extensive and pervasive the conventions of cartography are inclines one to accept the notion that maps are grounded in a shared "form of life" (to borrow a phrase and concept from Ludwig Wittgenstein). The argument of the book is that maps are culturally-dependent artifacts and, somewhat paradoxically then, in a sense they ARE the territory after all.

Thus MAPS ARE TERRITORIES is rather philosophical in nature. The above paragraph is a gross oversimplification of the book, but still the discussion is rather broad-brush. For the philosophically inclined, among the notions raised are the parallels between maps and scientific theories, to what extent can maps and theories be "non-indexical", and spatiality as fundamental to human consciousness and our understanding of experience (spatiality as a Kantian a priori). It is not a particularly easy book to read, but it is not especially difficult either. For most readers, it probably will provoke more questions than answer them.

But there is another aspect to MAPS ARE TERRITORIES: it contains reproductions of approximately fifty maps. Many of these maps are attractive. None of them resembles a typical Rand-McNally atlas page or a standard road map; indeed, many of them are rather alien to 21st-Century Westerners. Among the most alien - as well as most intriguing and aesthetically attractive - are some Aboriginal-Australian bark paintings that, the book argues, also (perhaps even primarily) function as maps.

The prospective audience for MAPS ARE TERRITORIES is rather narrow, but anyone interested in maps and the conventions underlying maps - the "philosophy of cartography", if you will - probably will enjoy the hour or two required to read through it.