Unit 1: What is Cultural Mapping?

What is Cultural Mapping?

Long before the development of formal spoken and written languages, humans have shared their experiences through drawing, sketching, and other forms of visual representation. Maps, too, allow us to conceptualize and share our experience and sense of place, usually rendering place as a static construct, with clearly defined borders, lines, contours, and so on. The act of mapping, as practiced during the last half century, also allows us to represent our engagement moving through such places. As we define it here, cultural mapping may be seen as the meeting place of traditional and personal cartography, providing those working in community
arts and cultural development with exceptionally rich narratives of place.

Research Methodology and a Platform for Dialogue

Cultural mapping aims to recognize and make visible the ways local stories, practices, relationships, memories, rituals, and physical elements constitute places as meaningful locations (adapted from Duxbury, Garrett-Petts, and McLennan, 2015). The term cultural mapping refers, on one hand, to an interdisciplinary field of research characterized by a wide array of approaches that uses cultural mapping as a tool and method of inquiry, knowledge organization, analysis, and presentation. On the other hand, it also refers to a practice-generated field that uses cultural mapping as a participatory planning and development tool that is embedded in community engagement and creates spaces to incorporate multivocal stories and multiple perspectives. In this way, cultural mapping is commonly characterized as both a research methodology as well as a platform for discussion and dialogue.

Cultural mapping projects provide opportunities to critically examine the past, assess the present, examine representations, make connections, address absences, and envision continuities and change into the future – creating spaces and processes for participatory research, learning, and community action.

Video 1. In this 10-minute video, Leonardo Chiesi (University of Florence), Julie Scott (London Metropolitan University), and Andreas Lang (“Public Works,” artist/architect, UK) offer a definition of cultural mapping, emphasizing especially what Chiesi calls cultural mapping’s “engagement effects” and “knowledge effects.”
Cultural mapping is presented as a way of “humanizing geography,” bringing together past, present, and future into a single document. Together the presenters see cultural mapping as embodying a necessary critique of more conventional forms of community consultation.

As a mode of inquiry and a methodological tool, cultural mapping is widely used to bring a diverse range of stakeholders into conversation about the cultural dimensions and potentials of place. Cultural mapping projects serve to make visible different perspectives and knowledges and to provide spaces for sharing these with others, extending and building new collective knowledge in the process. The coming together of diverse perspectives and knowledges within cultural mapping projects has tended to highlight and prioritize pluralistic approaches to the knowledge that is developed. Where individual cultural maps give visual testimony to personal experience of a particular place, cultural mapping as a practice helps bring those experiences together in dialogue. Increasingly, cultural mappers are recognizing an obligation to make room for and embrace the different forms in which knowledge is found and the means through which it is communicated.

Counter-mapping

Cultural mapping thus becomes a kind of “counter-mapping” (Peluso, 1995, p. 384) challenging the power and authority of traditional mapping, and interested instead in (1) mapping culture, (2) mapping cultural experiences, and (3) culture formation through participatory practice. An especially powerful example of counter-mapping is presented in the following documentary video. Employing a mapping methodology used extensively among Indigenous communities, a gathering of people from Siberia, Africa, and the Amazon work together find a voice that speaks to their respective governments. Their aim is to save their culture and
their territory from extinction by making a visual record of their knowledge and their way of life.

Video 2. Reviving Our Culture, Mapping Our Future (2010) is a short film produced as part of the project “Eco- Cultural Mapping and Training, Limpopo Province, South Africa.” It is a co-production by the Mupo Foundation, the African Biodiversity Network, the Gaia Foundation, and the Technical Centre for Agriculture and Rural Cooperation, ACP-EU. This work is distributed under the CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 Unported License.

In contrast to the kind of conventional maps you would see in an atlas or history textbook, participatory cultural mapping processes and participant-generated cultural maps assert that local inhabitants possess expert knowledge of their environments and can effectively represent a socially or culturally distinct understanding of the territory that includes information excluded from mainstream or official maps (see, for example, Mapping for Rights Website: http://www.mappingforrights.org/participatory_mapping .

Social Practice

In this way, cultural mapping is a social practice that invites multiple forms and modes of non-specialized vernacular discourse—from Indigenous communities, locals, those with lived/living experience, peers, and those from not-for-profits and grassroots organizations representing multi-sectoral viewpoints—into the public sphere of community identity formation, political and social advocacy, local knowledge production, municipal planning, cultural sustainability planning, participatory decision making, and community engagement.

Methodologically, this has meant that for those practicing cultural mapping the processes of knowledge building/compilation, participation/dialogue, and representation/expression are becoming increasingly intertwined dimensions, rather than separate components in the overall project. Furthermore, as community engagement becomes more central to the creation of cultural maps, and the nature of the knowledge collected through participatory cultural mapping projects deepens, we observe more public questions and higher expectations about what will happen with the insights and knowledge created and how they will be used.

Forms and Outputs

The forms and the outputs of cultural mapping can take many forms, ranging from a simple spatial arrangement of post-it notes on a flip chart, to mind map diagrams, to photo-voice exhibitions, to group discussions and survey responses documented through graphic facilitation or web-based inventories, to detailed hand-drawn renderings of places and experiences and journeys, to multi-media compendia, and even works of art (Cochrane, Corbett et al., 2014; Corbett, Cochrane and Gill, 2016; Duxbury, Garrett-Petts, and Longley, 2019; Stewart, 2007). Among these choices, (1) hand-drawn sketch maps, (2) journey maps, and (3) story maps are becoming recognized as rich cultural texts redolent with individual experience and worthy of greater attention from both scholars and practitioners (e.g., see Crawhall, 2007; Duxbury, Garrett-Petts & MacLennan, 2015; Pillai, 2013; Poole 2003; Roberts, 2012; Strang, 2010).

Unit 1 Activities
Check your understanding of Unit 1 by completing the quick, automatically assessed activities below.
The more complex reflective journal practice will guide you through ways to apply Unit1 concepts to your life.
You are invited to:

You are invited to keep a reflective journal to process key concepts, and to use for future reference. Drawing will be part of your journaling practice; if you choose to keep an electronic journal, you may want to consider ways to add images (taking digital photographs of hand-drawn work, or using a stylus and a tablet). Paper or video journals are another option – the choice is yours.

Imagining cultural mapping in your life:

Imagine yourself creating a cultural mapping project with a small community of people- let’s say your friends, family, colleagues, or special-interest group. As Leonardo Chiesi noted in Video 1, cultural mapping can make the intangible visible. What an opportunity to better understand communal perceptions!

In your journal, answer the following questions. You can write or draw, or record your answers.

What would you like to map?
What questions would you ask?
Who would you ask to participate and why?

Please give your imagined project a name -you will use your imagined project and build it up further – as you move through the units in this workshop.

References:

Cochrane, L., J. Corbett, P. Keller, and R. Canessa. (2014). Impact of Community-based and Participatory Mapping. Institute for Studies and Innovation in community-university engagement. University of Victoria, Victoria, B.C.

Corbett J., L. Cochrane, and M. Gill. (2016). Powering up: revisiting participatory GIS and empowerment. The Cartographic Journal, 53(4): 335–340.

Crawhall, N. (2007). The role of participatory cultural mapping in promoting intercultural dialogue—‘We are not hyenas.’ Concept paper prepared for UNESCO Division of Cultural Policies and Intercultural Dialogue.

Duxbury, N., W. F. Garrett-Petts, and A. Longley (Eds.). (2019). Artistic Approaches to Cultural Mapping: Activating Imaginaries and Means of Knowing. London: Routledge.

Duxbury, N., W. F. Garrett-Petts, and D. MacLennan (Eds.). (2015). Cultural Mapping as Cultural Inquiry. New York: Routledge.

Peluso, N.L. (1995). Whose woods are those? Counter-mapping forest territories in Kalimantan, Indonesia. Antipode 27 (4), 383-406.

Pillai, J. (2013). Cultural Mapping: A Guide to Understanding Place, Community and Continuity. Petaling Jaya, Malaysia: Strategic Information and Research Development Centre.

Poole, P. (2003). Cultural Mapping and Indigenous Peoples. Report prepared for UNESCO (March). http://www.iapad.org/publications/ppgis/cultural_mapping.pdf

Stewart, S. (2007). Cultural Mapping Toolkit. Vancouver: Creative City Network of Canada and 2010 Legacies Now.

Roberts, L. (2012). Mapping Cultures: Place, Practice, Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Strang, V. (2010). Mapping histories: Cultural landscapes and walkabout methods. In I. Vaccaro, E. A. Smith, and S. Aswani (Eds.), Environmental Social Sciences: Methods and Research Design (pp. 132-156). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.