Elcano, viaje a la historia

Abstract

remains bound to cartography’s ideal to at least some degree. An interesting example of Edney’s analysis comes in his treatment of satirical mapping. The nineteenth-century examples like Mark Twain’s “Fortifications of Paris” and Lewis Carroll’s “The Hunting of the Snark” show that cartography had not yet reached a hegemonic status. In contrast, the twenty-firstcentury examples like Neil Gaiman’s Fragile Things provide evidence that both scholars and the public have begun to chip away at cartography’s place in spatial analysis. The book follows that modern cartography developed after European states widely adopted a singular methodology for all mapmaking in the 1790s. Researchers, therefore, may see some of the attitudes that cartography incorporated earlier in the eighteenth century. The acceptance of geometry as a unifying concept led cartography to become fully formed between the 1820s and 1850s, with European attempts to map much of the globe for their imperial ambitions. The early-twentieth century then saw cartography reach hegemony as mapmakers began using rules of numerical ratio outside of engineering. This process forced intellectual questions to shift from why people made maps to simply asking how people made them. Such a shift in thought took the importance of maps for granted and focused only on improving mapping techniques and technologies. With the development of postmodern critique and satellite image mapping in the twentieth century, academics have begun calling for cartography’s end. Edney states that scholars like Denis Wood, Timothy Barney, and William Rankin have already argued that cartography is a zombie project—a dead construct that continues in the present without realizing it has already died. Ultimately, Cartography serves as an opening to a much larger, three-part research project designed to offer an historical study of mapping and explain what mapping is and offer suggestions on how to study its history (see p. 7 and Edney’s website mappingasprocess.net for more in-depth descriptions). In this process, he calls upon map scholars to abandon even the word cartography for its reliance on imperial structures. Cartography offers only a singular meaning and method for mapping, and, therefore, different cultures must adapt their processes to it or be rejected from academic map study. Instead of this bleak uniform vision of the map, Edney offers readers a possible route to studying maps, plural both in the types of documents and in the cultural norms that create them.