Revisiting the Histories of Mapping: Is there a Future for a Cartographic Ethnology?

Abstract

31 A Return to Cartography? Like so many of its fellow cultural sciences, the ethnology of material folk culture boasts a rich cartographic past. The adoption of the historicalgeographical paradigm within this discipline covers an era in twentieth-century ethnology where the spatio temporal charting of material folk culture became a joint project for several generations of scholars in institutions across Europe. Tracing its origins to the late nineteenth century when German historians first began categorising and mapping the geographical distribution of agricultural implements and house types (e.g. Baumgart 1881; Rhamm 1905), the historical-geographical paradigm is sometimes seen as the closest thing ethnology has ever come to a period of Kuhnian normal science (see especially Stoklund 2003). It nonetheless still figures as a curiosity that has little or no relevance for today’s research practices in the field. With very few exceptions (see e.g. Frykman et al. 2009), cartography remains a thing of the past. At its height, however, the cartographic method saw ethnologists across Europe and Scandinavia undertake a series of national atlas projects (e.g. Lithberg 1919; Erixon 1957), eventually culminating in the European atlas collaboration in the decades following the Second World War (Rooijakkers & Meurkens 2000). In its aftermath, the cartographic method has been dismissed for its lack of This paper revisits the cartography of material folk culture from the point of view of a current cartographic project in science and technology studies (STS) known as controversy mapping. Considering the mutual learning that has already taken place between ethnological engagements with material culture and material semiotic strands of STS, we ask, what kind of cross-fruition could be gained from expanding the dialogue to cartography and mapmaking? We suggest that a shared focus on open-ended assemblages of cultural elements, rather than functional cultural wholes, provides a good basis for such a conversation. We argue that the capacity of the atlases of material folk culture to draw their own theoretical assumptions into doubt could serve as a useful prototype for controversy mappers. Vice versa we suggest that recent innovations in controversy mapping might overcome some of the problems that have troubled earlier ethnological mapmaking projects.