What’s in a Map?
I recently ran across two comments on maps. One was while editing Rediscovering Paul, a forthcoming textbook by David Capes, Rodney Reeves and Randy Richards. Randy cites an incident from his time as a missionary in Indonesia.
[I] was quite lost among a cluster of islands in the South Pacific. I had a map. I asked a local where I was. He looked confused and then pointed to the ground. “No,” I said, “where am I on this?” pointing to the map. He looked confused and said I was holding it, not standing on it. I explained it was a picture of this island. He wondered where the trees and rocks so clearly around us were in the picture. “If you were a bird flying high in the sky,” I explained, “and you looked down, which of these islands would you see?” “I have never been a bird,” he replied in disgust and walked off. Maps and other visual representations of the world are not as natural and self-explanatory as we often assume.
Would the man have been any more impressed by a mapping GPS? I doubt it. But then, Randy wouldn’t have needed to ask for assistance, and we would have been the poorer for it. I assume the islander was accustomed to directions such as, “follow this coastline until you come to a cove, then head for the far island toward the setting sun.”
Are maps perhaps essentially “modernist” constructs? After noting and commenting on the above story for this blog, I ran into the following analogy in an article on “Modernism and Postmodernisms” by Brad Kallenberg and Ethan Smith in our forthcoming Global Dictionary of Theology:
Although shuttling between roadmaps and driving directions seems trivial in a world dominated by a uniform Global Positioning System, the deep instinct of modernity is that every itinerary can be translated into a bird's-eye-view picture-map. In sharp contrast, many cultures treat growing up as a journey for which no picture-map exists, but for which there is an itinerary. Youths are painstakingly taught to live well through the telling of stories, some stories being reserved until the proper time when the youth is developmentally ready to heed it. The collection of (canonical) stories is one type of moral itinerary whose timely telling to the community's children is as much a function of the elders' practical wisdom as it is the quality of the stories themselves. But if, as the modernist insists, every itinerary translates into a "picture-map," then even a moral itinerary was thought to be translatable into a timeless, skill-less, context-free picture whose correct application no longer has anything to do with practical wisdom or personal character but with mathematical calculation.
The preference for roadmaps over itineraries is symptomatic of the presumptiveness of modernism (namely, that the lone and untrained individual can adopt a God's-eye-view at will).
It’s as if Kallenberg and Smith are “preaching” on Randy Richards’s story!
Interestingly enough, a few days ago I was on a sailing trip into British Columbia's Gulf Islands. Studying the map (or nautical chart), I thought I knew our location and what channel we should turn into in order to reach the town of Ganges on Salt Spring Island. But I confidently turned too soon, with the result that we were headed toward Sidney on Vancouver Island. Fortunately, it wasn't long before the error became evident, but we probably lost an hour on our "scenic detour." Part of my error was in not paying close enough attention to how the chart related to the terrain. This, as one of my sailing companions, an ethicist, might have pointed out, was a deficiency in my virtue as a mariner--the kind that only comes with years of sailing. I'm still working on practical nautical wisdom. The picture maps of modernity have their limitations. (But I'll confess, my old non-mapping-but-modernist GPS provided data that confirmed the error of my ways!)
Posted by Dan Reid
at August 8, 2007 11:31 AM
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