Preamble to the Friday Map Drop (Patreon)

On Friday, I'll be also releasing this month's feature, a beautifully flawed map on "civilizational spheres" and "cultural lenses." The map will be imbibed with reductive Western geographic imaginaries and Orientalisms not just for the Orient, if you know what I mean. Oh, and the aesthetics be 90s-themed.

Why did we attempt to make a map like this? Well, I started questioning the reasoning myself.

Cultural geography maps like this are "fun" and "intriguing" to most people, perhaps because of inherent prejudices and unhealthy assumptions of how the world works. Divvying up the world into categories is not the issue. The issue is that culture at such a scale is full of ironies and overlap, which make demarcations or the drawing up of borders futile. There are several traits to each cultural group defined at this scale. And every time the geographer considers a new cultural component or trait, the borders shift and the units of measurement—the countries—fall into a different layout.

Today, only political scientists or international relations theorists ever make reference to such a worldview. Hopefully it's to challenge or complicate Samuel Huntington. No contemporary anthropologist does the same by attempting to simplify the world this way. Even archaeologists have distanced themselves from the "Cradles of Civilization," pivoting instead to the concept of "Centres of Domestication."

I guess the reason I wanted to see this map through was because I recognized the fact that people, or maybe just Western people, do still use this kind of thinking as a heuristic for understanding differences in the world. If there is an Orientalism, there is definitely an assumed Occidentalism in our vocabulary—I just referenced it in the previous sentence. Thus, this imaginary map does not depict empirical facts in an imaginary world, but rather, is an imaginary map that depicts imaginaries—social constructs—that are nevertheless treated as fact in an imaginary world. 

And just as all the categories in the Altera Factbook are reductive and too simple to be useful on their own, only when put to consideration with other socio-cultural categories is such a perspective useful. One may even get a robust view of some nation in Altera by doing this. Perhaps they'll even discover ironies—Haiti has this prevailing religion but is considered to be part of that unrelated cultural lens.

Next month, I hope to carve out some time to make a couple of other cultural geography infographics, maps that highlight centres of art and aesthetics—literature, fashion, architecture, cuisine etc.—and to which of these centres countries orient themselves. But I'll also be gearing up for two sports related maps to sync up with FIFA, so do wish me time.