Mapping Ourselves, Mapping Others: On John Pickles' A History of Spaces

November 19, 2007

I’ve read John Pickles’ A History of Spaces last September and at first blush, I thought that the book was not that good. I felt that he wanted to say a lot of things and because of this, was unable to communicate his message clearly. I was not surprised when many (about 3) of the students in my class felt strongly against the book, but not for the exact same reasons why I didn’t like it. For them, the book was simply inaccessible because of the plethora of people Pickles was trying to pick on. It was also supposedly heavy on jargon; and compared to the books we’ve previously read, is the least coherent. For me, however, this wasn’t the problem. My problem, after a certain distance from the book, was that I knew some of its philosophical baggage, and their transparency revealed the seamlines of the book to me. Unlike my favorite book in this class for example (Timothy Mitchell’s Rule of Experts), the arguments and texts forwarded in this book didn’t just flow too well. As one of the professors in the class expressed it, it reads more like an elaborate literature review. I agree with him and I think the power of the book lies in pointing out very crucial studies already done on thinking about cartography and the history of mapping.




For example, because of his repetitive quoting of Thongchai Winichakul’s Siam Mapped, I was led to read the book itself and found a lot more pleasure in understanding the complexities of mapmaking and its subsequent effects on nation-making. Siam Mapped made me rethink the history of colonialism in Southeast Asia, in particular, (outside Thailand) the Philippines and the pre-colonial artistic production of balangay peoples (the basic unit of pre-colonial Philippine society, which also pertains to a kind of boat) and their production of maps and navigational tools. I wonder how this coalesced with European (Spanish and Portuguese) and eventually American practices of mapmaking and how the distribution of power among the so-called natives, mestizos and the colonial powers allowed for the production of Philippine maps.





This search led me to read the only book written about Philippine cartography (this clearly signals the paucity of geographical literature about the Philippines) by Carlos Quirino published in the 1950’s. In this book, Philippine Cartography: 1320-1899, Quirino elucidates the history, politics and processes that undergirded the formation of Philippine maps 200 years before the Spanish colonial era and just a year after the American annexation of the archipelago, the so-called Pearl of the Orient. One thing struck me: the claim that most primitive Philippine maps were actually produced, not in the European tradition, but in accordance to the ‘Oriental’ ones, specifically the Chinese and Japanese cartographic traditions. There was a lot of chatter in the class about counter-mapping and its revolutionary potentials. I agree that there is room for re-writing the history of spaces, and I would like to join this effort by reading historical accounts of the encounters between the mapmakers and the world they mapped in pre-colonial and colonial Philippines. There is a lot of work that needs to be done in this area, and instead of ranting, I’ll do part of the work this summer and visit the National Museum in Manila and attempt to look at the rubbles and clues left to us who can re-map the Philippines once again.