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A MAP IS A PECULIAR KIND OF VISUAL TEXT. It seems a mere instrument of utility, showing us where to go and how to put things in place. Invisible ingredients, however, render every map a Pandora's box. Emotions are undoubtedly the most potent of all of the invisible elements in maps. The cartographic passions that make the headlines may be national ones, but in cities, towns, and villages, people have strong feelings about local maps. Street gangs, real estate developers, insurance companies, zoning boards, planners, and electorates invest maps with local politics. Landowners love their property lines. Universities map their campus identity. The Association for Asian Studies (AAS) signifies itself succinctly in its logo, a map of Asia. Such territorial attachments and many others have striking similarities: they infuse boundaries with iconic significance, tinged with feelings of security, belonging, possessiveness, enclosure, entitlement, and exclusion.
Equally invisible in maps are social relations of mapping that produce maps and authorize their interpretation. The most influential mapmakers today work in national institutions, including schools, colleges, and universities. State-authorized mapping is so ubiquitous that most governments do not regulate most map making, but almost everyone draws official lines on maps by habit anyway, in accordance with cartographic regimentation that is so invisible, pervasive, and widely accepted that few people ever think about it, indicating the current global hegemony of the national state's territorial authority. We see the internal and external boundaries of national states so often they appear as virtually natural features of the globe. This virtual reality came into being in the nineteenth century, as industrial technologies for surveying the Earth, producing statistics, mass printing, mass reading, and mass education began to make viewing standardized maps a common experience. Making maps, reading maps, talking about maps, and thinking with maps in the mind became increasingly common each decade. By 1950 people around the world had substantial map knowledge in common. Today, we can reasonably imagine that most people in the world share common map knowledge because they routinely experience various versions of exactly the same maps.
During the global expansion of modern mapping, national territory incorporated all geography. Old spatial realities remained-and new ones emerged-but maps in everyone's mind increasingly had to make sense inside maps of national...