WORLD MAP, MODERNITY, CONFLICTING GEOGRAPHIES

Claudia Scheihing ¹ y Ricardo Goñi ²

Abstract

Based on an analysis of Mercator's world map and that of its “rectification”, which is Arno Peters' world map, we reflect on power relations and ideologies revealed by cartography as being an abstraction of territorial, social, political and cultural realities. The first constitutes the symbolic representation par  excellence of planet Earth from the perspective of colonialist Eurocentric modernity; the second, drawn up from an ideological matrix opposed to that of Mercator, while correcting the latter’s distortions regarding the size of the continents, does not escape the Eurocentric rationality of the “unique”, “impersonal” and “objective” space. Both refer to the cartographic logic imposed by modern civilization, that of being a single space, which separates the
ethnic point from the geometric point, thus denying the singularities of the territory. As a contrast to that “scientific” and “neutral” view of space, a cutout of
the “turns” in human geography at the end of the 20th century is presented. It is still in progress,  around the claim of regional-local territory and the deconstruction of scientific cartography. Curiously, while this new geography debates territoriality and its cartographic representations, something of this
was already implicit in ancestral American culture, as revealed by Guaman Poma’s “Mapa Mundi de las Indias del Perú” (World map of the Indies of Peru),
a map that -since the perspective of the Southern Epistemologies (the other Modernity)- reflects meeting between the geographical and cultural components of a place.