Cartographic Anxiety and the Search for Regionality

Despite the rise of relational and antiessentialist approaches to regional theory, many accounts of regionality continue to work with territorial conceptions of regions as bounded wholes or totalities. The author suggests that this tendency can be explained in part by the continuing effect of cartographic anxiety and Eurocentrism on dominant understandings of regionality. The paper examines the relationships between regional theory, different forms of totality and the cartographic impulse, and discusses possible reasons for the Eurocentric cast of some regional research. It concludes with a consideration of how regional theory might respond to cartographic anxiety and Eurocentrism.