A Cultural Interpretation of Inuit Map Accuracy

Cartographers can broaden their field by developing methods to understand cultural processes in historical and contemporary maps. Inuit maps have been noted for their high level of accuracy. A cultural interpretation of this characteristic accounts for implied linkages between mapping and other forms of Inuit environmental behavior and thought. Inuit maps as acts rather than as artifacts are one form of environmental mimicry. The act of making accurate maps reinforced the value of mimicry in traditional Inuit society. M APPING is fundamental to the process of lending order to the world. Maps may be considered artifacts composed of signs that materialize a way of experiencing (Geertz 1976). By transforming a given way of thinking into material reality, maps simultaneously reflect and reinforce the world view or spatial thought of a culture. In this essay I propose a method for studying cultural influence on maps and mapping and use this method to examine the meaning of cartography for a select culture group: the Inuit, or Eskimos, of the central and eastern Canadian Arctic. Perhaps nowhere in North America does the relationship between humans and their environment elicit as strong and enigmatic an image as in the Arctic. Maps afford a valuable perspective on this relationship. The historical record and modern cartographic research both agree that most Inuit maps, extensively tested through a century of use by non-Inuit explorers and field scientists, were extraordinarily accurate renderings of the landscape as sensually perceived. But why was this so? Or, specifically, what did it mean within the native culture itself for an Inuk to make an accurate map? The study of maps in their cultural milieu has interested researchers in several disciplines, including geography, but this approach was not widely accepted by cultural geographers until the 1970s, and historians of cartography began to see maps explicitly as cultural artifacts only recently (Wright 1932; 1942; Zelinsky 1973; Tuan 1974, 34-44; Lewis 1980; Harley 1987). Since 1980, however, the study of maps as cultural artifacts, which I term cultural cartography, has expanded rapidly, and several different models and approaches have been proposed (Harley 1983; Wood and Fels 1986). Semiotic analysis, information-processing models, progressive evolutionism, iconographical analysis, and Derridean deconstruction all build on the same basic * Partial funding for this research was provided by a fellowship from the University of Kansas and a grant from Sigma Xi. I thank Kathryn Martyn of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto, for assistance with map collections and James R. Shortridge and Ernest S. Burch Jr. for comments on early drafts of the text. * DR. RUNDSTROM is an assistant professor of geography at George Mason University, 4400 University Drive, Fairfax, Virginia 22030-4444. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.157 on Mon, 01 Aug 2016 04:42:50 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms THE GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW assumption: maps both reflect and reinforce cultural values and beliefs of the people who make them (Gilmartin 1984; Wood 1984; Woodward 1985; Lewis 1986; Harley 1989). Each of these approaches contributes to this nascent research endeavor, but none penetrates deeply into the intracultural context of maps and mapping. INSTITUTIONAL ANALYSIS Explanation of the cultural context of mapping requires ethnographic data to validate assertions about map meaning. If maps both reflect and reinforce a given cultural viewpoint, the values and beliefs important in the culture and implicit in its maps must operate similarly. Explaining the intracultural meaning of maps necessarily involves identification of those values and beliefs, and unless mapping is the only activity in which such beliefs are implicit, they must also be confirmed in other cultural expressions. This type of explanation has been labeled institutional analysis (Hanson 1975) and deals with the structure of values, symbols, and beliefs as manifested in social behavior. For example, it asks how the religious beliefs of a society relate to prevailing spatial concepts. Institutional analysis is valuable because basic beliefs and values in a culture find expression in its various institutions. By studying the interrelationships among them fundamental underlying beliefs held by the group can be identified. Institutional analysis deals with implied meaning, the implications or consequences that a specific behavior or belief has for other behaviors and beliefs. This focus differs from the equally valid intentional meaning lying behind human activity. Human behavior can be explained either by the intentions that people have or by the implied linkages with other activities that together reveal basic beliefs and values. An example comes from American cartography. The intentional meaning behind the application of the distinctive federal public-land-survey grid to the official topographic series published by the U.S. Geological Survey is straightforward: to assist in locating areas and to assign exclusive coordinates to them. The implicational meaning lies elsewhere in the related concepts of resource inventory; identification, allocation, and purchase of private property; property protection and access through thousands of miles of barbedwire fencing and pavement; manifest destiny; and the geometry of American society. The act of designing and producing such a map is an action of subjugation and appropriation of nature, a basic value of American society, not merely the reification of an idle curiosity in recording dimensions (Wood and Fels 1986, 70-72). This type of nationalistic message can be accomplished only in a society in which map objects are more highly regarded than the act of mapping itself. The reverse of this is true of traditional Inuit culture. The approach offered here has an important new element: a focus on maps to demonstrate how values embodied in other institutions are implicit 156 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.157 on Mon, 01 Aug 2016 04:42:50 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms