Author and Reader Perceptions of the Literary Map

There is a continuing need in cartographic communication for reserarch directed toward better understanding of the perceptual properties of maps, particularly as they interrelate between map author and map reader (percipient). This research explores that area by examining the perceptions of authors of maps utilized in science fiction and fantasy, and readers who encounter these maps in the literature.

The first phase of the research demonstrates that authors generally have a positive attitude toward the literary map and view them as critical to the formulation of a story and important to proper understanding of the narrative. By contrast, readers tested in the second part of the study view literary maps as superfluous and in general have a negative attitude toward them.

The literary maps employed in this research fail to communicate effectively with the reader. Poor cartographic communication and the negative attitude of readers toward the literary map is explained in terms of functional illiteracy.     

Co-becoming with angophora: performing more-than-human belongings in Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park

Belonging in Australian national parks has long been associated with universal ideas of nativeness or naturalness. However, these delineations have been critiqued as rooted in western, dualistic understandings of nature and culture that do not allow for other ways of conceptualising the world or for the agency of nonhumans. This paper argues for reconceptualising belonging as an ontological co-becoming where multiple contingent belongings co-emerge with bodies, worlds and place. To show how belonging co-becomes, I examine human–tree relations surrounding a special and sacred tree in Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park, Australia, the Angophora costata. I tell three stories that shed light on the multiple ways performances of belonging are entangled with histories, stories, spirits, and present and absent humans and nonhumans. In doing so, I show how belonging is a more-than-human practice where ideas of native and natural are questioned.     

Queensland Aborigines,Multiple Realities and the Social Sources of Suffering: Psychiatry and Moral Regions of Being: Part 1

ABSTRACT This two part paper considers the experience of a range of magico‐religious experiences (such as visions and voices) and spirit beliefs in a rural Aboriginal town. The papers challenge the tendency of institutionalised psychiatry to medicalise the experiences and critiques the way in which its individualistic practice is intensified in the face of an incomprehensible Aboriginal ‘other’ to become part of the power imbalance that characterises the relationship between Indigenous and white domains. The work reveals the internal differentiation and politics of the Aboriginal domain, as the meanings of these experiences and actions are contested and negotiated by the residents and in so doing they decentre the concerns of the white domain and attempt to control their relationship with it. Thus the plausibility structure that sustains these multiple realities reflects both accommodation and resistance to the material and historical conditions imposed and enacted by mainstream society on the residents, and to current socio‐political realities. I conclude that the residents' narratives chart the grounds of moral adjudication as the experiences were rarely conceptualised by local people as signs of individual pathology but as reflections of social reality. Psychiatric drug therapy and the behaviourist assumptions underlying its practice posit atomised individuals as the appropriate site of intervention as against the multiple realities revealed by the phenomenology of the experiences. The papers thus call into question Australian mainstream ‘commonsense’ that circulates about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people which justifies representations of them as sickly outcasts in Australian society.     

Rhetoric,Narrative, and the Remembrance of Death in ʿAttār's Mosibat-nāmeh

This paper examines the anecdotes of ?Attār’s Mosibat-nāmeh as temporal phenomena from the perspective of a reader moving progressively through the text; it is argued that that these anecdotes do not function primarily as carriers of dogmatic information, but as dynamic rhetorical performances designed to prod their audiences into recommitting to a pious mode of life. First, the article shows how the poem’s frame-tale influences a reader’s experience of the embedded anecdotes by encouraging a sequential mode of consumption and contextualizing the work’s pedagogical aims. Next, it is demonstrated that these anecdotes are bound together through formulae and lexical triggers, producing a paratactic structure reminiscent of oral homiletics. Individual anecdotes aim to unsettle readers’ ossified religious understandings, and together they offer a flexible set of heuristics for pious living. Finally, it is argued that ?Attār’s intended readers were likely familiar with the mystical principles that underlie his poems; he therefore did not use narratives to provide completely new teachings, but rather to persuade his audience to more fully embody those pious principles to which they were already committed.     

Inventing the Victorian age: the Greville Diary and its Early Critics

The Journals of Charles Greville, clerk to the Privy Council from 1821 to 1859 are among the most well-known, well-respected and widely cited sources for the political and social history of their times. What is less well-known is the controversy they aroused among Greville's Victorian readers when first published (less than a decade after Greville's death) in 1874. The purpose of investigation here is to chart the course and extent of reader reaction as it unfolded during 1874–75, to explore ways of accounting for its intensity and, finally, to attempt evaluation of its impact as a cultural experience conducive to the emergence among readers of a conscious recognition of themselves as ‘Victorians’. When read in the context of the preoccupations of its first readers, Greville's Journals prove to be anything but a dead historical source. Instead, reader reaction is found to be driven by a series of contemporary concerns. They include the question of the degree of respect owing to hereditary authority; the definition of standards of honourable behaviour in protection of the private dealings of people of public reputation; and the very degree of reliability to be attributed to diary-based ‘memoirs’, given their contestable genre. Even so, participants in the controversies which broke out on all these fronts found themselves admitting common ground in acknowledging across their differences that the ‘Victorian’ age in which they lived was a decisive cultural and political break from the past world the Journals recorded.     

Mapping coexistence in Italy: Reshaping the cartographic feelings of the plural nation

Rarely considered from the perspective of ordinary citizens as opposed to institutional actors, national maps have been primarily deconstructed as abstract tools of power that express nationalist agendas. This paper offers an alternative examination of the map as a performative tool of national pluralism. In tune with the most recent conceptualizations of everyday forms of nationhood, I explore multiple creative auto-cartographies of Italy as experiential images for investigating the coexistence of several senses of nationhood and cultural diversity. To this end, I combine an inductive visual content analysis of nearly three hundred remappings of Italy, uploaded online by readers of a popular national newspaper, La Repubblica, with a visual semiotic reading of six samples. Here, the playful idea of remapping the nation becomes a catalyst to produce or resist a sense of belonging to the nation, while eliciting a wider spectrum of feelings with regard to internal and external perceived meaningful others. This paper concludes that the different ways in which ordinary people map the nation have to be taken seriously, as they show evidence that these readers absorb and decode, but also resist or challenge, different mainstream discourses regarding the idea of nationality, coexistence, and cultural diversity.     

Playing with fear: parkour and the mobility of emotion

This article engages debates on emotional geography and non-representational theory by considering fear as a distinctly mobile engagement with our environment. Parkour, or freerunning, has exploded into public consciousness through commercial media representations and films. It is depicted as a spectacular urban sport that either can or cannot be done. Through ethnographic research with groups of parkour practitioners I consider what has been excluded from these representations: the emotions involved in trying, experimenting, and gradually learning to be in places differently. In parkour places are ‘done’ or mobilised in tentative, unsure, ungainly and unfinished ways which can be characterised by a kind of play with architecture. I argue that this play is contingent upon an array of fears, which, rather than being entirely negative, are an important way in which practitioners engage with place. Here fears can manifest differently, not only restricting mobility, but in some cases encouraging imaginative and playful forms of movement.     

“Where is the border?” Villagers,environmental consultants and the ‘work’ of the Thai–Burma border

This article examines how Thai–Burma border residents are enrolled and engaged in remaking the political border through their knowledge practices and performances, or their own “borderwork”. Border residents do not perform this work alone, but in connection with other actors including environmental consultants. In order to highlight this co-production of the political border, I bring together border studies scholarship that see borders as process and performance with work in science studies that has highlighted the way that knowledge and order are co-produced. The importance of this approach is that it facilitates an understanding of the multifaceted and contradictory work to remake the border by multiple actors, a way to study “borders from the bottom up” that illustrates how the border is continually enacted. While this article puts forth the notion that the border represents an important site and process of struggle and negotiation in which marginalized communities invest, it also questions the assumption that because residents are engaged in remaking the border, the border is necessarily more ‘democratic’. The discussion and empirical data presented in this article also speak to broader debates in political geography about how borders are remade through practice and performance.     

SAME/DIFFERENCE? TOWARD A SAPPHIC/NONBINARY SEXUALITY OF HISTORY

What is the next step when one has published a strong intervention in a field but later recognizes that one's angle of vision deserves new scrutiny? In this article, which began as a roundtable talk, I return to The Sexuality of History: Modernity and the Sapphic, 1565–1830 (2014) to interrogate its “same-sex” logic through a nonbinary/trans lens. My book argues that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century representations of the sapphic became a flash point for European cultures grappling with questions of power and governance, desire and duty, mobility and difference in an age of colonialism, racial capitalism, revolution, and reaction. In figuring the sapphic exclusively through notions of sameness, however, The Sexuality of History does not do justice to trans and nonbinary figures both historical and fictional. Is there a place among sapphic subjects for these figures, and, if so, with what implications? I argue here for a both/and approach that requires recoding certain figures as nonbinary while still insisting on their efficacy as signs of the sapphic. This recoding encourages a more nuanced exploration of the cultural work performed by sapphic representations and a more expansive conception of what I have called a sapphic episteme. Such revisionist thinking may be useful at a time of social and theoretical tensions at the intersections of “lesbian” and “trans.”     

RESEARCH,NARRATIVE, AND REPRESENTATION: A POSTNARRATIVE APPROACH

Narrativism or representationalism is founded on the idea that historical narratives and representations are 1) true and indivisible wholes, whereof 2) the truth needs to be maintained, although a narrativist or representationalist whole cannot be confirmed or disconfirmed, and wherein 3) the past is represented in a figurative sense. These fundamental aspects of narrativism have had a positive impact on historiography, but they are also the three reasons why narrativism has neglected historical research and argumentation. To remedy these problems postnarrativism has been evoked. It opts for presentation instead of representation, cutting through all the links between the past and the historiographical product. The product is not a narrative or a representation but a thesis, a proposal to see the past in a special way. The only element postnarrativism wants to retain of narrativism is colligation because it has an argumentative structure based on epistemic values. Postnarrativism leads to knowledge, built on the practice of warranted assertions instead of truth. My postnarrativism chooses a middle course between a strong narrativism and what I would like to call a “weak,” presentational postnarrativism. I agree with postnarrativists that more attention must be paid to argumentation and research. Moreover, I consider time a neglected issue in narrativism. Nevertheless, I don't want to give up the three above‐mentioned fundamental aspects of it. In my view the assumption of truth with regard to (figurative) representation needs to be maintained, but in a pragmatic, provisional form: a historical narrative or representation can be considered as true as long as it has not been replaced by a better one. Retaining truth and holism, but wanting more room for investigation and argumentation, requires that narrativism's role in historical research and history‐writing be revised. This implies the replacement of the usual research phase by a preparation phase, wherein, next to research, space must be reserved for so‐called writing activities. Preparation means the conversion of a germinal narrative or representation into an accomplished whole. Holism occurs in two representational forms: a narrative and a representation. In both forms, research concepts and the associated temporalities become visible under the surface of the narrativist or representational superstructure.     

Carto-fiction: narrativising maps through creative writing

Abstract

This study reacts to the recent call for a narrativisation of maps’ life in post-representational cartography, proposing ‘cartographic fictional writing’ as a means to move geography’s ‘creative (re)turn’ from a place-centred to a ‘carto-centred’ perspective, and as an epistemological tool to go on rethinking maps from post-representational perspectives. First, ‘carto-fiction’ is defined as a self-reflexive (autoethnographic), ethnofictional, creative carto-centred product/practice of research. Second, by including the entire short story entitled ‘Unfolding Berlin’ and an autoethnographic account on how it emerged, this study strives to both theorise and perform carto-fictional writing as an embodied and trans-subjective mapping experience. My goal is to propose ‘carto-fiction’ as a prolific tool to let emotional, subjective cartographies emerge and to narrativise maps as mapping practices. The article further strives to focus on the mapping power of creative writing, and carto-fictional writing and reading will be interpreted as mapping performances, in which subjects are bodily and emotionally engaged. The inclusion of original illustrations aims to involve readers in a visual experience and to further stimulate their spatial imagination: each reader is asked to reflect on his/her own mapping experiences to interpret the fictional story and, thus, the paper itself attempts to unfold unpredicted creative cartographic practices.     

Regional Design in the Context of Fragmented Territorial Governance: South Wing Studio

In the Netherlands, the formation of governance arrangements around planning issues that cross administrative boundaries has been assisted frequently by a design approach that is often referred to as “regional design”. This is a distinctive method of policy argumentation that makes use of spatial representations of the plausible future of regions. Such representations are intended not only to indicate physical changes, but also to stimulate debate on sharing responsibilities and resources for planning tasks among planning actors. This paper contributes to a better understanding of the performance of regional design in the context of fragmented regional governance through a case study in the southern part of the Randstad in the Netherlands. We argue that regional design has contributed to institutional capacity in a complex polycentric and, looking at the governance structure, pluricentric region like the Randstad South Wing, largely by allowing for multiple interpretations.     

Calls for educating girls in the Third World: futurity,girls and the ‘Third World Woman’

In this article I examine three calls for Western support for girls' education in the ‘developing world’. Using transnational feminist theory and discourse analysis I look at three examples of these calls; Three Cups of Tea, ‘Because I Am a Girl’ and the United National Girls Education Initiative. I suggest that what Mohanty (1988) terms the ‘Third World Woman’ – a homogeneous, static image of women in the third world – is the spectre used to motivate Western support. Through representations of girls, Western viewers/readers are hailed to invest in order to save the girl-child from the haunting ‘Third World Woman’. The girl-child, through her particularity as a girl, her future womanhood as motherhood and her neoliberal potential, becomes presented as emblems of a better future with the investment of Westerners.     

Declaration on Behalf of an Archaeology of Sexe

This article is an attempt to demonstrate the basic weakness of gender as a theoretical concept when studying prehistoric embodiment. ‘Gender ‘is theoretically linked to ‘sex’, known as the ‘sex–gender system’. The study of past genders, in the sense of prehistoric normative roles and symbols, has decreased in interest among archaeologists, in favor of studying sex, i.e., sexual practice and orientation. This switch to sex is part of archaeologists’ endeavors to understand prehistoric bodily subjects. I will here recapitulate on the concept of gender and its serious limitations. I will furthermore try to shed light on how the turn to sex involves an encounter with almost exactly the same fallacies as did the focus on gender. As an alternative for the future, I suggest social identity and embodiment be studied under the theoretical label of ‘sexe’.     

In Praise of Heresy: Hus,Luther, and the Ethos of Reformation

Reformation is confined neither chronologically nor geographically but is best understood as a series of efforts to recover particular visions of Christian faith and practice. These endeavours always have potential for religious and social change. The martyred Bohemian priest Jan Hus (1372–1415) has often been characterised as a forerunner of the European Reformations and Martin Luther frequently referred to him. Past scholarship has evaluated the relation between Hussite history and the Reformation, Hus and Luther, in a variety of ways arguing either for organic connections or dismissing the possibility of causal connections. I argue that what Hus and Luther shared was not theology, common principles of reform, or visions of religious practice as much as a particular ethos. That ethos can best be understood within the idea of heresy. This article examines what Hus and Luther were striving to achieve, assesses the assumptions about Hus current in the sixteenth century, evaluates the Hus myth, and argues for a reconsideration and rehabilitation of heresy, a concept that epitomises the shared ethos that made Hus relevant to sixteenth‐century reformers.     

浅谈地方党报如何用活版面语言

众所周知,在读者看报的时候,一般情况下很难将整版的内容从头到尾地通读,也就是说,浏览一个版面内的文章会有取舍。那么,什么样的报纸会更吸引读者的眼球？这就需要报纸拥有独具匠心、特色鲜明、图文并茂的版面。作为版面编辑,要将重要新闻编排得突出醒目,次要新闻编排得短小精悍,版面上既有红花,又有绿叶,要做到主次分明、相得益彰,这样才能抓住读者的阅读视线。     

Recent Studies on Violence: What's In and What's Out

Focusing on four recent books about violence gives a reader an idea of what current anthropological wisdom is and what it tends to omit (peace, domestic violence). Since most studies deal not with direct observation of violence but with representations of it, questions of representation loom large in terms of how anthropologists represent violence in these books and elsewhere in the literature, and what possibilities of representation might round out readers' understanding.     

Palestine,Israel, Gaza,and the West Bank: the muddled mental maps of French and Israeli students

ABSTRACT

The Palestinian–Israeli Conflict is perceived by many – observers and parties to the conflict alike – as a struggle of two peoples over the same land. Yet, through this century-long conflict (and more so as Israel has expanded and deepened its occupation), what was once, perhaps, imagined as a single land has become an assortment of territories. These territories bear multiple names and different legal statuses, and their boundaries are often blurred. In light of the jumbled patchwork that Palestine–Israel has become, we examine the ways that the conflict’s territorial dimensions are imagined and represented. We study the mental maps of the region held by higher education students from Israel, both Jewish and Arab-Palestinian, as well as with university students from Montpellier, France. The representations indicate that while the French students were almost completely at a loss regarding the conflict’s spatial dimensions, the students from Israel were also confused, especially regarding the Occupied Palestinian Territories. We argue that these findings stem from a wider process of deterritorialization, linked to the conflicting relations between state and nation and intensified by a policy of chaotic spatial arrangements.