Still Deconstructing the Map: Microfinance Mapping and the Visual Politics of Intimate Abstraction

J.B. Harley’s (1989) ‘‘Deconstructing the Map’’ opens with a map that speaks to us, using the language of modernist cartography to transform sea, sand, and rock into calibrated measurements recorded on a page, a ‘‘cold thing’’ calling out for our belief in its visual truths. From there he builds a now-familiar path for critical cartographers: a call to engage cartography not as technical practices for moving seamlessly from reality to representation but rather as situated expressions of power/knowledge produced at the intersection of the socio-political and technical (Foucault 1982). He urged us to engage cartography as a discourse whose rules for representing knowledge create openings and closures in what can be known and acted on (Foucault 1978), and to read maps as texts whose signs and symbols constitute culturally situated meanings (Derrida 1976). From these foundations, Harley traced the tight linkage of post-Enlightenment Western cartography to the epistemological hierarchies of science (objectivity, expertise, quantification, measurement, classification, and precision) and to political projects of hegemony, from colonization to the Cold War and beyond (see also Wood and Fels 1986; Haraway 1988; Sheppard 1993).