Performative and embodied mapping

This article explores how and why all mapping might be understood as performative and embodied, comparing different approaches to mapping as a process and relating these to wider epistemological changes across the humanities and social sciences. The distinctions between embodied mapping and performativity, the ontology of mapping practice, nonrepresentational theory, and an actor-networked understanding are explored, and methodological implications are considered. The emphasis of this article is also on practice: many different mappings are being made and experienced, a diversity deemed unworthy of study by cartographic orthodoxy in the period after World War II. So, the second part of this article charts contexts in which mapping practice might be particularly characterized as performative. The non-Western indigenous mapping tradition is contrasted with everyday Western mapping and its increasingly interactive and mediated practices. The fluid relations between art and mapping are another important context where mapping is embodied, emotional, performative, and also increasingly locative. These contexts of practice are still largely separate from performative theoretical approaches, but a rapprochement between writing and doing is already taking place.