#epistémique

  • The North of the South and the West of the East
    http://www.ibraaz.org/essays/108

    Geopolitical naming and mapping are fictions, and #fictions have creators. Take the regional name ’#Maghreb'. If you look for the ’meaning’ of Maghreb on the Internet in a standard search – which to my mind expresses the general understanding of the term – you will find the ’reference’: that is, the name of the countries within the Maghreb. If you insist, you will find the etymology of the word, and not the reference: ’the place of the setting sun’.[3] The source will also tell you, so you do not get lost, that it is in the west that the sun sets. But to the west of what, you may wonder. It may take a while to realize that the Maghreb is located on the side where the sun sets in relation to Mecca and Medina.[4]

    On the other hand, if you search for the meaning of ’#Occident' (again in a standard Google search) you will find that the term incorporates the countries of the western world, especially Europe and America. If you search for the etymology, you will find that the term comes from the Latin occidentem: ’the part of the sky where the sun sets’.[5] Now, if Europe and America are countries ’to the west’ then what west are they in relation to? If you continue to search, you will find out: the west of Jerusalem.

    The act of naming and mapping is always an act of #identification, and identification at this level requires someone who is in a position to name and map. Furthermore, effective naming and mapping can only be done from a position of power that overrules local senses of territoriality. Take Alfred Thayer Mahan, who in 1902 renamed a region that was identified in Orientalist discourse as the ’Near East’ with the label ’Middle East’.[6] Thayer Mahan was not interested in people, but in natural resources and strategic geo-political mapping, and a great deal of India’s territory became part of his newly identified ’Middle East’. But not everyone in the region was happy with such an identification and proceeded to dis-identify from it, making it clear that in this case, naming cartographic regions carries the weight of #imperial identification. There is never a direct relation between the name and the map on the one hand, and the people and the region on the other.[7]

    Here, the consolidation and expansion contained in the act of naming and mapping is not only economic and political, but also – and above all – epistemic in terms of authority, and the management of knowledge and identities. Geopolitical naming and mapping are fictions in the sense that there is no ontological configuration that corresponds to what is named and mapped. The act is possible through a control of knowledge; and it requires epistemic privilege that makes naming and mapping believable and acceptable. That naming and mapping territories and peoples creates fictional cartographies does not mean that what is mapped and named already had an ontological existence beyond its mapping and naming, either. On the contrary, they are grounded in the interests of people, #institutions and languages (modern European vernacular languages grounded in Greek and Latin) who have the privilege of naming and mapping.

    #cartographie #nommer #pouvoir #géopolitique #étymologie #langage #connaissance #epistémique