Map Cultures, Misuses, and GI - A Primer of GIS: Fundamental Geographic and Cartographic Concepts - page 220

questions to ask about any GI or map. Other civilizations from East Asia,
South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East have contributed greatly to cartogra-
phy and have their own forms of cartography that we still have much to learn
about and from.
Cultures of Maps
Culture is a word with many meanings. To discuss the culture of GI and
maps, we can distinguish between “national culture,” “indigenous culture,”
and “disciplinary culture.” National culture refers to the overarching set of
values, beliefs, and implicit understandings held by the majority of people
living in a particular nation. Indigenous culture corresponds to the beliefs and
knowledge of people who lived in an area before it was colonized and their
heirs. Disciplinary culture indicates a more specific set of values, beliefs, and
implicit understandings governing a particular profession or discipline—for
example, sanitary engineers and city planners in an urban realm, or conser-
vationists and consulting engineers for environmental issues. Blends of cul-
tures characterize individual perceptions more often than clear-cut divisions
between cultures. Many people have multiple professional responsibilities
and have different professional and life experiences that impact their own
cultural understandings. Regardless of the variety of cultures and difficulties
of pinning down the exact inf luence of any culture, culture remains signifi-
cant for GI and maps.
Civilizations and Maps
Before looking at more specific inf luences of culture on GI and maps, we
might want to start by taking a step back from specific cultural issues of geo-
graphic representation and cartographic representation and exploring the
relationships between civilizations and maps. As far as archaeologists can
tell, all human cultures have had some form of representing geographic
things, events, and the relationships between them. It may take the form of a
prehistoric cave drawing showing animals with hunters attacking them, it can
take the form of an organized set of sticks bound together, or it can take the
form of a story that describes the relationships between a tribe and the uni-
verse sketched in the sand, or something else that most people today would
also call a map.
EUROPEAN
European cultures and cultures in the Middle East—or plain Western civiliza-
tion, if we want to avoid dealing with the complex differences and conf licts
between the different national cultures of Western Europe and many colo-
nized countries—put maps and their precursors at the heart of how many
people came to understand the world. Maps in the past complemented expe-
rience in much the same way as today by depicting things and events beyond