“I’ve got another question for you.” She handed the map to a young man in the front row. She was a small woman, but her presence was massive and at this point in the presentation I was really anxious and felt steamrolled by her. Elliot was putting her finger right in the face of people as she walked up and down the audience. Why isn’t Greenland a continent?” Nervous laughter ran across the room. You said that Africa was a continent, right?” We shook our heads and droned out a yes in unison. Are there 8 continents?” We all looked at her with our crazy faces. She pointed at North America, South America, Africa, Europe, Asia, Australia, and Antarctica and we all spoke their names aloud. “How many of you went to school looking at a map like this?” I raised my hand and so did most of the 400+ people in the room.Įlliot continued, “How many continents are there?” Someone shouted out that there were 7. is racist and I’m going to prove it to you.” She then started to unfold a world map. She said, “The education system in the U.S. She was one of the boldest speakers I’ve ever heard before or since. The inertia of habit is a powerful force.Can maps be racist? Aren’t maps just a reflection of reality? In this piece Nathan Palmer will show us how maps are actually a social construction and how they can lead us to think that anglo nations are bigger and more central to the world than nations of color.Ī few years back I had the opportunity of seeing Jane Elliot speak at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln my alma mater.
When there are so many other projections to chose from, why is it that today the Mercator projection is still such a widely recognized image used to represent the globe? The answer may be simply convention or habit. Was this conscious or deliberate? Probably not, as most map users probably never realized the Eurocentric bias inherent in their world view.
It suited them to maintain an image of the world with Europe at the center and looking much larger than it really was. This was convenient, psychologically and practically (Military), through the eras of colonial domination when most of the world powers were European. Typically, the cropping technique results in a map showing the equator about 60% of the way down the map, diminishing the size and importance of the developing countries. This practice results in the Northern Hemisphere appearing much larger than it really is. Because the Mercator distorts size so much at the poles it is common to crop Antarctica off the map. Cartographers refer to the inability to compare size on a Mercator projection as "the Greenland Problem." Greenland appears to be the same size as Africa, yet Africa's land mass is actually fourteen times larger (see figure above). As you get closer to the poles the distortion becomes severe. The Mercator projection creates increasing distortions of size as you move away from the equator.
0 kommentar(er)
