{"id":983,"date":"2008-06-20T09:11:10","date_gmt":"2008-06-20T09:11:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/?p=983"},"modified":"2014-03-06T14:09:10","modified_gmt":"2014-03-06T19:09:10","slug":"mapping-afghan-ethnicities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/?p=983","title":{"rendered":"Mapping Afghan Ethnicities"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I have a long-running fascination with spatial distribution of, well, pretty much anything and everything. One of the slipperiest <i>things<\/i> to map is ethnic identity, but that hasn&#8217;t deterred legions of cartographers (though in fact the cartographers are mostly hired help, assisting anthropologists, demographers, census-takers, colonial masters, the military&#8230;). One of my favorite examples of the pitfalls of ethnic mapping is George Peter Murdock&#8217;s effort to define the territories of peoples in Africa:<br \/><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/oook.info\/humangeog\/gpmafrica.gif\"><br \/>[adapted from <b>Africa: Its Peoples  and Their Culture History<\/b> (1959)]<br \/>Pretty much <i>everything<\/i> is wrong with this map, starting with the very notion of a clear boundary (a <i>line<\/i>) to define where a &#8220;tribe&#8221; (ooooh, hateful word&#8230;) starts and stops (ethnic plurality and complex interdigitation is much more common than ethnic homogeneity, for all sorts of very good and highly location-specific reasons). At best, one might say that ethnicities have foci (perhaps <i>hearths<\/i> would be a better characterization) and force-fields that (seem to) emanate from a sort-of cultural identity centroid&#8230; but then there&#8217;s the problem of defining an ethnicity (does a person get only ONE?) and comprehending what its earmarks and contents might be (just what <i>is<\/i> &#8220;culture&#8221; anyway? &#8211;a problem that vexes anthropologists permanently). Sort of a long runup to a pointer to <a href=\"http:\/\/easterncampaign.wordpress.com\/2008\/06\/16\/fun-with-ethnic-maps\/\">Ghost of Alexander&#8217;s &#8220;Fun with Ethnic Maps&#8221;<\/a>, which showcases <b>7 versions of the ethnic territories of Afghanistan<\/b>. The message here isn&#8217;t that one shouldn&#8217;t attempt to map slippery concepts, but rather that any map is a starting point for discussion and elaboration, and not an authority, and especially not a permanent authority. Pretty much any phenomenon worth mapping is likely to squirm around over time, and we&#8217;re just beginning to have the wherewithal to construct and distribute <i>dynamic<\/i> maps. Fascinating times, these.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I have a long-running fascination with spatial distribution of, well, pretty much anything and everything. One of the slipperiest things to map is ethnic identity, but that hasn&#8217;t deterred legions of cartographers (though in fact the cartographers are mostly hired help, assisting anthropologists, demographers, census-takers, colonial masters, the military&#8230;). One of my favorite examples of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-983","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ethno","category-geography"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/983","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=983"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/983\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2497,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/983\/revisions\/2497"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=983"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=983"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=983"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}