Mapping as an ethnographical method
Or different recommendations (and opinions on them) from a Social Anthropology student to read on Mapping.
I just finished one of the readings for Ethnography in Practice and the text really touched me and made me think about how I look at different people’s life experiences and what it depends on. The article was written by Charlotte Sanders, who happened to teach me the Migration, Borders and Space module last term at SOAS, University of London. I loved that module, and it definitely changed the way how I look at migration, and this article just added an extra layer to it.
The article is about Sudanese Mothers who moved to Portsmouth, a port city in southern England. It shows us, how certain governmental laws and policies affect Sudanese Mothers’ spatial im/mobility and explains how this gendered, classed and racialised Othering impacts them with the use of an ethnographical technique, mapping. (Sanders 2019) Mapping can take many different shapes. It can be used to show kinship and relationships between people, and connection between places, time, objects and people. It can also help us understand certain social structures, changes in society and cultural elements. Culture can be expressed by environment mapping, sound mapping or even smell mapping. Rodo-de-Zarate claims that maps “show the relationship between three dimensions: power structures (the social), lived experience (the psychological) and places (the geographical)”. (2014, p. 925)
Sanders points out that the fact that the mothers who she worked with had difficulties pinpointing where are the everyday landmarks compared to each other, the places which they did not visit daily shows “the limits of their urban spatialities.” (2019, p. 9) These women drew maps of quite narrow areas, without having familiarity with public places, like the beach, shortly put, because they had no time to explore places outside of filling in for their everyday motherly duties. They don’t have access to public transport or to cars and getting to places on foot takes longer. The UK government only provides 3 hours of free childcare per day, if you haven’t got a job, but these mothers just don’t have time to learn English which is needed to get a job. Even being able to find a job takes time, which these women don’t have a lot. It is easy to see that they can only experience life between these racialised, gendered and classed boundaries. (Sanders 2019, p. 13–15)
(The following part had been written before Israel’s ground and air campaign in Gaza:)
As time took a huge role in this article, it made me think about how time is connected to migration policies and border regimes. The Palestinian territory had been occupied by Israel 30 years ago, and that meant a closure with bureaucratic tools. This not only disturbs the society, breaking up families and isolating Palestine, but controls the time of Palestinian people and their mobility. Controlling a group of people or community’s mobility creates a power imbalance and shows the hierarchy between the dominant and the subordinate group. (Peteet 2018, p. 45) I am wondering what kind of maps we could get if we asked Palestinian people to draw their paths of visiting family for example in Jerusalem, how many institutions they had to visit before they got their permit to cross the border and how much time did they spend at each location before they got to their relatives’ homes. We could ask them to mark each feeling they had on the journey just to be able to put a foot into Israel as it leaves mark on people’s mental health for sure. One of Peteet’s interlocutors said, that all these bureaucratic obstacles are made to drive them crazy, and their daily life becomes unmanageable as it is impossible to plan your day with the hurdle of the border regime. “It takes so much time to do anything; every task becomes an ordeal and you are never certain what will happen.” (2018, p. 48)
Looking at both examples make me believe that creating systems which control others’ time and mobility is just a neo-colonial practice. Even if we are not in the colonial era anymore, the systems and policies created by governments uphold a colonial situation. I think mapping could be a great tool to go deeper into this topic and show easily understandable data on how the governments uphold discrimination against gender, race and class.
My thoughts were quite emotional regarding mapping, but as I was finishing off the other reading by Allerton on Manggarai houses I felt a bit more positive.
Only looking at all the drawings of the houses in Allerton’s book could indicate that the households are quite closed off from each other, but because she starts the main body of the chapter after the introduction by describing the noises in the community, we can easily understand that the lines of the walls on the blueprints are just those. Lines which show where the walls of the buildings are. We quickly get to know that different households’ rooms are only divided by curtains, not walls and that people even communicate through the actual walls of the huts. These sounds made the people in the community feel closer and represented their openness and the way how they live life as a community. (2013, p. 46–53)
I really enjoyed reading Allerto’s description of the sounds of the neighbourhoods and seeing the connection between mapping out a house’s structure and understanding a community’s behaviour. It made me feel happy and almost welcomed into this lively environment. In my opinion, using similar techniques in our ethnographic work can connect the reader on a deeper level to the group whichwe are describing and maybe even encourage people who are not that interested in anthropology to read more ethnographic research as they can be really enjoyable.
Later on, I was still thinking about mapping, and I have done some digging regarding what else you could use mapping for and how. I stumbled upon this article where the researchers were using body mapping to understand more about people’s lived experiences who have HIV and AIDS in South Africa. They were observing the “physical, emotional and social matters triggered by the experience of illness and suffering”. The article does not only describe the creation of the body maps, but talks a lot about the self and how it can be viewed related to one’s self, society and social and political control. All these categories of views can be seen in the body maps which the participants created. (Lambert, Favero, and Pauwels 2022, p. 176–177)
Using creative mediums allows us to see things which are usually not visible, like mental health, feelings or ideas, can make it easier to participants to express themselves and include more people in the conversation as well. For example, two of the participants could not read and write, so they would not have any other ways to express their own experiences besides verbal interviews. While these body maps had been created, many topics have come up that maybe would had been much harder to talk about, like deeper emotions, how they have experienced the illness which they are living with or suicide. (Lambert, Favero, and Pauwels 2022)
In all the studies, articles and book chapters that I have come across regarding mapping, I could see how this technique can bring new insights to different topics. How they can change and deepen the discussion on difficult topics and how they can emphasise the main point of an issue. Besides all the gains that this technique can bring, I think one of the most important reasons to use it is the fact, that it can make it easier for our interlocuters to share their thoughts and it is more inclusive as well.
Feedback is always welcomed and appreciated.
Feel free to write me a comment with criticism, ideas or questions.
Bibliography (Recommendations):
Allerton, Catherine. 2013. ‘The Permeable House’. In Potent Landscape: Place and Mobility in Eastern Indonesia, 44–72. https://doi.org/10.21313/hawaii/9780824836320.003.0002.
Lambert, Chernelle, S. H. Paolo Favero, and Luc Pauwels. 2022. ‘Making Life Stories Visible: An Ethnographic Study of Body Mapping in the Context of HIV and AIDS in South Africa’. University of Antwerp, Anthropology & Medicine, 29 (2): 175–92. https://doi.org/10.1080/13648470.2021.1893981.
Peteet, Julie. 2018. ‘Closure’s Temporality: The Cultural Politics of Time and Waiting’. Duke University Press, South Atlantic Quarterly, 117 (1). https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-4282037.
Rodó-de-Zárate, Maria. 2014. ‘Developing Geographies of Intersectionality with Relief Maps: Reflections from Youth Research in Manresa, Catalonia’. Routledge, Gender, Place and Culture, 21 (8): 925–44. https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2013.817974.
Sanders, Charlotte. 2019. ‘Cartographers of Disrupted Belonging: Sudanese Mothers Drawing Maps of Portsmouth (UK)’. Bridgewater State University, Journal of International Women’s Studies, 20 (4): 5–23.
