Читать книгу Literature of the Gaelic Landscape онлайн

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All maps, whether drawn or not, are the products of priorities and preferences, individual and societal. But cognitive maps confirm how patterns of relative importance and patterns of movement are understood and used by those who conceive them. Although official maps purport to portray the world as it is, they show deserted landscapes devoid of life, where nothing is happening, like a theatre whose actors have departed the stage (Ingold 2000). Unlike a story, poem or song or indeed someone giving directions with gestures and a description, once made, the topographic map does not grow or develop with use. Social anthropologist Tim Ingold argues that the professed rectitude of modern maps, claiming to spring from the structure of the world, is a cartographic illusion (ibid 2000). The making of maps has parted company with the experience of moving through the world. As in the history of writing, the act of remembering has been slowly superseded by acts of physical representation or inscription. Knowledge of the landscape has progressively parted company with experience of landscape. Though the endpoint of western exploration is to produce a map, purporting to be a total spatial representation, it hides the temporal qualities and stories that perhaps prompted exploration in the first instance (Potteiger and Purinton 1998).