Abstract
The rise of Duterte's authoritarian regime, and a series of violent dispersals to peasant-led mobilizations, prompted counter-mapping workshops in protest camps and rural communities. These workshops evolved out of the need to gather and visualize shared experiences and collective aspirations of the basic sectors-peasants, indigenous groups, and workers-who bear the brunt of oppression in a neocolonial society such as that of the Philippines. Additionally, these mapping sessions have become a potent method in exposing rights abuses, land grabbing, extractive industries, development aggression and other forms of violence perpetrated by centralized bodies. Moreover, the goal of the workshop is to find discursive ways for marginalized populations to assert their rights and author representations of their own lived environments.
Maps are usually impersonal objects that conceal the experiences of the people inhabiting a physical space. Beneath the cartographic surface are stories upon stories of struggle and survival.
Throughout the history of cartography, maps have often served scientific, political, or military functions. They have been created and used by centralized political and economic bodies such as states, corporations, and institutions, disseminating information and enforcing notions of territory, ownership, or statehood, among others.
Rudimentary visual elements (lines, colors, shapes) and geopolitical concepts (strategies, alliances, frontiers, etc.) are all activated to delineate borders drawn by colonialism that contain and control people.
Entire populations and ecosystems are subject to these concepts. All that is to be known, manipulated, and extracted is laid out on an inanimate object— the map—and regarded as truth. Thus, maps are tools used by institutions to exercise power and justify acts of exploration and exploitation.
When one pays too much attention to dominant boundaries and categories, one tends to forget to look at the bigger picture.
All maps can be weaponized. Much as they chart projections of space and place, they hide entire networks of reality. While showing us a prescribed view of the world, they control how we move and how we think. They not only inform, they also impose.
Maps offer a vertical, top-down perspective. This view tends to make readers believe that they are omniscient, omnipresent, that they see with God's eyes.
But what happens when readers can’t find themselves on the map?
HOW DO WE TAKE BACK MAPPING? HOW DO WE MAP AGAINST HEGEMONIC POWER?
Counter-mapping is a practice of producing maps that counter the dominant narratives imposed by power. These include maps that were made by institutionalized, professionalized cartographic agencies working for the state or large corporations. In broader terms, counter-mapping resists dominant power structures in order to further progressive and popular agendas.1 It recognizes the idea that maps are never neutral or value-free tools.2 The term “counter-mapping” was coined by Nancy Peluso, who argues that this technique gives communities the power to control their own representation and to describe the resources they use in everyday life.3
Counter-mapping is a reversal of the state's cartographic gaze and boundary-making. It is mapping the material conditions of the lived space from the ground rather than from above, and doing so not from a position of authoritarian control.
Based on the work of other geographers, activists, and community organizers, these are the roles counter-mapping can play:
Consolidating information.
Gathering stories, narratives, beliefs, data, observations. How do we draw them all up in a map?
Engaging the public.
Asking others. Verifying claims. Sharing knowledge. Assessing together. Generating a wider discourse.
Exposing and grounding contradictions.
What doesn't make sense? Where do we find oppression, violence, injustice? How do we locate inequality in resources, in access to basic social services?
Resistance.
Know and assert your rights! Counter-mapping can be used to expose and address violations of human rights, displacement, harassment, aggression, and structural violence. It can also be used to present space based on everyday shared experiences of community, and ultimately it can articulate collective aspirations for a shared space that, in this day and age, may be deemed subversive. As Denis Wood aptly put it, geographic imaginations are an important site for struggle.4
There are several available formats where we can practice countermapping: Geographic information systems; participatory 3D mapping; infographic maps in reproducible formats; web-based, open street mapping:
For this project, we turn to COGNITIVE MAPPING
[mental maps, mental sketch maps, hand drawn, analog, low tech…]
Cognitive mapping is a mental representation of the environment that captures the spatial relations (and also the subjective imagination) among things in the world.5
It is a process composed of a series of psychological transformations by which individuals acquire, code, store, recall, and decode information about the relative locations and attributes of phenomena in their everyday spatial environment.6
You can think out of the box in terms of details, accuracy, features, and other properties of cognitive maps. In fact, include details only as you see fit. Ignore accuracy. All maps are distortions. Highlight those features that matter to you. And, if you can, highlight those features that matter to you AND to your community. Scale. The scale of the space you will use to represent your map will depend on the stories you place on it. The map can be as vast as you wish, or it can be as intimate as your own skin. It's totally up to you. Orientation. This project is not interested in cardinal directions. Instead, we want to orient participants toward solidarity,
Toward accountability. Toward vigilance. Toward justice. Toward care. We activate cognitive mapping within the context of counter-mapping.
LET'S MAP
This is not an introduction to “mapping.”
It is a reintroduction to the idea of mapping as a political gesture where we can reclaim authorship of the representations of the spaces we occupy.
Although this is an individual exercise, it is best done with a group.
Mapping alone » Mapping together.
Mapping individually » Mapping collectively.
Participants are asked to individually draw their maps in relation to shared conditions of community.
In most cases, the project of cognitive counter-mapping is directed toward marginalized communities, and as such, it addresses issues around human rights and social justice.
As the session unfolds, we Detect shared issues, Define collective identities, Articulate collective visions and strategies, Identify common enemies.
MATERIALS
For drawing and writing, we use pencils as well as black and red pens. Participants are encouraged to finish with ink pens, as these produce a more deliberate and legible line. Though soft materials such as crayons and pastels are also welcome and can afford an entirely different, expressive texture, line drawings and text bring the stories closer to the discursive quality of mappings that we are after.
Otherwise, use anything you see fit, depending on the needs of your participants and your access to materials.
Mapping sessions may take place in communities during solidarity visits, picket lines, or protest camps, or in people's homes, classrooms, churches, the streets—anywhere that we can activate as a critical space.
INSTRUCTIONS
Write your name. Claim authorship. Your perspective is central. Draw your general idea of the space(s) you want to map. Your town, your ancestral domain, your city, your house, your route, your body, your community, your universe(s), your mind.
Visualize lines and landmarks. Illustrate Movement. Connections. Relationships.
Plot resources. Necessities. Home, food, water, health, faith, community, knowledge, institutions.
Identify spaces where you feel safe, comfortable, hopeful.
Identify spaces where you feel fear, danger, distress. Spaces where you have experienced trauma: Land grabbing. Militarization. Mineral extraction. Armed conflict. Rights abuses. Disputed spaces. Prisons. Plantations. Factories. Gentrification.
Label your drawings. Name what needs to be named, but in your own terms. Reclaim place names. Use your own language. Vernacularize.
Finally, articulate shared conditions and experiences of your community. Write your narrative statement. Register your collective calls.
WHAT TO DO WITH THE MAPS
Gather and share your maps, build and consolidate community. Map drawings can be used for grassroots organizing, social investigation, and class analysis (SICA), resource management, psychosocial interventions to fuel people's campaigns, engage the public, engage the state, engage dominant power structures.
Produce new knowledge
Take action
Assess learning
Product new knowledge
Take action
The use of this method entirely depends on the social dynamics between facilitator and participants, as it allows people to critically evaluate power relations in the space they inhabit.
These sessions should be organized within communities of trust and solidarity. Many of the stories and narratives that might come up within these sessions are sensitive, and the participants might feel vulnerable. It is advised that the utmost respect and discretion be observed. This method maintains a critical lens on dominant power structures, and it prioritizes marginalized, disenfranchised, and deliberately silenced perspectives.
The photographs in this project were taken from various mapping sessions around the Philippines in 2016–23. Consent was given to publish on platforms that maintain solidarity with the struggles of farmers, indigenous peoples, fisherfolk, and workers.
Dorothy L. Hodson and Richard A. Schroeder, “Dilemmas of Counter-Mapping Community Resources in Tanzania,” Development and Change 33 (2002): 79–100.
David Harvey, Social Justice and the City (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988).
Nancy Lee Peluso, “Whose Woods Are These? Counter-Mapping Forest Territories in Kalimantan, Indonesia,” Antipode 27, no. 4 (1995): 384–406.
Denis Wood, Rethinking the Power of Maps (New York: Guilford Press, 2010).
Lynn Nadel, “Cognitive Maps,” in Handbook of Spatial Cognition, ed. David Waller and Lynn Nadel (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2013).
Roger M. Downs and David Stea, “Cognitive Maps and Spatial Behaviour: Process and Product,” in The Map Reader: Theories of Mapping Practice and Cartographic Representation, ed. Martin Dodge, Rob Kitchin, and Chris Perkins (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011): 312–17.