Demon Landscapes and Cartographic Exorcism in Guayana Illustraionsdoc-libre

8/11/2019 Demon Landscapes and Cartographic Exorcism in Guayana Illustraionsdoc-libre

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Demon Landscapes and Cartographic Exorcism in Guayana

Neil L Whitehead

Map of Guayana and its Demons, 1599, Hondius (in Theodor de Bry, Americae III

Maps are a form of power but, despite the way in which they may accurately represent

spatial relationships and the presence of material earth forms, many of those maps are notmeant as guides to anything.

A world map is like this it demonstrates to the producers and consumers a power toenvision the world but no one could travel the world using such a map.

So too, even with much m ore localized and small scale maps, until the advent of masstravel in the 19th century, maps are more expressive of how territory landscape and

space are valorized rather than being practical tools for navigation.

Certainly the very first practical maps in western cartography such as the Greeksailing rutters are from the 1st- 3rdcenturies AD and even they encode ethnological

judgments. However, they are not visual representations of places but rather verbal

iterations of routes between places.


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Historical cartographers see such texts as ancestral to our own cultural forms of mapping

and this indicates the priority of ideas of accurate representation in the ideology of

western map-making.

The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea visualized by Abram Ortelio, 1597

This is nicely illustrated by Ortelios 16thcentury rendering of the Periplus of the

Erythraean Sea,a renowned 1st century AD rutter, which therefore culturally announces

this emphasis on the accurate visual depiction of material space in western map-making


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Papyri from the Book of the Deadof Nakht

On the other hand. ancient Egyptian maps for the passage to the underworld, earlier than

the Greek sailing rutters, could have been a staring point for modern maps especially

since they are representational of spatial relationships.

But they are not maps in the sense that contemporary historical cartography understands

its own origins and the history of mapping because they do not show material, earthly

places.

However, such ritual routes across sacred and immaterial space was also the essence of

Amazonian indigenous mapping. The routes of ancestors and culture heroes across thenight sky, beneath the waters and through mountains are verbally iterated in shamanic

chants.

Such routes of knowledge do have material landscape referents and therefore could also

function like the Greek sailing rutters to be practical guides across material landscapes.

If then our own histories of the map are bifurcated into he actual and the imaginary, or

mundane and visionary this strongly signals the recent colonial purposes of mapping andhow ideologies of science, measurement and remote sensing have played into that.

In short colonial purposes were to exorcise the demons of native spiritual cartographyfrom the spaces of national occupation and to provide a re-enchantment of the emergent

national space with forms of western magical understanding distances, elevations

topographies, climactic zones, roads, settlements, fortification and so on.


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Maps thus create a virtual world, akin to the digitally based virtual worlds of the on-lineworld, but do so in an analogical fashion. Lines, dots, shapes, colors spaces stand for and

represent an imagined world but do so by making a claim to accurate representation.

This entails that the wider cultural work of such maps is occluded by the claim to

accuracy and precision. But this did not occur all at once and of course it is in fact notpossible to separate representation from its other cultural meanings.

Thus the history of colonial mapping may be understood in part through the ways in

which these two distinct aspects of mapping, the visionary and the mundane, vied for

visual dominance in the actual making of maps.

In order to draw out these features of colonial mapping that finally permitted seeing the

nation that was otherwise uncertain and invisible in the vastness of unmarked space ofthe wild and untamed jungle my talk explores the human terrain of Guayana.

Firstly as constituted through indigenous mappings of physical and spiritual space andlatterly how that indigenous vision was exorcised of its demonic and threatening genius

locii through the inscription of colonial and national territorial desires.

Snakes and Dragons are also important guardian spirits esak of gold bearing deposits and

ritual spaces in indigenous mythologies

Romanrepresentation ofthe genius loci

Fresco in Pompeii, ca.60-79 A.D

The notion of the genius loci derives from Roman mythology. A genius loci was the

protective spirit of a place, often depicted as a snake and in contemporary usage refers toa location's distinctive atmosphere, or a "spirit of place", rather than necessarily a

guardian spirit.


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However, in the case of colonial mapping in particular the possible exorcism of suchgenius loci was manifestly a part of the purpose of accurate representation and as such

an act of possession. By dis-enchanting the indigenous landscape and inscribing new

meanings into places maps were a token of mastery and control.

Paradoxically what constituted such places or sites for the acts of cartographicdisenchantment were wholly defined by the indigenous culture so that the project ofcolony and nation was anchored by very these points of cultural contention.

But one other important general distinction need so to be made. Just as the Egyptian

Royal papyri maps of the underworld were only available to a limited audience, so toothe output of western cartographers, until the 19thcentury, had a very restricted and

privileged clientele.

By contrast the Greek rutters were known to and used by ordinary sailors and traders. So

too in South America, initial maps were all like the rutters, giving limited but very

practical navigational information for costing the Atlantic littoral or entering the mouthsof the major rivers.

Provincia de los Aruacas, ca. 1540

Only with time would maps summating such dispersed knowledge be attempted and it is

those maps which do the cultural work of seeing the nation, particularly as the audience

itself becomes diverse in social originsThis is very striking in European maps, even from the 12thcentury


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Opicinus de Canistris,World map, 1296 - 1300

But this visual torpe greatly increased as Europe and its nations were themselves

defined partly through the experience of the colonization of the Americas

Sebastian Munster, Europe as a Queen,Basel 1570

It is therefore most notable that Jodocus Hondius who produced the enduring map of the

demonic landscape of Guayana also produced a striking vision of the Belgian nation


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Jodocus Hondius the Elder, Leo Belgicus, 1611

This kind of anthropomorphic map became a key way of seeing the nation in 19th

centuryand into the 20thcentury.

Emrik & Binger, New map of Europe, Haarlem 1870

And in places as diverse as Finland and Brazil


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Seeing the nation

in Finland and Sao Paulo, early 20

th

century

1948

1932

Paralleling processes of landscape representation through maps anthropologists,cosmographers, naturalists and other scientists also elaborated more intimate delineations

of cultures, languages, artifacts and bodies.

Ethnographic Chart of the World Shewing (sic) the Distribution and Varieties of the HumanRace from General Atlas Of The World: Black, Hall and Hughes, 1854; Edinburgh


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As a consequence of such attempts to stabilize the colonial and national imaginarythrough geography and other sciences a range of superstitious or fanciful places and

beings were cleansed from the cartographic and cultural scene.

As Bruno Latour first suggested, the logic of modern science is one of purification, the

sorting of the unmarked into categories, typologies and classes. But this process cannever really capture the world so that new hybrids are constantly generated preciselythrough the attempt to delineate ambiguous alterity.

Consequently lost cities, lost tribes, lost species and lost explorers were either discovered

or discarded.

But nonetheless even with the modern categories of science all kinds of quasi-humans

(cannibals and criminals), or shape-shifting beings (shamans, water and forest spirits), aswell as illegible and uncategorized identities (Caboclos, garimpeiros, white Indians and

wild tribes) proliferated and continue to inhabit this region.

Partitioned amongst six nation-states the space of Guayana still eludes cartographic

surveillance.

Guayana

Guianas(British,Dutch andFrench)

Guyana

Guayana-Essequiba

Indeed even naming this space bounded by the Amazon Rio Negro, Orinoco and Atlantic

is problematic as variant spellings of the name abound, reflecting the persistentuncertainty as to where such names designate (mail to Guyana often ends up in Ghana)


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Guyana is a modern nation state, the Guianas is a collection of colonial enclaves,Guyana-Essequiba is that part of the nation of Guyana claimed by Venezuela, while

Guayana is the current technical term for the macro-region.

At the same time this is also Weyana, the indigenous term for a mountain in the heart of

the region where the good people of the earth still wait to be born.

And it is also the Encanche of the Amazonian Caboclos, a parallel world under the waters

of the great rivers or in the deep trackless forests. The Encanche doubles our world but

there the ancient spirits rule and treat well those they kidnap from the grim realities of

modern life,

In order to illustrate these processes of cartographic exorcism and invention of multiple

modern spaces for Guyana I will briefly trace the progressive disenchantment of nativemeaning from the maps relating to this region, and also show how peculiar forms of

modernist magic have re-codified this space.

In particular, along with other visual and cultural tropes of the space of Guayana, the

fabled lake of Manoa, on which stood the great and golden city of El Dorado, is a very

striking way in which this process can be traced mapped out if you will.

As we shall see in the maps below the progressive exorcism of El Dorado illustrated in

the erasure of first Amazon and Headless-Men (as in Hondiuss map) through the drying-

up of the Lake Parime (Manoa or Rupununi) and then the final emplacement of scienceand commerce through ethnology and the multinational mining corporation.

Such exorcisms of the wild, savage and un-modern perfectly expresses this passage from

native antiquity to colonial modernity, from savage wilderness to civilized nation.

Maps of Guayana 1540 - 2009


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Jodocus Hondius the Elder


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Guyana, 1707, illustrating Raleghs voyage of 1592, Leiden

Guiljelmus Blaew - Map Guiana, Venezuela, and El Dorado - 1629


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CASSANI, JOS. Historia de la Provincia de La Compaia de Jesus del Nuevo Reyno deGranada en la America, Madrid 1741

Guyane, 1745, Paris


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London, 1781, from Political Magazine

Raif Effendi - Guyana, Surinam, Amapa, skdar (Istanbul), 1803.


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Agustin Codazzi- Cantn Upata de la Provincia de Guayana.Atlas fsico y poltico de la Repblica de Venezuela, 1840.

Capt. J. E. Alexander - Map of interior ofBritish Guiana based on writings ofWilliam Hilhouse and others, ca. 1825


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Richard Schomburgk, map fragment, London 1835

Richard Schomburgk, Georgetown, 1838


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Edward Goodall - Maps ofBritish Guiana and Trinidad,incorporating scenes from theSchomburgk expeditions, ca1840

John Tallis, Map of Guyana from theIllustrated Atlas, London, 1851


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20th Century Ethnological Map of the Guianas from Handbook of South American Indians,Washington 1948. (The Amerindian logo appears on all the volumes)

Maps showing thedistributions of potteryand mounds in Guyana,21st century


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Mining and Minerals in Guyana - the modernist El Dorado

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