Conflict: Jeff Fox Maps the Commons

“…while maps can be an empowering tool, helping a local community define itself in relationship to the landscape and to the political forces that shape and influence it, maps can also be used to disinherit them” (p.4).

Jeff Fox, in his article “Mapping the Commons” explores the duality of mapping to empower people. In particular, he draws on examples of Indigenous mapping projects that seek to give cartographic power to communities. The tools of spatial information technologies, in all its various forms, can help solve land-use conflicts and boundary disputes. However, Fox illustrates there is several issues with cartographic representation within different cultural contexts.

Fox asserts that by utilizing the cartographic technologies to gain power, Indigenous people, are “telling alternative spatial stories” (p.3). However, they are trying to capture their own knowledge within a western knowledge framework. Fox discusses a fundamental aspect of western mapping--the four directions. He points to how various cultural groups do not recognize these four directions, such as the Zuni people and the Inuit who have radically different directional systems. How can western style mapping depict richly different and complex cultures? One proposal is to increase the practice of mapping with other methods in research such as participant observation that may capture the cultural and symbolic spaces that are difficult to depict.
Other issues arise in land-use mapping, where mind maps of traditional societies are transformed to paper maps, defining borders, and thus specific land rights between villages. In the communities discussed, the customary system of land representation was “fluid” which allowed for flexible interpretations of boundaries. The flexible boundaries in the peoples mind maps provided minimal conflict; the paper maps created new conflicts, and as a result in some examples resource managers, stopped the practice of mapping boundaries.
Fox concluded his review with the idea that is it a fine line between cartographies and research practices that simply reproduce power relationships, and one that works to break these down. So far, cartography has not found any definitive solutions. In this article a common end is drawn on by Fox with wisdom from Nancy Peluso that Indigenous people have to participate in mapping or they will quite literally be left off the map. Now how is that for empowerment! I will sum up with the old saying--can’t live [justly] with, can’t live [justly] without.