Clean out of the map
Knowing and doubting space at India's high imperial frontiers
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4392218 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Thula Simpson (0000-0002-5992-3948, Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge, UK, corresponding author), Thomas Simpson (0000-0002-9175-8874) |
| Year | 2017 |
| Volume | 55 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 3-36 |
| Publication date | 2017-03-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | History of Science (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0073-2753 • E-ISSN: 1753-8564 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1177/0073275316686580 |
| PMID | 28111981 |
| OpenAlex | W2581506107 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 9 |
During the second half of the nineteenth century, land frontiers became areas of unique significance for surveyors in colonial India. These regions were understood to provide the most stringent tests for the men, instruments, and techniques that collectively constituted spatial data and representations. In many instances, however, the severity of the challenges that India's frontiers afforded stretched practices in the field and in the survey office beyond breaking point. Far from producing supposedly unequivocal maps, many involved in frontier surveying acknowledged that their work was problematic, partial, and prone to contrary readings. They increasingly came to construe frontiers as spaces that exceeded scientific understanding, and resorted to descriptions that emphasized fantastical and disorienting embodied experiences. Through examining the many crises and multiple agents of frontier mapping in British India, this article argues that colonial surveying and its outputs were less assured and more convoluted than previous histories have acknowledged
Aesthetics · Archaeology · Colonialism · Embodied cognition · Epistemology · Field (mathematics · Frontier · Point (geometry · Sociology · Space (punctuation) · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Philosophy · Race, Genetics, and Society
| Unique citing works | 9 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1,13 |
| Citation span | 2018 - 2025 (8) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 9 |