Making Rain, Making Maps
Competing Geographies of Water and Power in Southwestern Africa
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8978649 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Meredith Mckittrick (0009-0003-0836-8002, Georgetown University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2017 |
| Volume | 58 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 187-212 |
| Publication date | 2017-06-07 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Journal of African History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-8537 • E-ISSN: 1469-5138 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s0021853717000032 |
| OpenAlex | W2621836489 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
| References cited | 24 |
This article explores the alchemy whereby ritual and political worlds invisible to Europeans were rendered visible on European maps. It begins with a puzzle: representations of southwestern Africa's rivers on those maps bear little resemblance to physical reality as the cartographers would have understood it. Using GIS technology to georeference a series of maps and highlight the placement of rivers on them illustrates the convergence of cartographers’ representations and regional political cosmologies linking power to control over water. Travelers’ accounts and colonial archives illuminate how knowledge was produced and why African ideas about geography were inadvertently embedded in those maps well into the twentieth century. This method opens a window into otherwise-obscured African intellectual history and demonstrates that even something as apparently and unambiguously ‘European’ as modern mapping was the result of on-the-ground negotiations well into the colonial period
Archaeology · Colonialism · Convergence (economics · Genealogy · Geography · Georeference · Negotiation · Physical geography · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Social science · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · Law
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Cocky’ Hahn and the ‘Black Venus’
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Himba Epochs
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From the Best Authorities’
Africa from South to North through Marotseland
Looking at the sky
Notes on the Kunene River, Southern Angola
Missionary travels and researches in South Africa
Cartography and Empire Building in Nineteenth-Century West Africa
Friedrich Jeppe
Landscapes of Power
The Image of Objectivity
The Ethnography of Southwestern Angola
| Unique citing works | 4 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2022 - 2025 (4) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 4 |