cultural geographies

This paper examines the cultural origins of rice cultivation in the United States, arguing that its appearance in South Carolina with settlement of the colony from 1670 is an African knowledge system that transferred across the Middle Passage of slavery. The origins of this wetland farming system are explored in relationship to other ethnic groups found in the colony at the time, the English, French Huguenots and native Americans. Also discussed is the development of scholarship on rice origins in West Africa and why scientific knowledge of this issue remained unexplored until this century. The final section addresses the significance of gendered practices in African rice cultivation and processing, and the role of female knowledge systems in the crop’s diffusion across the Atlantic basin to South Carolina.

A pair of scales -local canal-based (or village-based) and basin-scale (or valley-wide) -is featured in the irrigation of the mountain landscapes of Latin America. These scales arose historically through the interplay of cultural images with the political ecologies of agrarian transformation. In the Cochabamba region of Bolivia, long the irrigated breadbasket of the south-central Andes, the Inca state (c. 1495-1539) imposed canal-based irrigation using a powerful concept of rotational sharing (suyu). Valley basins containing local irrigation were a part of the territorial web of Inca state geography known later as verticality. The Spanish empire in Andean South America (1539-1825) was predicated upon a valley-centric colonial geography. Colonial rescaling involved despoliation and usurpation of waterworks, legal actions, and struggles over environmental change. Influence of the two irrigation scales has persisted. Today canal-based irrigation is not a timeless relict of indigenous customs, pace many postcolonial projects. Rather its usefulness, and its remarkable reinvention as a cultural concept and environmental creation, are the products of major modifications. Dismantling of multi-scale linkages in irrigation has reduced indigenous or peasant cross-scale co-ordination. Local containment poses threats to the environmental and socioeconomic sustainability of canal-based irrigation.

This paper explores the political and scientific justification for the mapping of Antarctica by the Falkland Islands Dependency Survey (FIDS). As with the ‘Great Game’ of the nineteenth century, cartography was politics by another means. Thereafter, consideration is given to how the maps and surveys of Antarctica reflected British anxieties concerning Argentina in the immediate postwar world. As a rival claimant state in the South Atlantic, Argentine surveyors and administrators were a source of considerable concern to the FIDS. In the field, however, the FIDS surveyors were expected to concentrate on surveying while at the same time plotting these foreign incursions in Antarctica. The methods and processes involved in collating information into map form are considered. Ironically, the greatest geopolitical challenge to these aspirations came from the United States rather than Argentina or even Chile. Finally, the paper concludes with the changing political and cartographic remit of the FIDS in the era of the 1959 Antarctic Treaty.

The production of the painter Jean Paul Lemieux is examined in the context of Quebec nationalism and its quest to define a Québécois territoriality. Prior to the independence referendum of 1995, the separatist Parti Québécois produced a ‘Declaration of sovereignty’ which was circulated throughout the province both in a text and video format. Focusing on territory rather than ethnicity, the language of the declaration sought to move away from francophone cultural politics to build a more inclusive platform for the nation. This movement toward a territorial nationalism was disrupted by the landscape imagery of the video, which was released simultaneously with the text. Composed almost exclusively of long, static, horizontal shots, the video of the declaration conveys the territory of Quebec as an empty space devoid of people and history. Looking at Jean Paul Lemieux’s use of a similar - yet differently coded - visual language in his own landscapes, I explore the complex process of collective authorship and response that enables the imaging of communities.