The Map, the name and the territory. Toponymic struggles in the era of cartographic post-sovereignty
| hal.structure.identifier | Passages | |
| dc.contributor.author | NOUCHER, Matthieu | |
| dc.contributor.editor | Giraut Frédéric | |
| dc.contributor.editor | Houssay-Holzschuch Myriam | |
| dc.date.issued | 2022 | |
| dc.description.abstractEn | In the official letter sent on February 5, 2018 to MP Valéria Faure-Muntian, French Prime Minister Édouard Philippe explains the motivations for the mission he has entrusted to her: “Spatial data remains more than ever a vector for informed action by the State and a sovereignty issue”. The expression “sovereign data” subsequently comes up six times in this three-page letter which details the expectations for this study on the governance of spatial data in France. This would lead, a few months later, to the submission of a report entitled “Sovereign spatial data” (Faure-Muntain 2018). This question is of concern to public authorities around the world today as the digital revolution profoundly reconfigures the strategic environment of states (Douzet 2020) and the way in which they attempt to control the “datasphere” (Bergé and Grumbach 2016).Mapping therefore appears particularly symptomatic of these new digital governance issues. In fact, the field has experienced a series of technical, legal and organizational reconfigurations over the past fifteen years that have overturned the way in which maps are produced, distributed and used. The digital turn and then the development of the Internet with the emergence of the geoweb – defined, at least, as the aggregate of spatial technologies and georeferenced information organized and transmitted via the Internet – have given rise to new actors, new practices and new tools. As a result, mapping is no longer the sole responsibility of States. Multinationals like Google as well as communities arising from digital commons like OpenStreetMap have become key players. I therefore argue that, despite the State's very voluntarist rhetoric seeking to rehabilitate a form of cartographic authority, the recent evolution of the geographical information landscape leads to the emergence of a form of cartographic post-sovereignty. Cartographic sovereignty can be defined as the exclusive privilege of states to provide their own representation of the national territory. This is reflected in the divergent technological choices of national cartography, even in the geodesic systems or the units used. The state thus constitutes itself as an essential source of cartographic authority through its ability to control the collection, representation and also the distribution of official maps. However, today's geoweb causes a shake-up of sovereign digital geographies by multiplying potential sources but also channels of distribution. Official maps are supplemented, circumvented or even competed with by alternative maps, and cartographic authority is called into question. The methods of production and circulation of place names are exemplary processes from this point of view. If official toponymy is a prerogative of local or national authorities, toponymies of use or even countertoponymies emerge on the Internet to the point of completely blurring the maps, as I will explain in the first part.To illustrate these issues, I propose to rely on the heuristic case of French Guiana. It presents, from the point of view of place names, a complex situation that is particularly interesting to analyse: settler place names from the time of the colonial conquest are juxtaposed with native place names. However, official maps are far from reflecting this diversity. They seem to be fixed in received ideas that have "stuck" to Guiana for centuries, while fostering them very widely (from terra nullius to green hell, from the El Dorado of the miners to the hostile jungle). Therefore, the geoweb appears as an alternative distribution channel where issues of knowledge and recognition of the different communities which make up French Guiana are expressed. By coming back to some historical and recent cartographic controversies, I will highlight the permanence of the political stakes of the naming of this territorial margin. I will then show how the geoweb can open up new perspectives of resistance.Finally, I propose a research agenda. I then defend the thesis that in addition to critical analyses of the meaning of place names or place naming, it is now also necessary to deconstruct the power games associated with the regulation and control of the circulation of the various existing toponymic databases (place name flow). | |
| dc.language.iso | en | |
| dc.publisher | ISTE | |
| dc.publisher | Wiley Son | |
| dc.source.title | The Politics of Place Naming: Naming the World | |
| dc.subject | Toponymie | |
| dc.subject | Nomination | |
| dc.subject | Toponymie critique | |
| dc.subject | Savoirs autochtones | |
| dc.subject | Infrastructure de données géographiques | |
| dc.subject | OpenStreetMap | |
| dc.subject | Etudes critiques des données | |
| dc.subject | Flux de données | |
| dc.subject | Amazonie | |
| dc.subject | Guyane française | |
| dc.subject.en | Place names | |
| dc.subject.en | Place naming | |
| dc.subject.en | Critical toponymy | |
| dc.subject.en | Indigenous knowledge | |
| dc.subject.en | Spatial data infrastructure | |
| dc.subject.en | OpenStreetMap | |
| dc.subject.en | Critical data studies | |
| dc.subject.en | Data flow | |
| dc.subject.en | Amazonia | |
| dc.subject.en | French Guiana | |
| dc.title.en | The Map, the name and the territory. Toponymic struggles in the era of cartographic post-sovereignty | |
| dc.type | Chapitre d'ouvrage | |
| dc.identifier.doi | 10.1002/9781394188307.ch10 | |
| dc.subject.hal | Sciences de l'Homme et Société/Géographie | |
| bordeaux.page | 191-216 | |
| bordeaux.title.proceeding | The Politics of Place Naming: Naming the World | |
| hal.identifier | halshs-03907218 | |
| hal.version | 1 | |
| hal.popular | non | |
| hal.audience | Internationale | |
| hal.origin.link | https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr//halshs-03907218v1 | |
| bordeaux.COinS | ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:journal&rft.btitle=The%20Politics%20of%20Place%20Naming:%20Naming%20the%20World&rft.date=2022&rft.spage=191-216&rft.epage=191-216&rft.au=NOUCHER,%20Matthieu&rft.genre=unknown |
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