Physical Anthropology - Racial Mapping

Racial Mapping is the use of cartography to identify and situate racial groups using maps to highlight, perpetuate, and naturalize the differences of race through both literal and metaphorical means, mapmakers create a common knowledge by displaying specific data as representative the real world, and construct racial identity by framing, situating, and defining what race is.

As a result, there is a long tradition of cartography being used as a tool to support social Darwinism, which seeks to promote specific groups of people as superior to others.

The basis for racial mapping, at least in the western world, goes back to the Hellenistic tradition of mapping, where exotic “other” people were purported to live in far off lands. These “others” were usually based upon the writings of Herodotus, and later Greek cartographers spatially situated these groups in their maps. The use of maps to identify otherness was also present Medieval Europe through the use of mappaemundi. These maps displayed “monstrous races” along the periphery to denote the separation between the settled (Europe) and the unknown. While these old maps are originally seen as representation of Christian proselytizing influence, they also exude an ideal of European supremacy. European mapmakers continued this tradition into the colonial era, using the maps to replace indigenous ideas of identity and spatial distribution. These maps, and others, were used to legitimize European imperialism through the use of racial delineation. Europeans were bringing their supposedly superior race, and the knowledge that went with that, to the world through their empires, and those empires were situated along a spatial understanding made possible through maps.

Racial ideology is not to be found entirely in maps of colonialization, it is also seen within the biopolitics of the early 19th century with the rise of the “population” as a unit of analysis, and a governmental concern with health and crime that led attempts to understand, and categorize, the population. The effects of grouping individuals into populations and having identities for the population, as opposed to the individual, presents the ability of a government to categorize people based upon knowledge. Many times this knowledge, and the categorization was done using cartography. Following the end of World War I, many of Europe’s borders were redrawn, often influenced by racial and eugenic ideologies. The decision behind this was that, “…territories remain stable and peace be guaranteed,”. The AGS assisted in the redrawing of Europe's map through the project known as the Inquiry, and in doing so helped to determine what the territory and identity of people in Europe would be. Consequently, the redrawing of Europe’s map after World War I was directly influenced by the knowledge of racial purity.