There is no internationally agreed map of the world. This is one of the more memorable things I took away from a recent exhibition at the British Library.

The exhibition, entitled “Maps and the Twentieth Century: Drawing the Line,” reviewed   landmarks in cartography over the course of the century, from schematic mapping of the New York subway system to the challenges of mapping glaciers that are melting faster  than we print atlases.

A project proposing an internationally agreed map of the world (based on a standard set of universally recognized coordinates) “was proposed by German geographer Albrecht Penck in 1981, and taken over by the United Nations after the Second World War.” “To date,” the exhibition suggested, “about 40% of planned world coverage has been produced.”

Interestingly, a parallel initiative was undertaken in the USSR using “Sistem 42,” “a geodetic system enabling standard grid reference system across all Soviet maps.”One of the maps on display at the BL was a remarkably detailed (1: 10,000) map of Brighton and Hove produced as part of this Soviet project in the late 1980s.

Maps and theory

In teaching anthropology, I use maps as a metaphor for theory. Like a map, theories  reveal something of interest to us at the expense of leaving other things out. A 1:1 representation of reality is rarely useful.

The exhibition at the British Library closed last week, but much of the content remains available through the BL’s website.

Maps and the Twentieth Century: Drawing the Line ran at the British Library from November 2016 to March 2017