THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SPACE

Ethnographers often overlook the importance of space in people’s lives. When ethnographers make maps, they often lack key information on scale, orientation, and dimension that is essential for understanding what a map represents. The authors outline basic principles of mapmaking and demonstrate how easily maps can be made under field conditions. If ethnographers take the short amount of time to make decent maps of human cultural behavior, the crucially important spatial dimension of people’s lives will not be lost. Guides to ethnographic research note the critical importance of mapmaking: “Maps and plans of the area under investigation are essential to a clear under-standing of the economic and social life of a people, ” such as “small-scale sketch maps of the whole area and plans (large-scale maps) of small areas ” (A Committee of the Royal Anthropological Institute 1951:47). Our concern in this article is with large-scale maps of relatively small areas. Most maps one can buy are small scale, perhaps 1:25,000, where 50 milli-meters (roughly 2 inches) on the map corresponds to 25,000 × 50 mm, or 1.25 km (a little more than 3/4 mile) in the real world. By large-scale maps, we mean scale drawings with a ratio of 1:100 or so, that is, where 50 mm on the map corresponds to 5,000 mm, or 5 meters (or 1 inch corresponds to 100 inches). Large-scale mapping is best suited to the recording of house sites, camps, or a few structures at a religious or perhaps food-extraction site. In this age of Global Positioning Systems and laser/computer technology, map-ping can be very easy and precise. However, the average ethnographer still lacks access to these sometimes expensive and delicate technologies and is left with only pencil, paper, and his or her own wits. We argue that much valuable information can be preserved with such traditional, if rudimentary, tools