140

Maps Narratives and Trails: Performativity,

Hodology and Distributed Knowledges in
Complex Adaptive Systems an Approach to
Emergent Mapping
Original
BlackwellActicle
Publishing Asia
D. Turnbull: Maps Narratives and Trails

DAVID TURNBULL
Australian Centre for Science, Innovation, and Society (ACSIS), Old Arts Building, The University of
Melbourne, Victoria 3010, Australia.
Email: turnbull@deakin.edu.au
Received 30 November 2006; Revised 30 January 2007; accepted 31 January 2007

Abstract
If maps are conceived as representations of reality or as spatially referenced data
assemblages, a dilemma is raised by the nature of Indigenous knowledge traditions
and multiple ontologies. How can differing knowledge traditions, differing ways
of mapping be enabled to work together without subsumption into one common
or universal ontology? The paper explores one way of handling this dilemma by
reconceiving mapping and knowing performatively and hodologically. It is
argued that one way in which differing knowledge traditions can interact and be
mutually interrogated is by creating a database structured as distributed knowledge
and emulating a complex adaptive system. Through focusing on the encounters,
tensions and cooperations between traditions and utilising the concept of cognitive
trails- the creation of knowledge by movement through the natural and intellectual
environment the socially distributed performative dimensions of differing modes
of spatially organised knowledges can then be held in a dialogical tension that
enables emergent mapping.
KEY WORDS complex adaptive systems; Indigenous knowledge; multiple ontologies
Introduction
What I want to address in this paper is the problem, which, from one perspective, lies right at
the heart of the relationship between mapping
and Indigenous knowledge the problem of
incommensurability of multiple, incompatible
ontologies and perspectives. This mapping
problem is of course well known to all those
involved with Indigenous knowledge and
geography. But, I would argue, not only is it
part of the broader problem of the relationship
between the incommensurable knowledge
traditions of science and Indigenous knowledge,
but that it is also a problem right across the
broad spectrum of the ways in which we have to
deal with knowledge in this transmodern era

(Dussel, 1993). The problem is often expressed

in terms of databases, and of knowledge
assemblage and management, and in relation
to complex interdisciplinary problems like
biodiversity and global warming. In 1999
UNESCO issued a policy statement in which
they asserted:
... that traditional and local knowledge systems, as dynamic expressions of perceiving
and understanding the world, can make, and
historically have made, a valuable contribution to science and technology, and there is a
need to preserve, protect, research, and
promote this cultural heritage and empirical
knowledge (UNESCO, 1999).
Geographical Research June 2007 45(2):140149
doi: 10.1111/j.1745-5871.2007.00447.x

D. Turnbull: Maps Narratives and Trails

However, The International Council of Scientific

Unions (ICSU) contends that Indigenous, traditional, local or place-based knowledge is not
capable of rational evaluation, unification and
assemblage. Most importantly and damningly
they claimed that it cannot be moved from its site
of production and relocated in a central archive
or database. Therefore it cannot be centrally coordinated or rendered commensurable because it
is different in kind from the rational, objective,
universal, tested and evaluated knowledge that
the institution of science produces (ICSU, 1999;
Bowker, 2005a, 219). On the other hand there
are those who argue the value of Indigenous
knowledge lies precisely in its local, place and
practice based character and that to decontextualise it, to relocate and render it commensurable
with scientific knowledge would be to lose its
cultural specificity (Agrawal, 2002).
Various versions of this second perspective
have been voiced by Indigenous communities
and researchers who have used western databases
and geo-referencing technologies of cartography,
GPS and GIS to some advantage in knowledge
assemblage, land claims and resource management, but nonetheless have encountered many
problems with these techniques and approaches
(Harmsworth, 1998). Such geo-referencing
practices commodify and make exploitable that
which was previously communal. They make
contemporary social relations problematic by
disrupting and creating boundaries of identity, and
ownership, both territorial and epistemological.
Equally they suppress or even erase differing
ontologies and epistemologies (Fox et al.,
2005). Mapping and databasing using scientific
coordination of commensurability techniques
not only subsume differing spatialities and
temporalities into one abstract space-time
they also omit the multiplicitous and interactive
dimensions of the local and the practical, the
stories and the journeys, the spiritual and the
experiential. Though there are examples of success in community development and community
mapping and of heroic endeavours, for example,
in the effort to create a database for the entirety
of Indias traditional knowledge (IKDL) they all
suffer from trying to impose a single unifying
ontology on Indigenous diversity (Craig et al.,
2002; Sen, 2002; Berkes, 2004).
There is, then, a set of general problems both
within and between knowledge traditions especially as they are manifested in mapping, knowledge management, and databasing which all
come under the heading of how do you work
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141
with multiplicity? What I want to do is sketch
out one approach to what I think is the essential
prerequisite rethinking knowing and mapping
where the key questions relate to the similarities
and differences in the ways space, time and
movement are performed and to how those
similarities and differences are handled.
All processes of knowledge generation are
based in the dynamics of movement through
space, and of change over time, but how those
dynamics are conceived, lived and represented
vary between traditions, cultures and eras. In
many of the western scientific traditions such
spatiotemporal dynamics are largely rendered
invisible by the ways that knowledge is conceived, in objectivist, representational terms, as
abstracted and unified. I am not advocating the
dismissal or the overthrow of the conception of
science as a body of rationally evaluated and
carefully coordinated knowledge from which
any localness has been eliminated. Far from it,
I think that this unified, representationalist
understanding has manifest strengths and virtues
but, in order to prevent it from sliding into rigidity and self-inflicted mono-cultural atrophy, it
needs to be set in dialogical tension with alternative conceptions.
The South American historian, Enrique Dussel
sees modernity and the tradition of modern
science as having been born in 1492 in a
moment of sacrificial violence and misrecognition of non-European knowledge traditions. He
argues that we need to move beyond the modern
to the transmodern, an era in which modernity
and its negated alterity would co-realise themselves in a process of mutual, creative, fertilisation, a process that he called agonistic pluralism,
and which Geoff Bowker, in his examination of
the inherent contradictions of biodiversity databasing, has called dynamic uncompromise
(Dussel, 1993; Bowker, 2000b). This demand
for a resolution to the problems of multiplicity,
cultural diversity and incommensurable ontologies is even more urgent and pervasive than
it was in 1993 when Dussel was writing, but it
is now possible to propose some solutions and
ways to create a knowledge space in which the
essence of agonistic pluralism tension and
diversity can be expressed.
Previously I have argued that all knowledge
traditions, including science, are assemblages of
local knowledges. The salient differences between
them lie in the ways in which they deploy social
strategies and technical devices to move and
assemble these knowledges, thereby creating their

142
own knowledge spaces through linking people,
practices and places. The task as I now see it, is
to create a third space, a space in which the
possibilities of agonistic pluralism can occur
based on a performative rethinking of knowing
and mapping (Turnbull, 2003).
Hodology knowledge, space, and trails
I want to start such a performative rethinking by
considering some of the hidden spatialities and
temporalities. From a performative perspective,
the making of knowledge is simultaneously
the making of space, and space is made by
travelling (Rundstrom, 1990; 1991; 1993; 1995;
Ingold, 2000). Knowing is a form of travelling,
of moving through space; and travelling, like
knowledge, is also a form of narrative. Some of
these complex interweavings can be dimly perceived in a set of related root meanings of many
terms closely associated with making, meaning,
and knowledge; symbol from the Greek bolein
to place or throw, and syn together; metaphor
conveyance, a device for being transported
across space; in modern Greek a metaphori is a
taxi; theory originally meant to contemplate,
from theorus in modern Greek one who travels
to see things, an ambassador; travel originally
travail, to work; episteme putting oneself in a
good position; method from the Greek meta
after, and hodos way or path (Turnbull, 2002, 2).
These terms, which are central to knowledge
and to the dynamics of its generation, indicate
that they all had their basis in the idea of active
work, and of moving through space, cognitively
and physically. The elements of activity, work
and movement are now almost absent and invisible, as evidenced in our constant use of terms
like method or way without realising they
literally mean paths or trails. The Oxford
English Dictionary recently compiled a list of
the most commonly used nouns. The top 25 are:
time, person, year, way, day, thing, man, world,
life, hand, part, child, eye, woman, place, work,
week, case, point, government, company, number,
group, problem and fact (anon, 2006). This
reveals a clear emphasis on time and activity.
The somewhat obscure, but freshly emergent
term hodology neatly links space, knowledge
and cognition. In geography, hodology is the
study of paths, in philosophy, the study of interconnected ideas, and in neuroscience, the study
of the patterns of connections in the white
matter of the brain (Jonge, 19678; Earle, 1991;
ffytche and Catani, 2005; Wikipedia entry,
hodology).

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It is the hodological emphasis on the concept

of trails that is central to a performative understanding of the coproduction of knowledge and
space. Performativity has two facets; one is that
meaning, understanding, and knowledge are
based in embodied practices (Pickering, 1995;
Nash, 2000; Thrift, 2000, 2004). The other is
that the performance of knowledge practices and
their attendant knowledge spaces and artefacts
simultaneously structure and shape our sociocultural world in a process of coproduction
(MacKenzie, 2003). We make our world in the
process of moving through and knowing it.
These deeply hodological dimensions are now
becoming apparent across a wide variety of
areas of knowledge production, from the anthropological, through the scientific to the forensic
and managerial.
Trails as knowledge artefacts
Trails, along with string and stories, were among
homo sapiens first artefacts and they may have
been the foundational practices on which human
cognition, knowledge and technology are based
(Carruthers, 2002; Liebenberg, 2002; Rudgley,
1998, 110). The act of tracking, of moving
through the environment, following prey, and
reading the signs, creates a complex of intellectual and cognitive connections and, at the same
time, a physical trail. Tim Ingold, in his explorations of the ways in which people construct
their understandings of the environment through
skilled movement, argues that knowledge is
regional, it is to be cultivated by moving along
paths that lead around, towards, or away from,
places, from, or to, places elsewhere. We know
as we go (Ingold, 2000, 229; see also Eves,
1997). The topokinetic nature of knowledge
through movement is now apparent in the deep
epistemological embeddedness of trails in a
wide variety of cultures around the world,
including, for example: Native American Trails;
Aboriginal dreaming tracks; and Incan ceque
(Apple, 1965; Parmentier, 1987; Pandya, 1990;
Earle, 1991; Folan, 1991; Fox, 1997; Abercrombie,
1998; Bauer, 1998; Castro, 1998; Evans, 1999;
Layton, 1999; Stanford and Bradley, 2002;
Green, 2006a; 2006b). Commenting on Native
American maps, Peter Nabokov notes:
Another way such cosmograms guided human
action was through their incorporation of
what seems to be one of the most fertile and
widespread tropes in American Indian consciousness: the road, the trail, the path or the
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D. Turnbull: Maps Narratives and Trails

journey. Once again people often lived their

maps ... through ritual actions such as
pilgrimages through mythologised landscapes
or ceremonial enactments. The performance
of the practice is itself a map (Nabokov, 1998,
256).
What nearly every culture seems to share, in one
form or another, is the recognition and celebration of the hodological or topokinetic in their
mythologies, ontologies or epistemologies, and
especially in their stories, songs and maps. This
commonality is based in the connectivity of
trails the creation of meaning through marking
and linking. For example Richard Parmentier, in
his study of the Micronesian islands of Belau,
finds that:
Paths are also established linkages, relationships and associations among persons, groups,
and political units which were created by
some precedent setting action in the past and
which imply the possibility as well as obligation for following the path in exchange for
marriage cooperation and competition. The
corresponding schema of paths involves a series
of homologous elements tied together in a
linear thread, beginning at a spatiotemporal
origin point and concluding at a terminal point
(Parmentier, 1987, 108).
Timothy Earle, in his work on Native American
trails, shows that, in many cultures, physical paths,
far from being purely functional as the markers
of an optimal shortest distance route, are characteristically redundant, with many alternative
routes each of low volume; their construction is
unplanned, growing with the immediate needs and
utilities of individual travellers (Earle, 1991,
1011; Kantner, 1997; Snead, 2002). So another
common feature is that trails are typically multiplicitous; they are redundant in that they provide
a wide variety of possible routes or ways of making
connections. It is this multiplicity, redundancy or
polyvalency that allows for adaptivity, an essential dimension for growth and change in the
complex systems which we will come to shortly.
Story trails
Paths, tracks and trails are inherently performative; the cognitive connections, the social interactions, and the relationships that they bring into
existence, are themselves marked by trails and
movements and actions along them. For this
reason they are deeply intertwined with songs,
stories and narratives.
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143
In the words of N. Scott Momaday, the Native
American poet and writer:
We know who we are (and where we are)
only with reference to the things about us, the
points of reference in both our immediate and
infinite worlds, the places and points among
which we are born, grow old and die. There
is in this simple cartology the idea of odyssey. And in odyssey there is story. Nothing is
older than story in our human experience.
Nothing appeals more to our human being
(Kavanagh 2005, 31, citing Momaday, 1995).
Telling a story and following a path are cognate
activities, telling a story is ordering events and
actions in space and time it is a form of knowledge making. Diagrams and maps are likewise
stories. In science, just as in all knowledge producing traditions, the processes are inherently
narratological; they involve the creation of knowledge spaces in which people, practices and places
are discursively linked (Turnbull, 2004; 2005a).
Neural trails
As I mentioned earlier, in neuroscience, hodology is the pattern of white matter connections
between cortical areas (ffychte and Catani,
2005, 767). Furthermore the concept of paths,
trails, tracks and neuronal connections is absolutely fundamental. All of the brains functioning can be conceived of in connectionist terms
(Capra, 2003; Edelman, 2004). But, what is now
claimed as central to the structuring of the
brains capacity for perception and cognition is
movement its simulation, anticipation and
memories. In the performative understanding of
the neuroscientist Alain Berthoz, perception is not
representation, its simulated action projected onto
the world (Berthoz, 2000, 10). He distinguishes
between topographic and topokinetic memory.
Topographic memory is the construction of a
spatial story from environmental clues, or what
Lesley Green calls story maps the practice of
representational memory of space (such as the
listing of landmarks on routes). The topokinetic
is memory of movements in space, or story tracks
the practices of orientation that accompany the
telling of stories about journeys, or along them
(Lesley Green, personal communication, 2006).1
This neurological understanding of cognition,
memory, and perception fits neatly with the
ecological approach to our understandings of the
world as performed and produced in our movements through it. In both, knowing is mapping,
following and creating stories and trails.

144
Cognitive trails, trails as theories
The idea of trails as the links that we create in
theorising and mental knowledge production has
been taken up by Adrian Cussins in his concept
of cognitive trails. He suggests:
A travelling account of understanding and
representation should not opt for an epistemological grounding in thought or experience
since much of our intelligence in communicating and acting consists in our ability to
move between alternative conceptualisations
of a problem domain (Cussins, 1992).
A hodological understanding underpins two
revealing approaches to the role and use of diagrams; one ethnographical and one analytical.
Ochs et al. looked at how experimental physicists work collaboratively and found that they
use visual representations and models to create
a virtual space in which they can travel as a
hybrid construction of themselves and the
objects they are attempting to explain and
understand (Ochs et al., 1994, 151). Osborn
describes diagrams as tools for learning how to
see, how to reason, and how to narrate. He
argues that:
One aspect of academic work is the practice
of building methodological tools for navigating ecologies of information. And a diagram
is a visual representation of these navigational
trails ... diagrams are cultural objects composed of simple elements, and these simple
elements allow human cognition to follow a
complex trajectory. The diagram is neither a
direct representation of the natural world nor
a natural data set, but a suggested theoretical
walk through the landscape of data (Osborn,
2005, 1516).
Osborn also points out that one of the first people
to develop this concept of an associative trail
was Vannevar Bush who conceived the memex
machine which would enable the capture and
reproduction of such cognitive trails through a
process of tagging (Bush, 1945).2
Trails as mapping
As Tim Ingold sees it the traveller or storyteller
who knows as he [sic] goes is neither making a
map nor using one. He is quite simply mapping
(Ingold, 2000, 2301 emphasis in the original).3
This is performative mapping, as it has now
come to be known (Gartner, 1998; Cosgrove and
Martins, 2000). And it is here, in the elision
from mapping to map making, that Ingold finds

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the source of what he calls the cartographic

illusion. When the movements of the travelling
story are erased or suppressed, the illusion is
created that the structure of the map represents
the structure of the world (Wood, 1993; Ingold,
2000, 234). Thus a performative/constructivist
approach, by emphasising movement, action,
event, space, and time, would seem to destabilise
what it is tempting to call the representationalist
illusion. However, to talk in terms of illusion is
also to suggest that there is some fundamental
or concealed truth that the performative approach
reveals. In working with multiple ontologies,
multiple paths, multiple connections, revealed
truth is not possible; rather the tension of agonistic pluralism opens up new and unperceived
insights, possibilities and opportunities. A tension
which, I think, needs to be made central to the
linking of constructivism and complexity.
Barbara Herrnstein Smith has analysed the
structure of contemporary debates about truth
and relativism, about the unity/disunity of science, and the nature of biological processes and
finds them reflected in the processes of debate
itself, in cognition and in her special interest
the micro-dynamics of incommensurability
(Smith, 1997). Smith perceives a positive
dynamic in such typically polarised debates as
the culture wars, where there is no common
ground, no possibility of the coordination of
commensurability between opposing sides, a
characteristic that is also present in cognition
and in complex adaptive systems. This is the
dynamic of a dialogical process in which opposing voices constantly interrogate and negotiate.
It is the fecundity of tension, of cognitive dissonance, of working with incommensurability, of
Bowkers dynamic uncompromise. She explicitly
makes the connection between the constructivism
of the sociology of science and developmental
systems theory in biology and finds the same
general processes at work in cognition. So it is
to complex adaptive systems I want to turn next,
since they work through processes that have
already been noted in the exploration of trails;
namely multiplicity, linking, tagging and mapping.
Complexity
We have, I think, reached a point of remarkable
coalesence across a wide range of disciplines
with regard to the ways in which organisms,
entities or agents interact with each other and
their environments. In social studies of science,
in anthropology, in psychology, biology, ecology,
neuroscience, development studies, information
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D. Turnbull: Maps Narratives and Trails

management and computing science, a common

processual picture is emerging of autonomous
local agents in interaction producing self-directing,
adaptive outcomes. This coalescence often goes
under the label of systems theory or complexity
theory.
However, it is important to distinguish two
quite different versions of complexity theory.
One is basically objectivist and physicalist, where
the assumption is that systems or networks, in
all locales, and at all scales, from the universe to
the atom, result from the operation of one unified
set of rules, algorithms or laws. The contrasting
version usually falls under the heading of
complex adaptive systems or developmental
systems theory. These are distinguished by being
performative and bottom-up rather than topdown and representationalist, and by conceiving
such systems as distributed, spatial, historically
contingent, and scale dependent. Their emergent
and adaptive character derives from multiplicity,
from feed back positive and negative, and form
linking and tagging. As Stephen Rose put it in
describing evo-devo, another complex adaptive
system, organisms are essentially a matter of
topography and history (Rose, 2006). All of these
approaches assume, at heart, organic, spatially
interactive, performative knowledge systems,
where the system itself is created through paths
linking the agents; hence they are forms of
emergent mapping. Indeed I would like to call
them emergent mapping systems.
The questions then become is there a way by
which an emergent mapping system can be simulated in a model or a database or in some form
of knowledge management? Can an emergent
mapping system map itself? Can differing local
knowledge traditions actually be enabled to
work together? Is there a way in which multiple
ontologies can interact? Can there be interoperability and coordination without standardisation?
Is it possible to work with incommensurability?
Is there even a way of imagining a model for
innovation?
Obviously, I think that there is, and such possibilities are a subject of my current research.
Robin Boast, the Curator of World Archaeology
at the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and
Anthropology, has a project to rebuild the database of the Museums collection of artefacts
(Boast et al., 2007). That project, E2D2 Emergent
Databasing, Emergent Diversity, aims, as the
name suggests, to avoid giving the database a
fixed pre-established classification system and
to allow its users and contributors to produce
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145
emergent effects. In my terms this would be an
example of emergent mapping.
Distributed knowledge
But, for such a databasing project to enable
emergent mapping, the social dimensions of the
performative non-representational approach to
knowledge production and of complex adaptive
systems, need to be brought into play. That is,
the recognition that knowledge is not a unified
abstract thing residing in individual minds;
rather knowledge is socially distributed, it arises
from the interactions of autonomous independent agents (Hutchins, 1996).4 One area in which
this distributed view has been combined with
cognitive trails has emerged from a range of
approaches to mapping variously termed argument mapping, causal mapping or cognitive
mapping. For example Kerry-Anne Mairs has
produced a cognitive map of farm abandonment
in the Faroes (http://www.geos.ed.ac.uk/ ... /
Cognitivemapping.html). In her view, such a
form of mapping has a dual function: it can display the possible complex interactions between
large numbers of factors allowing the possibility
of alternative explanations to emerge; but it can
also represent:
... the understandings and perceptions of different actors. By creating maps with different
groups of people concerned with farm abandonment, for example between farmers and
academics or between Icelandic and Faroese
farmers, cognitive mapping can help figure
out how much and in which way the views of
these different actors are distinct (Mairs, 2006).
To explain how such an emergent database
might be structured I want to end by looking at
the work of an Italian management group at the
University of Trento and an information design
group at MIT. The Trento group is working on
what they call distributed knowledge management within complex organisations such as
universities which, like science, typically have
quasi-autonomous substructures or cultures, such
as departments, disciplines or faculties, each
with their own local knowledges and ontologies.
Like E2D2, the Trento group rejects the basic
assumption behind most knowledge management practices namely that there can be or ought
to be a centralised repository of information and
that, in order for such knowledge to be assemblable, it needs to be shorn of what they call its
tacit dimensions, those which I have summarised
here as spatial and performative.

146
They claim that organisational knowledge ...
appears as a heterogeneous and dynamic system
of local knowledges that live in the interplay
between the need of sharing a perspective within
a community (to incrementally improve performance) and of meeting different perspectives
(to sustain innovation) (Bonifacio et al., 2002,
27). They propose an architecture for a knowledge management system based on what I have
redescribed as three protocols for each participating knowledge tradition which can be readily
seen as speaking to the issue of enabling differing mapping and knowledge traditions to work
together. First, autonomous local knowledge
mapping knowledge should be autonomously
managed where it is created and used, namely
within each community which should be
allowed to build its own local knowledge map.
Second, local ontology mapping the system
must provide a way for each community to
make explicit its own interpretation schemas,
or context. Third, emergent mapping through
linking and tagging, making connections each
community must be enabled to create relations
with explicit contexts of other communities
(Taylor, 2005, Ch. 5). Rather than requiring that
each local context is translated/mapped into a
centrally built, shared knowledge map, connections are created by partial mappings from context to context.
This schema aims at reproducing these social
processes of meaning negotiation and linking
through agents whom they call brokers and I
would call go-betweens (Turnbull, 2001). They
claim that this structure gives semantic interoperability without semantics. In many ways what
social studies of science have been doing in
exploring heterogeneous engineering, invisible
work and ecologies of knowledge is ontology
mapping and linking, creating contexts and displaying connections acting as go-betweens, in
situations of agonistic pluralism and diversity.
But, for a database with such a protocol structure to allow emergent mapping, something like
the work of Benjamin Fry and his conception of
Organic Information Design is also needed
(Fry, 2000; Dodge, 2001). Fry has a software
program called Anenome which maps how
people use a website. The program is of particular
significance because it was explicitly developed
through the study and analysis of distributed and
adaptive systems, in particular, from the traits of
simple organisms; traits which include adaptation, metabolism, feedback, and movement. Frys
aim was to design a form of visualization that

Geographical Research June 2007 45(2):140149

responds to and synthesises data in a similar

manner (Fry, 2000, 13). What you see in Anenome is the formation of trails, tags and links in
emergent mapping between local knowledges
(Go to http://mundi.net/maps/maps_022/).
Conclusion
I would conclude that we are currently witnessing a major transformation in the nature of
knowledge and knowledge production in several
interacting arenas. In environmental change, in
the biosciences, in information technology (IT),
and in business organisation we have started to
encounter the necessity of dealing with multiplicity. We are entering a new era of mapping
and databasing where it may now be possible to
find ways in which local mapping traditions,
including those of western science, can work
together in productive dialogical tension and, in
so doing, we will have created a new form of
mapping, a new form of knowledge and a new
form of innovation based in the concept of
emergence.5 Previously, the dominant trope for
knowledge, its management and assemblage
was the map, and mapping through location and
coordination in a standardised metricated space
was taken as the essential prerequisite for understanding the world. Now this Cartesian simplification, which gave reductionism its analytical
power, has started to reach the outer limits of its
explanatory scope. Just as, with much fanfare,
we have mapped the human genome, it has
become apparent that the old genetic paradigm
no longer provides the schema to explain the
plethora of new data, and we are starting to
develop a new, interactive epigenetics (Jablonka
and Lamb, 2005; Richerson and Boyd, 2005;
Corning, 2003; 2005; Oyama, 2001). Similarly,
just as we have mapped the universe it is becoming
apparent that it, too, may be a complex adaptive
system (Smolin, 1997; 2006).
Our world and the ways in which we understand it have been profoundly shaped by maps
and by the attendant cartographic socio-technical
system. At the same time, cartography has not
only had a strong tradition of reflexive critique
paralleling this representationalist and scientistic
orthodoxy, but those critiques have also served
to provide considerable impetus to the spatial
turn in history, literature and cultural theory
generally (Carter and Malouf, 1989). In turn,
this has served to support the performative and
distributive turns across the intellectual board
which have now come together with developments in complexity and their emergence in the
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D. Turnbull: Maps Narratives and Trails

biosciences and in network theory in IT. What I

have been suggesting in this article is that these
flows into the cultural arena now need to feed back
into cartography and mapping to reconceive
both the coproduction of knowledges and spaces
and the ways in which we can explore them.
I have argued that several components are
central to such a reconception. Knowledge is
performative. In the act of producing knowledge
we create space. The primary mode of such
activity is hodological; it is movement through
space, following and simultaneously creating
trails or paths through tagging and making
connections. Our trails are reinforced or erased
forming complex distributed systems as we
interact with other people and our environment.
These networks of connections are emergent.
They vary with local, cultural and historical
contingencies and, in themselves, they are a
form of mapping. Given that there are multiple
varieties of spatiality and emergent mapping and
that the task, in most arenas, is to find ways in
which to understand complex interactions between
widely variable components on different scales,
the challenge is to create a form of space, a third
space in which we can follow the emergent trails
(Bhabha, 1994; Soja, 1989; 1996; Turnbull, 2005b,
2930). This requires that cartography adopt a
form of mapping which is itself emergent and
which can be held in dialogical tension with the
standard representationalist forms. Such a form,
I suggest, has to be performative in all its
multiple dimensions.
NOTES
1. My thanks to Lesley Green for introducing me to
Berthoz and for allowing me to read her material in
preparation.
2. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all
his (sic) books, records, and communications, and which is
mechanised so that it may be consulted with exceeding
speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory (Bush, 1945, 107).
3. Ingold points out the (m)apping in this sense is not the
same as what is often meant by cognitive or mental
mapping which implies the pre-existence of a map in
the head (Ingold, 2000, 223).
4. For a fascinating exposition of electricity as process
and infrastructure in a distributed system see Patterson
(2005).
5. Katie King recently brought together some very interesting material on string and emergence (see King, 2005).
She cites Haraway (2003, 7) and Helen Verran (2001)
who works with emergent ontologies, and asks (h)ow
can general knowledge be nurtured in postcolonial worlds
committed to taking difference seriously? Answers to
these questions can only be put together in emergent
2007 The Author
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147
practices; i.e., in vulnerable, on-the-ground work that
cobbles together non-harmonious agencies and ways of
living that are accountable both to their disparate inherited histories and to their barely possible but absolutely
necessary joint futures. For me, that is what significant
otherness signifies (Haraway, 2003, 7).
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