Reflections on Marshall Islanders contour map


Reflections on the importing the Marshall Islanders ‘contour’ map into our working group experience.



The activity challenged us to visually record the characteristics of an outdoor space using the stick maps of the Marshall Islanders to record wave movements. This tool was striking in three significant ways: 1) We attend to what we value; 2) As much as the user adapts the function of the tool, the tools also changes the user; 3) As a tool constructed for one purpose by a culture is appropriated into a different culture it revels new insight on the new culture through the lens of the old. 

1) We attend to what we know.

A small group of five participants moved into the small outdoor space and were charged with the job of producing a “Marshall Islander” map of the space using sticks and found natural objects. The space selected by the group was defined by a pathway that meandered through it. We map what is important to us as an exploration and a recording of what is useful. We selected the gravel pathway which has function.

2) A tool imparts its meaning into the experience of using it.

As we struggled to make meaning of the space through the map it became apparent that there was a tension between the Marshall Islanders mapping techniques and how we viewed our space. During the second day of the working group I was struck when Richard Barwell noticed that a child using fraction tiles as a mathematical tool was not using them as a way to build the concept; rather she was overlaying the tiles on the algorithms she already had practiced for addition of fractions. Here we were overlaying our fixed pathway on top of the Marshall Islanders map. This tension between our cultural choice of the use of a map versus the use of the map for the Marshall Islanders is important to consider.

3) As a tool constructed in one culture is appropriated into a different culture it reveals new insights. The tool becomes the lens through which the user attention is filtered.

As we reflected on the pathway versus the Marshall Island map Susan Gerofsky noted the Marshall islanders used the map to track the movement of waves. This prompted members of our group to move around the space and shift what we were attending to. Once we shifted our attention to the natural rhythms of the space we began to build the map. 

The activity shifted our focus from the visible modern pathway to the movement of nature below the pathway (trees, tree roots, slopes,…). It suggested to us how the movement of nature contributed to the formation of the path. The map, seemingly an object without language, communicated an alternate perspective to our group.

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