Inclusions, erasures and emergences in an indigenous landscape: Participatory cartographies and the makings of affective place in the Sierra de Perijá, Venezuela

Abstract

The post-representational critique in critical cartography has conceptualized maps as ontologically unstable, subject to re-makings through performative engagements between the map artifact, map makers, and map consumers. This insight has important implications for participatory cartographies, that is, the sorts of mapping projects which, through strategies of inclusion of indigenous spatialities erased from official maps, aim to produce counter-representations of indigenous landscapes which may serve political and emancipatory goals. Such participatory mapping practices have been critiqued for their own erasures, as meaningful, affective places are subsumed within Cartesian grids. However, an ethnographic study of a participatory mapping project in Yukpa indigenous territory in the Sierra de Perijá, Venezuela, suggests that such maps are not secure representations despite erasures of affective space. Instead, they are emergent mappings subject to the agency of performance.