All Mapped Out
Mike Duggan, Reaktion Books, £16

WHAT are maps? Who uses them and for what purposes? For anyone who feels these questions are too simplistic to engage with, then reading Mike Duggan’s exhaustive deconstruction of the concept of mapping will never look at a map in the same way again. 

He points out that most people take for granted what a map is, whereas in non-Western and indigenous mapping cultures, cartography, as those in the West know it, is not the be all and end all of spatial representation. 

For example: ”First Nations peoples of Australia have traditions of using song and ceremony to map and keep alive their history with the landscape. Song maps (sometimes named song lines, dreaming tracks or strings) show that not all geographical maps are two-dimensional or geographical. They can be local, deeply embedded in cultural life.”