Geographies of Disorientation

Marcella Schmidt di Friedberg

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317128281
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Physical Sciences
• Categoría: Geography

Spatial disorientation is of key relevance to our globalized world, eliciting complex questions about our relationship with technology and the last remaining vestiges of our animal nature. Viewed more broadly, disorientation is a profoundly geographical theme that concerns our relationship with space, places, the body, emotions, and time, as well as being a powerful and frequently recurring metaphor in art, philosophy, and literature.

Using multiple perspectives, lenses, methodological tools, and scales, Geographies of Disorientation addresses questions such as: How do we orient ourselves? What are the cognitive and cultural instruments that we use to move through space? Why do we get lost? Two main threads run through the book: getting lost as a practice, explored within a post-phenomenological framework in relation to direct and indirect observation, wayfinding performances, and the various methods and tools used to find our position in space; and disorientation as a metaphor for the contemporary era, used in a broad range of contexts to express the difficulty of finding points of reference in the world we live in.

Drawing on a wide range of literature, Geographies of Disorientation is a highly original and intruiging read which will be of interest to scholars of human geography, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, cognitive science, information technology, and the communication sciences.

Part I

Orientation/disorientation

Dis-orientation, as we have seen, concerns our relationship with space, places, the body, emotions, and time: it is a broad and transversal field of enquiry that speaks to a multiplicity of disciplines at both the theoretical and practical levels. Losing one’s bearings, if only for an instant, is an experience shared by most human and non-human beings. Our ability to orient ourselves draws on a complex set of components from the cognitive-intellectual, emotional, sensory-motor, cultural, and social spheres. How do we orient ourselves? What are the cognitive and cultural instruments that we use to move through space? Why do we get lost? The three chapters in this section introduce the theme of disorientation from a geographical perspective. In Chapter 1 (“Orientation/disorientation in physical space”), I examine disorientation from a practical-physical point of view, exploring the issue of orientation/disorientation in relation to language, culture, choosing suitable points of reference (stars, geographical cues, environmental factors) and instruments for organizing our movement through space, as well as wayfinding strategies. I bring a sociocultural approach to bear on a review of mythological, historical, linguistic, cognitive, and physical perspectives on spatial coordinates and their construction in different cultural contexts (the history of the compass, the wind rose, feng shui, the map). After dealing with physical spatial reality, I turn to the theme of orientation/disorientation in relation to thought, situating it within the theoretical reach of geography, and approaching it from a cognitive perspective. Thus, in Chapter 2 (“(Dis)orienting oneself in thinking”), I review wayfinding and way-losing behaviours and the construction of cognitive maps. In Chapter 3 (“Philosophy of disorientation”), I draw on the substantial body of literature that has dealt with the ancient philosophical discussion on space, outlining key theoretical/methodological frameworks for orientation/disorientation, proposed by philosophers from Kant to the phenomenologists and post-phenomenologists. In conclusion, I discuss disorientation and reorientation in relation to the theme of migration.

1 Orientation/disorientation in physical space

Lost in translation

Approaching the topic of disorientation necessarily involves reflecting on orientation and its different meanings, a familiar theme within geographical enquiry. Getting lost invariably represents a radical discontinuity that affects how we perceive our overall being in the world and our habitual system of reference. “What does it means to be oriented?” – asks Sara Ahmed – “How is it that we find our way in a world that acquires new shapes, depending on which way we turn? If we know where we are, when we turn this way or that, then we are oriented. We have our bearings” (Ahmed, 2006, p. 543). The word orientation is related to the present participle of the Latin verb orior – “to be born”, “rise”, or “come up” – and therefore, to the apparent movement of the rising sun. Observation of the sun and stars with a view to organizing space based on a systematic conceptual order is a practice that is common to many cultures but does not necessarily represent an undifferentiated value or universal constant. The ancient quest to identify and represent a cohesive system of spatial reference points is underpinned both by human beings’ practical need to navigate their environment and by a vision of the world that is culturally situated and rooted in people’s perceptions of their surroundings, of social and political life, of myth and history. In the words of Yi-Fu Tuan:

The earth’s surface is highly varied. Even a casual acquaintance with its physical geography and teeming life forms tells us as much. But the ways in which people perceive and evaluate that surface are far more varied. No two persons see the same reality. […] No two social groups make precisely the same evaluation of the environment. The scientific view itself is culture bound – one possible perspective among many.

(Tuan, 1974, p. 5)

Three-dimensional vision and laterality are, in Tuan’s view, the characteristics that allow human beings to order perceived reality, organizing it into different categories by dividing it into classes or binary opposites (north-south, right-left, land-sea, mountain-valley, male-female, we-you). Language is one of the fundamental categories that we use to define our relationship with space: “Language structure is the product of our interactions with the world around us. The way we build discourses and develop linguistic categories can immediately be derived from the way we experience our environment and use that experience in species-specific communication” (Heine, 1997, p. 3). Language can often express disorientation. For Wittgenstein: “Language is a labyrinth of paths. You approach from one side and know your way about; you approach the same place from another side and you no longer know your way about” (Wittgenstein, 1953, p. 82). In The Grammar of Space (1993), Soteria Svorou explores the relations between language and how we position ourselves in the world in terms of cognitive and social categories compared across 26 randomly selected languages:

Scientific knowledge about the world does not necessarily enter our belief system, and if it does, it requires the passage of centuries. […] Our belief system rather is formed by our everyday experiences with the physical world and our cultural environment. […] We describe the sun as “rising” and “setting” with respect to a stable horizon, and the stars as “coming out” at night.

(Svorou, 1993, p. 1)

The conceptualization of space can differ greatly at the cultural level. Bernd Heine, in a cross-linguistic study of the grammar of language, examines – among other themes – the linguistic structure of spatial orientation, identifying four different forms. Deictic orientation, in which indications of places and objects are immediately identifiable by the subject who is speaking or listening (up, down, in front of, behind, left and right); object-deictic orientation in which the deictic centre may be an inanimate object (in front of the cathedral); landmark orientation (up the hill, down the valley) and cardinal orientation, which is defined in absolute terms, independently of who is speaking or listening (north, south, east, west). Heine adds: “Now, while many cultures do in fact distinguish between deictic and cardinal orientation, some are claimed to lack such a distinction – that is, these cultures are said to have no deictic orientation and/or no terminology for it” (Heine, 1997, p. 14). The human body, as first suggested by Kant (see Chapter 3) is the primary reference point for deictic orientation, followed, in some cases by reference to animal bodies (zoomorphic orientation). Laterality also plays a key role, and the distinction between right and left is never neutral. For Kant, the left side is “weak and worthless”, while the right side “enjoys an indisputable advantage over the other in respect of skill and perhaps strength too” (Kant, 1992, p. 392). In his classical study on “religious polarity” the anthropologist Robert Herz adds:

To the right hand go honours, flattering designations, prerogatives: it acts, orders, and takes. The left hand, on the contrary, is despised and reduced to the role of a humble auxiliary: by itself it can do nothing; it helps, it supports, it holds. The right hand is the symbol and model of all aristocracy, the left hand of all common people.

(Hertz, 1960, p. 335)

Alice Werner’s research on over 300 Bantu languages (Werner, 1904) demonstrated that the right hand was considered superior (male, strong, big) and the left inferior: “the notion ‘left’ is frequently etymologically opaque. Wherever a conceptual source can be reconstructed, however, that source is either ‘female hand’ or else an expression denoting some entity or quality judged to be of inferior status” (Heine, 1997, pp. 48–49). Use of the left hand is connected with right-hemisphere dominance in the brain and vice versa. “Inferior beings”, such as women and racial others, are supposed to be associated with the left hemisphere of the brain: “This lack of neutrality is what grounds the distinction between right and left: the right becomes the straight line, the left becomes the origin of deviation” (Ahmed, 2006, p. 14). In addition to the body, place also provides geographical-environmental points of reference, which may be used dynamically depending on how we act or move in space. According to the theory of so-called linguistic relativity, which is based on the observations of Sapir and Whorf but had been anticipated some 100 years beforehand by Wilhelm von Humboldt, language influences our way of conceptualizing the world and our very thinking:

We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds – and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds.

(Whorf, 1956, pp. 212–213)

Spatial terms help us to organize our perceptions of our surroundings and supply the bases for our orientation system. However, not all languages feature terms of spatial orientation or organize their vision of space in terms of the cardinal directions. Whorf’s classic essay on language and thought among the Hopi of Arizona showed that this culture had no spatial imaginary, nor did it use spatial metaphors (e.g., our positions are distant from one another, a lofty thought, one’s mind is wandering): “[u]se of space terms when there is no space involved is NOT THERE – as if on it had been laid the taboo teetotal!” (ibid., p. 146, capital letters in the original). Whorf concluded that the concept of space was apt to vary as a function of language, given its close relationship with other categories of thought, such as time and matter, which are similarly influenced by language usage. In his own words:

The CONCEPT OF SPACE will vary somewhat with language, because, as an intellectual tool, it is so closely linked with the concomitant employment of other intellectual tools […]. We see things with our eyes in the same space forms as the Hopi, but our idea of space has also the property of acting as a surrogate of non-spatial relationships like time, intensity, tendency, and as a void to be filled with imagined formless items, one of which may even be called “space”. Space as sensed by the Hopi would not be connected mentally with such surrogates, but would be comparatively “pure”, unmixed with extraneous notions.

(ibid., pp. 158–159, capital letters in the original)

North, South, East, West, the four dwarfs of the Edda

The study of the cardinal points and the familiar scheme of reference that they provide, encompasses cultural and political interpretations, geographical elements, local perceptions and mythological connections, which frequently have little to do with reassuring scientific precision. As expressed by Elisée Reclus:

On the surface of this round earth the cardinal points have no precise meaning except in relation to particular places. The Greenwich observer may point to his north and his south, his east and his west; but the astronomers of Paris, of Washington, of Santiago, and direction-seeking mankind generally, will look for theirs in other directions. The lines traced by the meridians and the equator are purely artificial. Nevertheless, the attempt has been made to give to the geographical terms of orientation a common meaning that should be accepted by all.

(Reclus, 1894, p. 66)

The main cardinal directions may vary in number across cultures (four, five, eight) or not feature at all. In a study of 127 different languages, Cecil Brown (1983) set out to investigate the origins of the terms used to define the cardinal points, concluding that these origins are not particularly ancient and indeed that: “On a worldwide basis lexical encoding of cardinal directions is a fairly recent phenomenon” (Brown, 1983, p. 122). This claim was based on his observations of the use of spatial terms in traditional societies and how these terms had evolved over time: “The general increase in societal scale and complexity over the last several millennia of human history has no doubt promoted the lexical encoding of cardinal points in many of the world languages” (ibid.). In Brown’s view therefore, it is not surprising that more ancient cultures were lacking in terms to indicate the cardinal points, given that these societies were traditionally non-migratory and therefore tended to base their reference systems on local landmarks:

Technological advances accompanying increases in societal scale such as ocean-going vessels, the compass, maps, mathematics, and so on, obviously have contributed significantly to this development. […] In some instances, cardinal point terms have been directly borrowed from Western languages. In others, native terms have been extended to borrowed concepts of cardinal directionality.

(ibid., p. 123)

Brown identified four main sources of lexicon for describing the cardinal directions: celestial bodies and events, atmospheric phenomena, other more generic directions, and landmarks. Of the 127 languages examined, 81 (about 64 per cent) featured terms for identifying all four cardinal points, while 18 had no such terms. Cardinal point terms were frequently found to be polysemic, that is to say:

They have referents in addition to cardinal points which seem to be semantically related to them. For example, in addition to left and right, cardinal direction terms often denote other more general directions such as up, down, in front of, behind, and so on.

(ibid., p. 124)

Alternatively, they could refer to celestial bodies or atmospheric phenomena, such as winds, temperatures, weather conditions, and seasons. Brown’s analysis showed that north was frequently associated with an upwards direction (in seven cases out of 27 associations), only denoting a downwards direction in one case; vice versa, south was linked to a downwards direction in 11 cases, and only in one instance to an upwards direction (ibid., Table 9, p. 135): “This finding may be indicative of an innate human predisposition for such associations but it is equally plausible that it reflects diffusion of a Western prejudice, i.e. the ubiquitous aligning of north with the top of the maps” (ibid.). The sun, in relation to its rising and setting, was the reference point most commonly shared by the languages under study. The east was most frequently associated with the direction “in front” and the west with the direction “behind”. Of 127 languages, 59 (over 45 per cent) connected the east with the rising sun, while 50 related the west to the setting sun (ibid., Tables 2–3, pp. 126–130).

In Latin, as in the majority of languages, orientation was largely based on the apparent movement of the sun, orient-levant and occident-ponente. Again from the perspective of the Ancient Romans, midday and midnight united the temporal with the spatial dimension. The north, on its part, was indicated by the group of seven stars forming the constellation of the Great Bear, for the Ancient Greeks arktos (bear) from which the term “Arctic” is derived, for the Latin world septem triones, the seven work-oxen that draw the Plough. In oriental Hindu and Buddhist cultures, orientation is under the protection of eight or nine – depending on the specific tradition – powerful divinities, the Guardians of the Directions. The current denomination of the four cardinal points – NSEW – a paradigm of order and precision from the Western cartographic perspective, is derived from Old High German (Althochdeutsch) and stems from the creation myth of Norse mythology. In this account of creation, there were nine worlds, forming a diversified and chaotic structure, in an interweaving of temporal dimensions, genealogies, planes and overlapping directions. The system was dominated by the great tree Yggrdrasill, among whose roots, which linked the various worlds, nested the great snake Níðhöggr. Within this complex construction, according to The Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson (dated to around 1220), the cardinal directions took the names of dwarfs, born of the dismembered body of the ice giant Ymir. The Edda recites...