The Cultural Periphery and Postmodern Decentring: Latin America’s Reconversion of Borders

Abstract

Remembering that maps are one of the most common cultural metaphors in our conception of the world, it is significant that the history of cartography is also the history of a certain rationalization: of how an order that measures and cuts up surfaces to articulate territories of signification and representation is, itself, subject to order. Both the geometric models and the visual categories employed by map-makers to formulate specific images of spatiality reflect the structures of knowledge which define the philosophical and cultural thinking of a tradition. From time immemorial the concentric representation of space has drawn an image of finiteness and completeness which symbolizes that form of universal knowledge whose domain is enclosed — sealed — within the perimeter of the circle. This symbolization operates as an image of totality, establishing a fixed point which permits the measured evaluation of relationships of proximity and distance that either draw together or separate all other points distributed in space: ‘Each historical period or cultural tradition selects a fixed point which functions as the centre of its current maps, a physical symbolic space to which a privileged position is attributed and from which all other spaces are distributed in an organized manner’¹ The privileged position which this centre defends, and then translates into authoritarian roles — taking decisions, fixing rules, exercising control, etc. — stands out most forcefully in the opposition we can mark as centre/periphery.