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Configurations 11.1 (2003) 123-126



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D. Graham Burnett. Masters of All They Surveyed: Exploration, Geography, and a British El Dorado. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. xv + 298 pp. $45.00, $27.50 paper.

In the opening pages of his book, Graham Burnett makes clear what is at stake: "colonial territory came into being as a result of the passage of certain individuals—explorers and surveyors—who made distant land possessable by means of a set of powerful linked texts. Diplomats explored those texts, not jungles, to see who had a right to what" (p. 2). The rest of Masters of All They Surveyed is a detailed study of how European mapmakers transformed the land into landscape and nature into culture, making a terra incognita into a mapped and bounded colony of British Guiana. Most of the book is focused on the work of Sir Robert Schomburgk, who mapped the interior and boundaries of the British colony from 1841 to 1844. While Burnett engages with fine historical details of the exploration of Guiana, the strength of this work is his ability to move from particulars to larger theoretical and cultural issues regarding the creation and reading of maps.

Burnett is concerned with what Bruno Latour calls the "immutable mobile" in his essay "Drawing Things Together" (in Representations of Scientific Practice, ed. Mike Lynch and Steve Woolgar [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990], pp. 19-68). Maps are mobile representations of a space since they are easily transported from place to place, unlike the things they represent—actual soil, vegetation, and bodies of water. Maps are also immutable: distant places and instances of time are gathered together in a unified and static representation legible to a select audience. Latour explains this power of inscriptions: "'You doubt what I say? I'll show you.' And, without moving more than a few inches, I unfold in front of your eyes figures, diagrams, plates, texts, silhouettes, and then and there present things that are far away and with which some sort of two-way connection has now been established. I do not think the importance of this simple mechanism can be overestimated" [End Page 123] (Latour, p. 36). Burnett shows the difficulty of establishing a two-way connection between map and land, and what is gained for the colonizer by the panoptic inscription that such mapping entails.

In the ninteenth century, trigonometric surveys with their scientific objectivity marked the cartographic ideal of British mapping. Such ventures transform the land into a landscape of ordered space through "coordination, uniformity, hierarchical organization, administrative order, and the rule of transcendental law" (p. 9). Burnett contrasts the trigonometric surveying in parts of India (as described by Mathew Edney's Mapping the Empire), and in Great Britain's national ordinance survey (in Lloyd Arnold Brown's Story of Maps), to the traverse survey used by Schomburgk in British Guiana. Unlike the trigonometric survey, with its coordinated sets of large teams creating triangulated points and countercheck points to capture space between their measuring chains, the work of a traverse survey is done by a small mobile exploration team. The traversing team must create landmarks where it can, and often amid adverse circumstances. Then, beyond the problem of creating fixed points, Burnett finds a unique paradox of the explorer-surveyor: in his traverse of the land, the surveyor must mark the boundaries of the empire while engaged in the act of transgressing these boundaries in the role of explorer expanding the territory. Unlike the "staged space" necessary to assemble empire, the traverse surveyor has mobile encounters with dynamic space. The problem of arriving at the cartographic ideal is eminently clear in Schomburgk's mapping of British Guiana, where he must struggle to create fixed points amid the overgrowth of jungles while seeking to explore and expand terrain. Furthermore, he must contend with economic hardships, uncharted terrain, and bouts of fever that interfere with the desired neatness of maps.

As Burnett explains in chapter 3, "Traversing Terra Incognita: Getting There and Making Maps," "traverse survey constituted a questionable source of...

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