In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

142 CHAPTER FOUR The Curvature of Surfaces Cartesian Space, the Topology of Palikur Grammar, and Consubjective Space A la espada y el compas, Mas y mas y mas y mas was the caption to a frontispiece portrait of spanish captain vargas Machuca in his 1599 volume on his journey to the West indies: “With the sword and the Compass, More and more and more and more.”1 For Machuca, getting home with the loot from the “large, rich and bewtiful empyres”2 in the tropics was possible for those with the physical and mental agility to navigate the ocean. With every journey made by Machuca’s swashbuckling generation , the scholars in europe’s centers of calculation could be more certain of the routes across which loots and harvests and the knowledges of them could travel to its emerging empires. successful journeys affirmed new ways of mapping and, in the same moment, affirmed the usefulness of the era’s experiments in projecting and calculating vast spaces with the tools of measurement, angle, point, and line. Critical geographers have written a great deal about cartography in the colonial imagination. Much of that literature focuses on its codes and conventions, on the selection of objects to map, and on the presentation of spaces as uninhabited terrae incognitae: unknown lands. Their work has inspired many treasured multiculturalist cartographic projects, in which indigenous lands can be overlain on maps of territories to include hunting sites, histories, and creatures of an unknown cosmos. But in these works, critiques of the philosophy of space that renders it in particular geometries warrant barely a mention. The paradox of multiculturalist cartographies is that they assume there is one nature of space The Curvature of Surfaces 143 and, at least in triumphalist accounts of not a few Gis projects in faraway places, one way of mapping and measuring objects in it. More recently, writers have reflected on possibilities of new nonlinear technologies for representing place.3 Google maps that go down to street view offer the possibility of integrating experiential views of space: spatial images arranged in the conical geometries of perspective, rather than the quadrilateral geometries that square the circles of the planet’s surface. Using spherical geometries, the familiar rectangular images from a standard digital camera, shot in a spiral from a particular point, can be assembled in images that stretch the sky into a circle that surrounds one. The confrontation with such images is startling because none of them are “untrue” in the strict sense of the term: they are simply different assemblages , projections of the spaces that encircle us, onto a flat page. To work with them is to encounter the history that delivers particular practices of remembering space and to recognize that the memory of space is not solely a matter of “the nature” of mind in its neurological structures, but it derives from learned practices of putting space together in particular ways. in everyday life, off-screen and off-page, the memory of space is never solely visual. Practices of spatial memory include memories of the sounds of a place, their smells, the ways people move in them, their seasonalities and weathers, their connectedness into other places, among many other sensory cues. rene Descartes’s fascination with the geometry of quadrilaterals and the ways in which the places of objects could be annotated exactly in x and y axes, elided the need for multisensory, relational memories of spaces-in-times. space, after Descartes, becomes analytical geometry.4 The cosmos becomes matter extended in space and time.5 The recognition that geometries of space are languages and tools of assemblage provokes the realization that the natures-cultures debate extends to ontologies of space. if space is translatable into a variety of geometries, projects such as ours could productively be asking: What alternative conceptualizations of space are possible? How might anthropological attention to spatiotemporality and its memory, enable us to rethink our reliance on the grids of Descartes?6 How might we grasp geometry as political cosmology? Can archaeologies engage the cosmopolitics of space and time, and critique the intellectual heritage that gives it form in ways that allow places to take form in different terms, and different imaginaries? in this chapter, i pursue two interlinked lines of enquiry: first, to consolidate what the previous chapters have asserted about space as a cosmos of bodies and movement, and second, to pursue some thoughts about form and spatiality in the Palikur language. * * * [3.17.156.200] Project...

Share