Mapping Israel, Mapping Palestine: How Occupied Landscapes Shape Scientific Knowledge

by Jess Bier

Overview

Digital practices in social and political landscapes: Why two researchers can look at the same feature and see different things.

Maps are widely believed to be objective, and data-rich computer-made maps are iconic examples of digital knowledge. It is often claimed that digital maps, and rational boundaries, can solve political conflict. But in Mapping Israel, Mapping Palestine, Jess Bier challenges the view that digital maps are universal and value-free. She examines the ways that maps are made in Palestine and Israel to show how social and political landscapes shape the practice of science and technology.

How can two scientific cartographers look at the same geographic feature and see fundamentally different things? In part, Bier argues, because knowledge about the Israeli military occupation is shaped by the occupation itself. Ongoing injustices—including checkpoints, roadblocks, and summary arrests—mean that Palestinian and Israeli cartographers have different experiences of the landscape. Palestinian forms of empirical knowledge, including maps, continue to be discounted.

Bier examines three representative cases of population, governance, and urban maps. She analyzes Israeli population maps from 1967 to 1995, when Palestinian areas were left blank; Palestinian state maps of the late 1990s and early 2000s, which were influenced by Israeli raids on Palestinian offices and the legacy of British colonial maps; and urban maps after the Second Intifada, which show how segregated observers produce dramatically different maps of the same area. The geographic production of knowledge, including what and who are considered scientifically legitimate, can change across space and time. Bier argues that greater attention to these changes, and to related issues of power, will open up more heterogeneous ways of engaging with the world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262339964
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	06/30/2017
Series:	Inside Technology
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	336
File size:	5 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Jess Bier is Assistant Professor of Urban Sociology at Erasmus University Rotterdam.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

A Note on Translation xiii

List of Abbreviations xv

1 Where Cartographies Collide 1

2 The Materiality of Theory 35

3 Removing Borders, Erasing Palestinians: Israeli Population Maps after 1967 81

4 The Colonizer in the Computer: Stasis and International Control in PA Maps 113

5 Validating Segregated Observers: Mapping West Bank Settlements from Without and Within 155

6 The Geographic Production of Knowledge 205

Notes 225

References 247

Index 293

What People are Saying About This

Stefan Helmreich

We knew that maps were political, but Bier's incisive ethnography of cartography gives us an embodied, on-the-ground, on-paper, and on-the-screen study of how this is so in the segregated and asymmetric worlds of Palestine/Israel. A welcome contribution to science and technology studies as well as to studies of today's ever more riven Middle East.

Endorsement

Bier's brilliant and original book is a richly humane and thoughtful meditation on places with contested cartographies and 'victims of maps.' Bringing together theories of colonialism, tools of science and technology studies, and a keen intuition for what matters, Bier tells us the story of how power is projected through geographies, maps, and force.

—Laleh Khalili, Professor of Middle East Politics, SOAS, University of London

From the Publisher

We knew that maps were political, but Bier's incisive ethnography of cartography gives us an embodied, on-the-ground, on-paper, and on-the-screen study of how this is so in the segregated and asymmetric worlds of Palestine/Israel. A welcome contribution to science and technology studies as well as to studies of today's ever more riven Middle East.

—Stefan Helmreich, Elting E. Morison Professor of Anthropology, MIT

Bier's brilliant and original book is a richly humane and thoughtful meditation on places with contested cartographies and 'victims of maps.' Bringing together theories of colonialism, tools of science and technology studies, and a keen intuition for what matters, Bier tells us the story of how power is projected through geographies, maps, and force.

—Laleh Khalili, Professor of Middle East Politics, SOAS, University of London

Laleh Khalili

Bier's brilliant and original book is a richly humane and thoughtful meditation on places with contested cartographies and 'victims of maps.' Bringing together theories of colonialism, tools of science and technology studies, and a keen intuition for what matters, Bier tells us the story of how power is projected through geographies, maps, and force.

Editorial Reviews

...a penetrating analysis of mapping in occupied territory that gives us an on-the-ground look at how such spatial politics play out....Bier is thoughtful about how tools and data constrain geographic knowledge, and attentive to cartographers' practices as ways of regaining control.—Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences—

... a crucial reminder that the social construction of knowledge must always include spatiality and that geography is simultaneously material and epistemic.

—Isis—

From the Publisher

...a penetrating analysis of mapping in occupied territory that gives us an on-the-ground look at how such spatial politics play out....Bier is thoughtful about how tools and data constrain geographic knowledge, and attentive to cartographers' practices as ways of regaining control.

—Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences

Reviews