Search

CARTOGRAPHY AS A TOOL OF IMPERIAL POLICY IN CENTRAL ASIA // ΠΡΑΞΗMΑ. Journal of Visual Semiotics. 2020. Issue 2 (24). P. 151-181

There are, at least, two difficulties of principle that we face trying to figure out the role of maps in any historical process. The first one is that the maps are generally understood as a product of strict empirical procedure free of perception gaps and idealizations. We are told that maps reflect objective realities. Consequently, if one suggests that they can be prejudiced, he insults the very scientific Method. The second difficulty relates to the supposed utilitarian attitude of cartography. It is customary for us to consider maps as primarily a supporting means not influencing the process but assisting it. The map is a useful and effective facilitator, rather than mentor imposing predefined positions. Both these beliefs are in fact myths, but extremely persistent myths. The talisman of precision protected the topographic methods against charges of complicity in imperial expansion for a long time. Fine scales of graduated circles, vernier scales, scrupulous procedures of error recovery, diminution of aberration and quantifying uncertainties – a whole range of positivist epistemologies allowed to speak that maps were nothing but scaled-down representations of real world. Still, the very existing of reduction, which is an integral part of map-making, obliges the topographers to resort to selection. What deserves to be depicted on the map and what not? Maps do not mirror the space, but re-encode it, and it is quite natural that this procedure operates as instrument of a particular political system with the underlying ideology and consequent social interests. Maps are both instruments and representations of power. The article shows how this particular feature of European cartography allowed to depict the Kazakh Steppe as vast uninhabited areas and helped to render Kazakh peoples invisible in their own land. The other indispensable function of cartography is delineation of phenomena. Cartographers draw lines, bridge them into particular totalities and thereby inscribe into the landscape new spatialized identities. The steppe did not contain boundaries, but surveying and mapping techniques allowed to establish “frontiers” by imaginary lines that connected rarely scattered Russian fortifications in the steppe. The article traces how these topographical lines formed a particular way of thinking among Russian top bureaucracy and military leaders, who eventually began to perceive them as gradual extension of imperial “frontiers” in the Central Asia. In spite of the fact that “frontiers” in question were no more than techniques of representation, military and civil functionaries granted them the status of firm state boundary. Since it was a primitive description of previously unexplored territory, political and cartographic discourses tightly intertwined each other. The article demonstrates how the objects produced by military topographers in the “no-man’s lands” obtained their own existence on maps and have been used as a platform for further imperial expansion.

Keywords: cartography, imperial policy, Russian empire, Central Asia, military topography, Kazakh Steppe, empire’s border

SEMIOLOGY OF PRELITERATE ASTRAL FIGURES // ΠΡΑΞΗMΑ. Journal of Visual Semiotics. 2021. Issue 4 (30). P. 81-116

For a long time, ideograms and graphemes of the Neolithic period were primarily the particular archaeological, ethnological, cultural, and theological interest. However, as archaeoastronomy consolidated its disciplinary positions, they were increasingly becoming a matter of attention for historians of astronomy. Indisputable alignments of archaeological remains toward the points of midsummer and midwinter risings and settings of the sun shows conclusively that people of the Bronze Age were expected to have a still greater knowledge of astronomy. The broad truth of the cyclical movements of the points of rising and setting and their correlation with the cycle of growth in nature was certainly known from very early times. That, in turn, means that the thorough understanding of the oldest symbolism to have come down to us – if it, in fact, was so – is only possible when a researcher is familiar at least with spherical astronomy. At their highest stage of development the Bronze Age people certainly knew the cardinal points of the horizon; they were aware of the tropical year as a cycle of repetition of the position of the sun against the horizon; they knew about solstices and equinoxes; some of them distinguished between azimuth positions of the highest and the lowest moon; they built monumental architecture for regular observations of the sun and the moon, and even invented writing, though not everywhere. It would be hard to imagine that such a complicated system of ideas and actions was created all at once, without an evolutionary accumulation of that rather complex knowledge and a concatenation of insights which came together to make the final discovery embodied in stone monuments of the Bronze Age. The given circumstance forces us to look closely into ideograms of the pre-Bronze Ages, namely the Neolithic and the Aeneolithic ones. Is it possible to find there some traces of formalization of primary astronomical observations which could be assimilated, developed, and widely adopted by representatives of the Bronze Age? This study attempts to identify among the corpus of Neolithic symbols, graphemes, and ideograms those of them that could be supposedly used as denotations for astronomical meanings. The article uses the system of Neolithic meanings developed by Ariel Golan as the reference body. The astronomical part of the study is based on the gradualist concept of the Western Zodiac by Alexander Gurshtein. In the course of a semiological analysis of Neolithic ideograms, categories of symbols and signs have been identified that are difficult to interpret from the point of view of archaeological and ethnographic data. However, they show clear signs of correlation with the rhythms of the seasons. Among these are, for instance: the so-called sign of ‘two suns,’ ‘f-shaped’ signs, and ‘four-part-binary symbols.’ Analysis of their probable semantics suggests that ‘protozodiac’ concept could have been preceded by a simpler binary division of the year indicated by opposition between the winter and summer solstices. In this regard, clarifications, concerning semantics and symbolic meanings of the first zodiacal quartet are included in the hypothesis by Gurshtein.

Keywords: archaeoastronomy, early agricultural Neolithic culture, Neolithic symbolism, zodiac, first zodiacal quartet, ritual, Neolithic religion