Conference reports THE LURE OF MAPS. A SYMPOSIUM ON THE IMAGING OF SPATIAL REALITIES UNDER OCCUPATION AND WAR

On April 22, 2024, professor Steven Seegel, University of Texas at Austin, was awarded the Vega medal from the hands of the King of Sweden in the Royal Palace in Stockholm, “for his scientific contributions to Human Geography.”

Published in the printed edition of Baltic Worlds BW 1-2 2015, pp 104-105
Published on balticworlds.com on December 9, 2024

On April 22, 2024, professor Steven Seegel, University of Texas at Austin, was awarded the Vega medal from the hands of the King of Sweden in the Royal Palace in Stockholm, “for his scientific contributions to Human Geography.”

“Steven Seegel has made important contributions to the field of critical cartography and political geography and is recognized as one of the foremost experts on the study of cartography in and about Eastern and Central Europe, in particular Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania and Germany. In his recent book Map Man, Steven Seegel provides an insightful analysis of the development of geography as a discipline in Eastern and Central Europe. He shows in this book how the seemingly systematic ways offered by the young discipline of geography for mapping a complex and diverse borderland actually reflected, for better or worse, the various political preferences of the cartographers and/or the geopolitical interests of their rulers. The manner in which maps and cartography are political technologies of empire are themes in Seegel’s research.”

The Vega medal, instituted in 1881 by the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography (SSAG), shows a woman in antique dress holding a laurel above a ship at sea and a boy pointing at a globe in front of a rocky landscape. The ship is the Vega. The first medallist was Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld, born 1832 in the Imperial Russian Duchy of Finland, exiled into Sweden after a speech indirectly questioning the Russian rule. After a successful career as mineralogist and geo-scientist, Nordenskiöld ventured into several expeditions into Arctic areas, even reaching the mouth of the river Yenisey, resulting in an audience with the Czar in St. Petersburg. Having thus reestablished relations with Russia, Nordenskiöld was able to raise money from the Swedish king, a rich merchant named Dickson, and the Russian industrialist Aleksander Sibiryakov, for a project to circumvent the Eurasian continent north of Russia. A small town north of the mouth of the Yenisei river still bears the name of Dikson. The ship was a sailing steamer Vega, and the whole scientific expedition was successful, including a predicted winter stay in the ice north of eastern Siberia.

Since Vega’s triumphant return to Stockholm on April 24, 1880, this day has been celebrated, but this year the events had to be changed because of the official visit of Nordensköld’s countryman, Finland’s new President Alexander Stubb, to Sweden. The Vega medallists are invited to invite three colleagues to form a symposium around a chosen theme. This year the theme was topical: Occupations and the occupied: Agency, expertise and patronage in wartime and postwar historical cartographies. The symposium was held at the Royal Academy of Sciences in Stockholm.

AFTER INTRODUCTIONS by SSAG president, Dr. Madeleine Bonow and moderator Dr. Brian Kuns, Steven Seegel, dressed in an Ukrainan vyshyvanka shirt, lectured On the historical geography of Ukraine and maps in times of war. Starting with a situation of total desperation by family in Poltava, Ukraine in March 2022, Dr. Seegel discussed the problem of doing academic research in times of war and occupation.

There is a long history of “putting Ukraine on the map” both in words and in cartography, often in opposition to the occupying powers of Russia and Poland. For a short period around 1918 Ukraine appeared as different territories. Prominent advocates of Ukrainian existence were historian and politician Mykhailo Hrushevsky (1866— 1934) and poet Bohdan Krawciw (1904—1975, exiled into the US). Seegel’ book Map Men (2018) depict several of these actors.

Maps of Ukraine and surrounding areas have been used for different purposes, e.g. by Putin in reviving the image of Novaya Rossiya, the areas annexed, ethnically cleansed and repopulated in the 18th century, partly in present Ukraine. The use of maps for fake and fiction were exemplified by areas such as “Absurdistan”,”Nukehavstan”. Ethnographic

mapping, even by “Western” media, are even today giving a false picture of Ukraine, especially when US media use the red/blue dichotomy to depict a yellow/blue dichotomy dividing the country into a totally false difference between Ukrainian and (pro-) Russian sentiment, based on reported language use.

TESS MEGGINSON, doctoral student at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, lectured with the title “The Commission has refused any popular consultation: Mapping the Austrian-Bohemian border after WWI.” While other regions in Europe were granted plebiscites (e.g. Upper Silesia, Sopron), the town of Gmünd was to be split between Czechoslovakia and Austria according to the terms of the Treaty of Saint-Germain (1919), leaving the railway junction on the Czechoslovak side.

The local population, however, protested this lack of public consultation by staging a large demonstration when the Inter-Allied Boundary Commission arrived in the town for delimitation negotiations in September 1920. According to Tess Megginson — who argues that more attention needs to be paid to the mapmakers involved in the boundary commissions after the war rather than just the statesmen at the Paris Peace Conference — this event highlights both the desire of local populations to participate in post-war border negotiations, as well as demonstrating the importance of examining the process of border drawing even after the signing of the Paris treaties.

Philosopher Peter Nekola, of Loyola University, Chicago, lectured on “Genuine inquiry and human agency under occupation: Lessons from the history of geographic and cartographic reasoning.” Stressing that ideas of human agency representable in maps have not always been national, dr. Nekola showed maps produced by native representatives of Iowa and Chippewa delegations in their negotiations with the occupying United States, offering examples of agency under occupation that did not take the form of the common color-bloc territorial maps. In a second example, Nekola mentioned geoscientist Henryk Arctowski (1871—1958), who, despite living for much of his career under successive regimes of occupation, or in exile, demonstrated agency in the form of inquiry into human-induced climate change, long before it became a common research topic, relying heavily on innovative uses of maps. Asked by the US Committee to Negotiate Peace in 1918 to use similar mapping tools to delineate national borders in Central Europe after the First World War, Arctowski took the task very seriously, producing hundreds of maps and atlases, but, unlike many others making maps for the 1919 Peace Conference, concluding that he could not make a scientific case for national borders.

Dr. Petra Svatek of the Austrian Academy of Sciences spoke on “Academic cartography in Vienna 1939—1945: Actors, funders and political context.” After ”Anschluss”, the Nazi German annexation of Austria in 1938, geographers and spatial scientists were engaged in Hitler’s plans for the resettlement of ethnic German populations into Greater Germany (and the replacement or eradication of other ethnic groups. Leader of the Vienna conference report Working group for spatial research was Professor Dr. Hugo Hassinger (1877—1952), who also wrote a memorandum for the resettlement of the German-speaking population of South Tyrol for the Southeast German Research Association. In the “P-Stelle”, which was headed by Wilfried Krallert (1912—1969), maps of ethnicity were made for Caucasus and Balkan countries with dispersed settlement of ethnic Germans in order to prepare for ethnic cleansing and settlement of Germans. In spite of his activities for the Nazi “Blut und Boden” policies, Hassinger was never member of the NSDAP and he could retain his position after the war, while Krallert was first a prisoner of war. Then he worked for the British secret service and could continue his scientific career after 1950.

AFTER THE LECTURES the audience was invited to ask questions. Brian Kuns, moderator, asked: Is map making inherently a corrupt business? Nekola underlined that intention is crucial, while Seegel pointed out that much of map making is about drawing a line. Maps are often drawn over the heads of population. Cultural anthropologist Sten Hagberg added that in Africa there has been a reaction against colonial cartography.

Another aspect of boundary drawing was brought up by physical geographer Lina Polvi who pointed out that borders defined by rivers are vulnerable to changes in the flow and meandering of the water. To this human geographer Thomas Lundén added that already in 1899 geopolitician Rudolf Kjellén saw a river valley as a cultural unity, making a state river border highly inappropriate. As pointed out by Brian Kuns, as demonstrated by the symposium presentations researchers have a responsibility to react to the lure of maps. After a quick lunch at the Royal Academy professor Seegel was received in the Royal Palace of Stockholm to be awarded the Vega medal from His Majesty the King of Sweden.

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Thomas Lundén