Visualizing Afghanistan: Cartography and the Imperial Imaginary, from the Anglo-Afghan Wars to the present
Date
2020-05-14
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Abstract
Afghanistan is currently one of the most imaged places in the world. Satellites, drones, and laser scanners ceaselessly upload data to an ever-expanding mosaic of images and maps in the cloud, on university servers, and in government offices. Knowledge of Afghanistan – whether for scientific or military purposes – is increasingly founded upon an ever-growing archive of foreign image images rather than grounded experience. Countless scientific projects today situate their investigations of Afghanistan in remote-sensed data. Outside of the most recent war and occupation however, Afghanistan has long been a place that foreign eyes attempted to capture and visualize from a distance. In this thesis, I argue that the reading of contemporary satellite imagery is dependent on the larger historical archive of maps of Afghanistan. To understand the implications, I turn to close analysis of the production, circulation, and consumption of maps and images to illustrate the types of understandings, meanings and imaginings of Afghanistan that endure and are transmitted across time through contemporary visualization practices. I do so through archival research at the British Library’s India Office Records and Map Collections, which I bring in conversation with materials from the Soviet-Afghan War (1979-1989), and the ongoing U.S. led War in Afghanistan (2001-present). I argue that while presenting objective and scientific images, historical maps contain and transmit interpretations about Afghanistan, chronicling the character of territories and peoples. Further, maps played an active role in the re-imaging of Afghanistan, as they worked as a tool of governance, reshaping places and the way they were perceived on the ground all while projecting foreign systems of understanding the world which relied upon order, rationality, and measurability. As foreign powers mobilized science and technology to map Afghanistan, they made it possible to imagine Afghanistan as a unitary entity. Understanding the roots of contemporary visual practices in Afghanistan underscores the power behind the reuse and recirculation of images today, and demonstrates the power that foreign militaries have exerted through successive choices in visualizing Afghanistan over the past two centuries.
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Keywords
Afghanistan, Satellites, remote sensing, archives, colonialism, imperialism, visualization, Anglo-Afghan Wars, War in Afghanistan, Soviet-Afghan War, Soviet Union, United States, British Empire
Citation
Boak, E. E. (2020). Visualizing Afghanistan: Cartography and the Imperial Imaginary, from the Anglo-Afghan Wars to the present (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.