Cartographic Citizenship: An Ethnography of Humanitarian Mapping

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Abstract

With her ethnography of Chernobyl survivors anthropologist Adriana Petryna established the notion of “biological citizenship”. Petryna documented how, despite suffering a range of chronic effects of radiation exposure, state support for survivors was only forthcoming through an onerous course of medical verification. The process of achieving rights and recognition through medical certification Petryna termed “biological citizenship”. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among humanitarian aid workers during the South Sudan civil war, I argue that a parallel process can be seen at play in crowdsourced humanitarian mapping in war and disaster zones—a process I tentatively call “cartographic citizenship”.

In a similar way to which biological citizenship helped individuals to assert themselves in the face of state abandonment, humanitarian maps establish the inconvenient fact of one’s existence. People’s demonstrable, cartographic, presence in a crisis zone speaks to their biological and social needs. Humanitarian and disaster mapping assert a claim: of a needful citizenship, individuals that should be accorded rights. Viewed from this perspective, cartographic citizenship can be seen as consistent with the prevailing discourse of aid and health care innovation as an emancipatory public good. However, as the ethnography reveals, these technologies play out along, and tend to reenforce, existing power relations. It is only through the mediation of benign experts and technological infrastructure that individuals are able to make claims to cartographic citizenship. Inclusion on a map is a form of surveillance, and the goods accessed in return are the bare minimum required for survival. This paper is a critical, empirical examination of this nascent technology, and hopes to inform its future deployment.

Author

• Darryl Stellmach