River Names
/A Question of Whose Ontological Consistency
A brief exchange on twitter this morning provides another example of how Western and non-Western practices are not necessarily distinct. There is nothing essential about the West that makes Westerners innately different to non-Westerners; it’s always a question of the practices that different groups use to comprehend and represent the world.
The occasion is the naming of rivers, or rather the local treatment of channels as opposed to the rationalized concept of “river.” Both are cultural constructs, but the former is part and parcel of living in the landscape, the other the imposition of outsiders seeking to understand and order a landscape. The specific prompt was the tweet by Gijs Boink, of the Dutch National Archives, of an image of a manuscript map of the Meuse/Maas at Rotterdam in 1771, and the printed version of 1772:
But, wait, I here you cry, Rotterdam is famous for being the port at the mouth of the Rhine. The Meuse (French) or Maas (Dutch) is a tributary of the Rhine, flowing north from Lorraine through Maasstricht. But the situation is far more complex than that! Google Maps places Rotterdam on the Nieuwe maas (New Maas):
Approximately the same area on maps.google.com as in the 1771/2 maps.
Google has the Oude Maas (Old Maas) flowing to the south. Other, lower-resolution (smaller scale) maps show the rivers differently. One map (proprietary, so follow this link to see it) identified Rotterdam’s river as the Nederrijn (Lower Rhine) with the Meuse/Maas flowing to the south, past Dordrecht. Another basic map of the Netherlands shows the Rhine splitting into two distributaries, the Lek (going through Rotterdam) and the Waal (going through Dordrecht).
Confused? You should be. I was, a few years ago, when I realized that different authors for Cartography in the European Enlightenment referred to the same maps as showing different rivers. A couple of hours of work clarified that one author used modern names, the other the names in use in the eighteenth century. One of the things I learned was that the Rhine, that great big mighty river, became no more than a side channel running through Leiden, to the north of the main streams.
The issue, as any Dutch person will tell you, is that the waters of the Rhine and the Maas flow close to each other and intermingle and form a horribly complex system of waterways in which there are two Maas rivers (old and new), the Waal. the Merwede, the Lek, and yes the Rijn. Making things worse is the manner in which the Dutch have for centuries extensively managed and canalized the rivers, redirecting water and enabling access.
The idea that there is a single dominant channel — a single river — that continues and perpetuates the single channel of “the Rhine” upstream in Germany, that keeps the same name all the way to the sea, is incorrect. It is a modern short-hand. To talk about the Rotterdam as being at the “mouth of the Rhine” is an easy way to reduce complexity to simplicity: useful at the lower resolution of geographical mapping, but irrelevant and misleading when applied to the higher resolution of topographical and territorial mapping.
A further comment in the twitterfeeds by Diana Lange—whose wonderful An Atlas of the Himalayas by a 19th Century Tibetan Lama: A Journey of Discovery was just published by Brill in Leiden (now on the Oude Rijn, according to Google)—about the difficulties that the British had with Tibetan river names, reminded me of a great passage from Francis Buchanan, in The History, Antiquities, Topography, and Statistics of Eastern India , ed. Robert Montgomery Martin, 3 vols. (London: Wm. H. Allen, 1838), 2: 591-592, about the practice by the residents of Dinajpur to keep the same name for channels of the Ganges, even as they silt up and become stagnant marshes:
This has been a source of great trouble to European geographers, who, endeavouring to trace a great river from where it joins the sea to its most remote source by its principal channel, are astonished to find that it sometimes loses its name altogether; or again, another river, after having for some part lost its original name, is traced further, is found with its former name restored. The geographers of Europe are apt to be enraged, when in tracing a river they find that an inconsiderable stream falling into their grand channel changes its name, and that the source of this smaller stream is obstinately considered by the natives as the source of the river, either having been the first to which they had access, or having at one time been the largest. Geographers are in general very unwilling to admit of these absurdities, and therefore construct their maps according to their own plan, with the same name following the same river from its most remote source to its mouth. It must, however, be confessed, that this improvement, until it shall have been adopted by the inhabitants of the country, is attended with considerable inconvenience to those who wish to use the maps on the spot, and often leads them into most troublesome mistakes.
(I quoted this passage in Mapping an Empire, chap. 10)
Buchanan, writing at a time when the different modes of mapping seemingly gelled into “cartography,” reacted to the obvious inability—the same as confronts us today—to reconcile geographical features defined within different spatial conceptions. There is not, there cannot be, a single spatial conception in which all features are represented in a “truthful” way, as the ideal of cartography holds.
In the case of the distributaries in a river delta, we might identify at least three different sets of spatial conceptions:
1) as maintained by local practice, which might be further differentiated between those who use the waterways and the residents on the adjacent lands;
2) as recorded by those who map and otherwise reference (in legal documents, for example) the waterways and adjacent lands for others (normally outside the local communities), the surveyors (generally outsiders, or if locals then using representational strategies developed for non-local purposes) who record the results of interviews with locals to the best of their orthographic abillity, which is a process made fraught by social inequalities; and
3) as constructed by geographers and other outsiders who map for their own agendas unrelated to the landscape and its inhabitants.
In other words, the ontology of spatial features is not a question of geometry and the degree of generalization from high-resolution surveys to low-resolution maps. Nor is it a question of cultural perspective: it is not that “Europeans” rationally insist that a single channel must bear a single name from source to estuary, while “non-Europeans” follow irrational or even mystical naming practices. No, it is a question of spatial discourse: it is geographers who want a single channel, who want to impose their reason onto the world.
