Dr. Catherine Gibson: "Mapmakers in Action - Drawing Borders in the Baltic, 1919-1920"

Arranged with the assistance of the New York Map Society

Location: Zoom

Time:  7:00 pm ET/6:00 pm CT/5:00 pm MT/4:00 pm PT

Title: Mapmakers in Action: Drawing Borders in the Baltic, 1919-1920s

Speaker:  Dr. Catherine Gibson, Lecturer in East European Studies, Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies, University of Tartu, Estonia

Summary: This talk presents an unconventional history of the uses of ethnographic mapping in the process of delineating the Estonian-Latvian state border in the aftermath of the First World War. While histories of border-making in the post-war period have usually been told from the perspectives of elites, in this presentation I offer a different view by examining the outpouring of written petitions and maps produced by local inhabitants to inform, correct, and challenge decisions about nationality, property ownership, and state borders made by the Estonian-Latvian Boundary Commission. I argue that these events can be seen as a culmination of the development of cartographic thinking over the course of the nineteenth century, circulating in schoolbooks and newspapers, which spread cartographic literacy among broad sections of society. When faced with the prospect of a border which left them on the “wrong” side, the inhabitants of the Estonian-Latvian border region turned to maps to communicate alternative arguments about where they thought the state borders should be located and why. This presentation pieces together a story of how the very subjects of ethnographic cartography turned the table to become mapmakers themselves.

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