Maps

To take a one week course with David Peat

How do we symbolize the world around us: the world of remembered childhood, the geography of a landscape, or the data gathered by a space probe or elementary particle accelerator? All over the world human beings have created maps to orient themselves within real or conceptual spaces. Many of these maps have little resemblance to those in geography books or town plans; indeed they may not always be written down or visually symbolized. But they can be used for navigation, creation stories, to understand the environment, hunt for game, to read the stories of the heavens, or to create cohesion within a group.

The use of maps raises many questions, how universal and translatable are maps, at what age can maps be read by children, what clues to maps give us to the ways we structure space and time, what is the relationship between the map and the territory?

Peat has explored a number of these questions, such as the use of maps and depictions in science and amongst Indigenous people.

For a workshop with David Peat

Books:
The Philosopher's Stone

Essays:
I've Got a Map in My Head

Contact F. David Peat