Mapping memory and movement: Absences, interstices, erosions

The polyvalence of erosion-related idioms sits alongside what Khan evocatively describes as chaura “self-opacity,” of a mode of existence that is ultimately obscure upon oneself and that manifests particularly in peoples’ nebulous memories of their past movements (p. 79). Examined by Khan through an exercise inviting individuals to track their trajectories on a map, this self-opacity is deeply gendered, with men’s definite and chronological responses contrasting with women’s frequent merging of near and distant events, their inability to explain the why and the how of their movements, and their constant worries about their future actions and options. This brings Khan to theorize maps less as accurate archives of human movements across space and time and rather as meaningful records of socio-terrestrial breakages, forgettings, and elisions, each of which reflect the nature of nature itself as cognitive schema and psychic interiority (p. 85). In this case perhaps, to torque Gregory Bateson’s (1988) famous adage, the map is in fact the territory.