TY - JOUR
T1 - Mapping the once and future strait
T2 - Place, time, and Torres Strait from the sixteenth century to the Pleistocene
AU - Douglas, Bronwen
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
PY - 2022
Y1 - 2022
N2 - Thematically, this article tracks European imagining, ‘discovery’, naming, and mapping of the geographical space between modern Papua New Guinea and Australia–called Torres Strait since the 1770s–and the local encounters with places and people which enabled or constrained that knowing from the early sixteenth century. The methodological focus is materiality. This cartographic knowledge was generated empirically in embodied encounters; materialized in charts, writings, or drawings; reinscribed materially in maps and globes; and translated into virtual materiality via high resolution digital imaging. The theoretical focus is time. Suspending awareness of later outcomes and nomenclatures, I approximate pasts as they might have seemed to diverse contemporary protagonists. This anti-teleological history is nonetheless episodic and chronologically sequential. I conclude by acknowledging other chrono-logics–Indigenous, Ethnographic, Archaeological, and digital–which enfold that conventional trajectory and qualify or disrupt History's linear temporality.
AB - Thematically, this article tracks European imagining, ‘discovery’, naming, and mapping of the geographical space between modern Papua New Guinea and Australia–called Torres Strait since the 1770s–and the local encounters with places and people which enabled or constrained that knowing from the early sixteenth century. The methodological focus is materiality. This cartographic knowledge was generated empirically in embodied encounters; materialized in charts, writings, or drawings; reinscribed materially in maps and globes; and translated into virtual materiality via high resolution digital imaging. The theoretical focus is time. Suspending awareness of later outcomes and nomenclatures, I approximate pasts as they might have seemed to diverse contemporary protagonists. This anti-teleological history is nonetheless episodic and chronologically sequential. I conclude by acknowledging other chrono-logics–Indigenous, Ethnographic, Archaeological, and digital–which enfold that conventional trajectory and qualify or disrupt History's linear temporality.
KW - History
KW - Torres Strait
KW - agency
KW - materiality
KW - place
KW - time
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85068206242&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1080/02757206.2019.1607849
DO - 10.1080/02757206.2019.1607849
M3 - Article
SN - 0275-7206
VL - 33
SP - 17
EP - 43
JO - History and Anthropology
JF - History and Anthropology
IS - 1
ER -