Interpreting Cartographies

To explore what it means to think “cartographically,” this session investigates the connections between cartography and religious meaning-making through the study of material culture, literary analysis, and artistic practice. The first paper explores maps of pilgrimage created with needle and thread as records of spiritual pilgrimage. Through line and symbol, recorded in stitches, the process of pilgrimage is remembered and captured as physical artifact. The second paper examines geopolitical disputes of 20th-century eastern Europe and renders visible the maps created by lay Catholics as they moved between Marian shrines and rural chapels in the Hungarian landscape. The final paper explores the “mapping” out of sacred stories in the novel A Record of Romantic Marching (2002) by Hikaru Okuizumi through the themes of exilic wandering, apocalypse, and imperialism.    

The first paper seeks to tell a different story of the communist period by drawing on sources like prayerbooks, devotions, and shrine cards typically seen as irrelevant to the broader geopolitical and territorial disputes of 20th-century eastern Europe. In so doing, this paper renders visible the maps created by lay Catholics as they moved between Marian shrines and rural chapels that dotted the landscape, and I argue that another map of Hungary emerges, one that participates in but is not fully subsumed by the geopolitical border disputes of the time. Through a study of Hungarian-language sources that cut across such borders, I show how these lay Catholic cartographies were grounded in the notion that Hungary was, is, and will always be Mary’s country, that Mary is, in fact, what makes Hungary.

The second paper explores enacted arts-based research of pilgrimage as essential to spiritual locatedness and journey. Maps are considered as a kind of sacred record or text in meaning-making, offering maps of pilgrimage created with needle and thread as records of spiritual pilgrimage. Through line and symbol, recorded in stitches, the process of pilgrimage is remembered and captured as physical artefact. The work becomes a way finder, a visible spirituality. Maps of biblical characters and the researcher will be shared as a new way of reading ‘sacred stories.’ In this way a cartography of pilgrimage invites meditation on landscapes of spiritual significance, insights, homecoming, exile and wandering as human aspects of being in a world as seekers and those sought. Connections to indigenous map-making and journey will be highlighted. Listeners will be invited to consider the cartography of their lives as a means to witness to their spiritual pilgrimage.

The final paper explores the “mapping” out of sacred stor(ies), especially themes around wandering in the wilderness by examining the Japanese novel, A Record of Romantic Marching (2002) by Hikaru Okuizumi. This novel follows the journey of Japanese soldiers who are sent to an (imagined) island in Southeast Asia that was occupied and devastated by Japan during WWII. The story tours the “hell”: wounded and sick soldiers continue an “apocalyptic march” in the jungle in a fashion that mimics the Israelites wandering in the desert in the book of Exodus. Eventually, the novel reveals that the soldiers are ghosts who, eternally bound by the megalomania of colonialism, are doomed to perpetually wander the wilderness and never arrive to the promised (home)land. Describing a wandering without liberation, this “cartographic” novel criticizes Japanese imperialism and its legacy and urges the reader to ponder how to stop this—and other—“marches” through hell.