The Dictionary of Human Geography

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are what make the Hispanic community in

this region of the USA cohere as a social and

political force. The same could be argued

for Palestinians or, in Canada, First Nations

groups. In diasporic and post-colonial con-

texts – in which memory is threatened by

both nostalgia and coerced assimilation – ‘cultu-

ral memory offers promise of epistemological

grounding’, though not necessarily within a

singular nationalidentity(Sugg, 2003, p. 469:

see alsodiaspora;post-colonialism;transna-

tionalism).Counter-memoriesmay beassembled

and transmitted through oral tradition, but also

in less bureaucratized time-places: thebody,

domestic spaces (Blunt, 2003), neighbourhoods

or ‘temporal re-territorializations’ of formal

spaces (such as carnivals, festivals or rallies;

Legg, 2005).

The memory projects of marginalized

groups may bear the traces of trauma, such

that the possibilities of memory are altered.

With traumatic recall, events remain in the

vivid present, resisting integration through

narrativization. Though thestateoften in-

corporates violent or tragic events into a linear

narrative of national redemption and over-

coming, what Edkins (2003) calls ‘trauma

time’ works differently, and its repetitive dis-

ruptive quality can reveal the violent founda-

tions ofsovereign power. Trauma thus has a

relation not just totimebut alsospaceand

geography; for instance, to narrations and

experiences of nation and persistent claims to

homeland. Sugg (2003) draws on Hirsch’s

concept of post-memory to understand the

‘suspended migration’ of second-generation

Cuban Americans:childrenof exiled parents

may inherit the collective cultural trauma of

their parents and remember their parents’

stories of exile as their own within a dynamic

of longing and return. Alternatively, memor-

ializing trauma in the landscape may consti-

tute a witnessing public, setting in motion an

emerging narrative (and a potential release

from traumatic recall; Burk, forthcoming).

The recent tendency has been to expand the

scope of memory studies by considering the

role ofperformanceandbodilyandnon-

bodily practices in the making of memorial

landscapes (Hoelscher, 2003), by examining

the wider production of social memory beyond

demarcated sites of monuments and memor-

ials, and by considering the landscape impli-

cations of the memories ofanimalsor other

than human beings (Lorimer, 2006). nj/gp

Suggested reading

Johnson(2003b,2005);Legg(2007a);Till(2003).

mental maps/cognitive maps Perhaps the

best-known research outcome frombehav-

ioural geographywas the retrieval of the

imagined or mental maps widespread in the

popular knowledge of places, mental con-

structs that were seen as intervening between

geographical settings and human action. An

early study was the simple sketch mapping of

urban areas from memory supervised by Kevin

Lynch in the pursuit of good urban design,

which permitted animage of the cityto be con-

structed, revealing districts of knowledge and

ignorance, and the role of such remembered

features as nodes, edges and landmarks in

establishing urban legibility. Behavioural geo-

graphers, including Roger Downs and David

Stea (1973), in contrast referred tocognitive

maps, which they associated with the spatial

tasks of orientation and way-finding. More

formal and widely replicated were the experi-

ments with paper and pencil tests conducted by

Peter Gould and his students (Gould and

White, 1993 [1974]), which were intended

not so much to identifyplaceknowledge and

place ignorance but, rather, to establish a sur-

face of place preferences. From surveys in sev-

eral countries, mental maps were constructed

that revealed both a national preference surface

and also a local surface of desirability for a

home area. Subsequent work sought to estab-

lish the developmental growth ofmapsamong

childrenof increasing age, and examined

linkages between geographical preference

surfaces and future residential choice and

migrationpropensities (Gould and White,

1993 [1974]).

Mental maps were part of a broader move-

ment inenvironmental perception, which in

turn has elided into an interest in therepre-

sentationandsocial constructionof places

in a variety of disciplines using lesspositivist

methods and emphasizing social rather than

psychological factors. Nonetheless, the older

analytical methods continue to generate inter-

esting results (Kitchin, 1994), even if with

interdisciplinary dissemination the links with

the original work are truncated or forgotten.

So a current study of the role of themediain

shaping the spatial surface of fear in Los

Angeles (Matei and Ball-Rokeach, 2005),

contains the key words mental maps, GIS

and spatial effects, but omits any reference to

Gould’s work, including his celebrated feature

inTimemagazine that included a map of the

perceived fear of urban areas. dl

Suggested reading

Gould and White (1993).

Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_M Final Proof page 455 1.4.2009 3:19pm

MENTAL MAPS/COGNITIVE MAPS