Discussant: Michael Bravo

William Bunge’s pioneering approach to ‘expeditionary geography’ and his book Fitzgerald - Geography of a Revolution have been an inspiration for radical cartographers, including LIVINGMAPS. Each year we will be organising a public lecture to celebrate Bunge’s achievements by inviting someone who has made an outstanding contribution to the development of this field.

For the inaugural lecture we have invited Hugh Brody, a pioneer of ethno-cartography, to reflect on his field work amongst the Inuit and to draw out some of the political and personal implications of his approach to indigenous mapping. There will be a small exhibition of cultural maps to accompany the lecture.

Our discussant, Michael Bravo, is also a distinguished contributor to this field, a senior lecturer at the Scott Polar Institute and author of The Pan Inuit Trails Atlas.

WHOSE MAPS? WHOSE DREAMS? Cultural mapping in historical perspective

"Cultural mapping – the attempt to show how a way of life can be seen and understood as a set of images – was first developed in the Canadian Arctic. This came about as a result of the very particular politics at the end of the 1960s – the mix of demands for a new recognition of indigenous peoples, legal activism and a government that both recognized and feared the new forces of change.

"This lecture will tell the story of the Inuit Land Use and Occupancy. The ambition of this project was unprecedented and the results surprised everyone. As one of the coordinators of the work in the Arctic, I will look back on what the adventure was like from the inside; but also reflect on what it led to, and where it may have failed.

"This is a piece of history that raises challenging questions about the digital revolution, and invites us to revisit and reconsider the potential magic of the analogue world. It also takes us to the way landscape is politics, and politics must always lead us to the meaning of the land."

Hugh Brody, anthropologist and film-maker, holds the Canada Research Chair in Aboriginal Studies at the University of the Fraser Valley in British Columbia, Canada, and is an Honorary Associate at the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge. He also is an Honorary Professor of Anthropology at the University of Kent in Canterbury. Since the 1970s he has been at the centre of projects that map the ways hunting peoples use and know their lands – taking on the challenge of making the invisible visible. This work has always been linked to securing or defending of rights to land, heritage and languages, especially in the Canadian North. From 1996 – 2012 he worked on the ‡Khomani San land claim, and made a set of sixteen films about the claim – now available as the DVD Tracks Across Sand. His books include Inishkillane, The People’s Land, Maps And Dreams, and The Other Side of Eden. His films include Hunters and Bombers, Inside Australia, The Meaning of Life  and the feature, starring Paul Scofield and Maria Schell, Nineteen Nineteen.