Conti-centric?

We had dinner at a friends house just before we left the US. They had a map of the world hanging up and Tom studied it quizzically.

"This isn't right," he finally said. "it's split funny!"

The map looked something like this:

As opposed to the map that hangs on our dining room wall.

Which looks something exactly like this:    

Does give one pause, doesn't it? How would one describe it? "Ethnocentric" isn't quite right. The best I could come up with was "Conti-centric." Further reasearch, however, suggests that North American Biased is the proper term.

Now, just to throw this out there, have you ever seen one of these?

An astute reader brought these to my attention. Here's what Wiki has to say about "Upside Down Maps:"

"A reversed map, also known as an Upside-Down map or South-Up map, is a map where south is up, north is down, east is left and west is right. Thus the Southern Hemisphere at the top of the map instead of the bottom. These maps are just as accurate as traditionally oriented maps, because the position of North at the top of maps is arbitrary. Such maps have been made in several cultures and time periods. The convention that North is at the top (and East at the right) on most modern maps was established by the astronomer Ptolemy and was adopted by other cartographers."

I will admit to having no idea that North was arbitrary. So while I was aware of what we shall now refer to as the "North American Bias" of certain world maps, I did not realize that most world maps are considered "Northern Hemisphere biased."

At the end of the day, perhaps a globe is the best way to look at the world, as our map makes Sweden and Greenland look like they've been pumped up on steroids. Although, since we now know that North being up is arbitrary, you must be wondering about Upsidedown Globes. Me too. I didn't find anything worthy of linking to, but one imagines such things exist in some corner of the globe or another. Ha! Or maybe only as photoshopped images on the internet.

However you hang it, I would argue that the sizable chunk of wall hanging in our dining room, despite its flaws, has gone a long way in grounding the wee ones in world geography. You want to make them laugh? Ask them the capital of Sri Lanka. (1) ______________________________________________________________________________________ (1) Sri Jayawardenapura-Kotte: we can neither say it or spell it. Perhaps that is a goal for the start of the new school year?

 

 

Comments

[Dad]

Ever been to Outback? They feature an "upside down map". First time I saw it, it made me think how much we get a mindset on our view of the world.

[Ellen]

Interesting! While I have been to "the Outback" in Australia, I have never been to an Outback Steak House. One imagines this is a much more top-of-mind issue in Oz than it is in the US. ;-)

[Katherine Walcott]

http://www.upsidedownglobe.com/eng/index.html

The make a good point about the North star.

[Gwynna]

Apparently the "pumped up on steroids" bit is because flat maps are actually all kinds of distorted (which is a big "duh" if you think about it...), but we almost always see flat maps, so we think what we see is what it actually is. The globes are, theoretically, MUCH closer to what our astronauts saw. (pause for pouting for past tense...)

[Ellen]

The upside down globe (it makes no difference when the planet is seen from space??) still makes my brain hurt. At age almost-47, I really had no idea that north was arbitrary. Perhaps I should be ashamed to admit it, but I am too astonished to be embarrassed.

[Monica]

Interesting perspective.

[Gwynna]

Well, if you think about it some more, even choosing from only north or south is only because there's a whole lotta "wasteland" that we don't much care about in those directions. If we still didn't know anything about, say, Asia, and thus it was a whole lotta "wasteland," maybe all of our globes and maps would be oriented with east up. Which really, doesn't THAT make the most sense? It is, after all, where the sun comes from AND it is what the word "orient" means, for goodness sake!

(don't be too upset - I visited NZ and Australia when I was 14, which is where I shed my north-is-the-only-way-up ideas. Take your kids to Oz now and they won't have to have these sorts of revelations at almost-47. They can other brain-bending and ego-bruising revelations instead. :) )

[Katherine Walcott]

East up is actually old school - very. Medieval maps had Jerusalem at the center & east on top. (Yes, my mind is filled with useless fluff. I play Trivial Pursuit for keeps.) Makes sense in days before axial rotation. I believe some folks knew the globe bit but immutable center of the universe was a fixed belief. [:)]

[Debbie Hanson]

Ya' know....until this post, I had never, ever thought about where a map was split. And I do NOT like the upside-down map....gives me vertigo.