It is exactly this kind of approach to mapping that Deleuze and Guattari encourage in their ground-breaking text “Rhizome,” in which they use the concepts of map and rhizome almost interchangeably over several passages:

Make a map not a tracing! [...] What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real. [...] The map is open and connect able in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, re versible, susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group, or social formation. [...] The map has to do with performance, whereas the tracing always involves an alleged “competence.” ⁹

According to Deleuze and Guattari, a tracing is nothing more than a reductive reproduction of given assumptions. Making a map, on the other hand, becomes a productive and often physical engagement with a territory that conditions the rhythmic relations of time and space.
   
Deleuze and Guattari’s laudatory estimation of the practice of mapping finds ample support within the history of cartography. The Polynesian stick chart, for example, emphasizes subjectivity, embo­diment, direct experience, and connectivity. Used at least until the end of World War II to canoe from atoll to atoll and island to island in the Marshall Islands region of the Pacific Ocean, these maps were constructed as open frameworks from coconut fronds and tiny seashells to symbolize ocean swells, and the wave and crest patterns of the ocean surface. Made by the navigators themselves, these maps reflected their individual, physical experience in the open sea, varying so much in interpretation and form that they were readable solely to the author-cartographer. Contrary to many other navigation techniques, the charts were not taken along on the trips but studied and memorized prior to departure, and the navigator would lie down in the canoe during the voyage tofeel how the boat was moved about by the underlying ebb and flow. While this practice makes the map a bio-geographical tool, rendering it personal and idiosyncratic, it nevertheless suggests that these personal cartographies were crucial devices for creating a network of inter-island communication.¹⁰

Voyages and Charts

Perhaps there never was a very first voyage that scattered the seeds of human habitation in the world’s space. But we do know of the last of them, of poles conquered, deserts crossed, wild erness invaded. This is the end of all voyages. All possible encounters have been accomplished, undertaken, ended, foreclosed. The cycle is completed, the map of the earth has covered the earth. Space is inscribed upon the charts. The globe is perceived as a ball in a net of latitudes and longitudes.

—Michel Serres


The tension between “voyages” and “charts” is well documented by David Neufeld, a historian of the Western Arctic and Yukon Territory. His text “Learning to Drive the Yukon River: Western Cartography and Athapaskan Story Maps” examines how artifacts and landscapes necessarily embody different, possibly conflicting, cultural narratives, and questions how to deal with these differences productively. Through his estimation of cartographic difference, the practice of the curator finds especially valuable clues. By remaining particularly sensitive to the idea that different peoples’ stories and histories “have shaped the way they experience, understand, and respond to the physical world,”¹¹ curators can unfold new relations to previously discounted modes of knowledge production and dissemination, and the values that attend to them. Neufeld uses a comparison between set­tler and native mapping techniques from the Dawson City region as a means to discuss issues of identity and cultural and environmental coexistence in the area of the Yukon River. The quintessential experience that he recounts from his field work revolves around the oral instructions given to him from an Indigenous elder on how to navigate the site of his historical and anthropological research. When consulted, the man uses a stick to scribble a pattern of a crucial part of the Yukon River—a conglomeration of sandbars  and islands—into the ground.