What's a map?

• Author: Ayres, Ed
• Position: NOTE FROM A WORLDWATCHER

There's a story I once heard--maybe apocryphal, but who knows--about the time some years ago when the government of Venezuela decided to give the territory of the Yanomami Indians, who had lived there since before memory, back to the Yanomami. When the news was announced, a journalist who knew the language trekked deep into the territory to record the natives' reaction. He came upon a Yanomami and asked, "Did you hear the news? Venezuela has given you your land!" The Indian looked at him quizzically, and replied, "What's Venezuela?"

Perceptions of the world will vary widely depending on what categories of reality make it up. To most of us, the world is made up of about 200 nations, defined by their familiar borders on a map. We are amused by someone who doesn't know this. We can be quite sure that our world is the real one and the Yanomami's is an obsolescent one, because about 6 billion of the world's 6.4 billion people--including all those who hold the real power--recognize our map as the real map. We can laugh off this tale as a good joke on ourselves.

But if we really do believe in a world of nation-states because that's what most people accept, we are of course buying into another prevailing assumption: that majorities set the rules, not only about what prevails but about what is real. If a Mohawk Indian tribe claims to be a sovereign nation, the tribe will be summarily overruled by the government of the United States, in which about 270 million of the 280 million residents can be depended on to affirm--and never question--that it is the real nation. And that majority has the helicopter guns and troops to prove it.

On the other hand, while indigenous tribes like the Yanomami or Mohawk make up only 5 percent or so of the world's individuals, they constitute more than 95 percent of its languages and cultures--and distinct territorial homelands. Two decades ago, that fact might have been shrugged off by the dominant governments as a mere inconvenience. With global trade, travel, and communications bringing the world together, these backward vestiges of our primitive past would disappear soon enough. The Yanomami would invite Shell to come drill for oil, and with their royalties would soon have TVs and SUVs. The Mohawks would take their casino earnings and forget about bows and arrows, except maybe to sell to the tourists.

In the early 1990s, that vision of modernization grew abruptly more complicated. With the fall of the Soviet Union, the map of nations was radically redrawn, but territorial turmoil was even greater within the newly drawn borders. During any given year of that decade, about 30 internal wars were being fought. A widely noted cause, of course, was the destabilizing withdrawal of superpower "sponsors," under whose occupation various ethnic or political factions had remained quiescent for half a century. In Yugoslavia, Indonesia, and other places, old hatreds exploded and the maps we once...