"However, some of the portrayals of the culture of non-Euro-American areas of the world are offensive to people.
How do you treat older cartographic (and geography) materials that contain outdated, offensive viewpoints?"
Kathy,
The answer to your question should ideally be based upon how your university treats materials from other disciplines that have outdated, offensive viewpoints?
Are the books about abortion weeded or de-accessioned so as not to offend pro-lifers, and are the books about adoption also weeded/de-accessioned so as not to offend the abortionists?
Are medical journals containing articles on gun trauma injuries weeded/de-accessioned so as not to offend NRA members?
Are astronomy books showing the sun at the centre of the solar system weeded/de-accessioned so as not to offend the pre-Copernicans?
Do you refuse to display any globes for fear of them being stumbled upon by innocent flat-earthers?
Are the maps that do not explicitly label Taiwan as an "eternal and inviolable part of China" shredded, so as not to offend the fee-paying Chinese students, who deserve better than to have their worldview challenged by the recipients of their exorbitant tuition fees?
Are the complete works of Harper Lee and Mark Twain kept in a mediated-access area (with on-call emergency counselling service) in case the use by those authors of certain words-that-man-must-never-speak-even-though-he-spake-them-in-the-time-of-our-forefathers-of-blessed-memory impinges the rights of literature majors never be offended?
Anyone at a university who is not mature enough to know that there are, were and always will be people with different views to his own, and which views he may or may not find confronting (and will not know which until he is actually confronted by them), really shouldn't be at university at all. The whole point of a university is to learn about the existence of different ideas and to learn to argue rationally, logically, scientifically, and not knee-jerk emotionally, as to which best fits the available evidence. And then to adapt ones own view to evaluate and accommodate new evidence as it comes along, or re-evaluate old evidence when called upon to do so.
Apart from that, there is a sad tendency today to forget that our attitudes today will be just as offensive to our grandchildren as those of our grandparents are now to us. Offendedness is usually completely subjective, and to think that today's accepted viewpoint is the end point and high watermark of human thought, science and morality is dangerous presentism, and incredibly arrogant, besides being plain wrong. What 5-year old has not been offended by a refusal of his parents to give him something, and has come to realise many years later that his demand was inappropriate and his parents completely in the right to refuse and thus offend him?
It is vital to teach our students to be open to new ideas, and to evaluate them for themselves, rather than to feel offended because someone else came to a different conclusion with different (or even the same) evidence.
That a bushman is (or is not) a different race from a negro is no more offensive or even surprising than that a topographic map and a geological map of Waco, Texas might be classified differently by Dewey vs the LC scheme (or that nasty right-wing extremist Boggs & Lewis classification). A classification scheme is a human construct, and the fact that several different map classification schemes exist for libraries should be a hint that something even more complex, such as human physiognomy, might have many more different possible classifications depending on the purpose and knowledge of the person doing the classifying.
There is also the issue of who decides what is to be offensive: do you as a librarian make the decision for the students, rushing in front of them to sweep away any possible speck of dust on their intellectual and emotional horizon? Do you meekly shred any book a student hands you when he says "the views of this author are offensive to my personal understanding of the world at this point in my life". Or do we set up an international committee to decree once and for-all-eternity what is, and must always, remain offensive for all mankind, regardless of gender, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, disability, veteran-status, marital-status, political party membership, conscience or personal preference?
The idea of weeding, de-accessioning, locking away, censoring, bowdlerising or (gasp) burning any book, simply because someone *might* be offended by it -- or even if they really are -- should be grounds for immediate revocation of life membership of the Librarian's Fireside Circle, and a permanent blackballing of any application to re-join. Censorship should have no place in any library, and certainly not in a Western/first world university library which is meant to be a collection of scholarship for the elucidation of current and future researchers and students, and not a political pawn of adolescent activists still in their intellectual leading-strings.
The idea of anyone, let alone a university librarian, removing atlases that showed Pluto as a planet, or a Nazi or confederate flag, because it might be or is offensive to someone, is to you (I hope) ludicrous. The idea of doing so for the book's viewpoint on anthropology, whatever that viewpoint may be, is no less so.
I don't take issue with you asking the question, but I am truly frightened by the question itself, because for every person who asks, there is someone else who has not felt the need to ask and is going ahead on his own bat...
It reminds me of Monty Python's bookshop (or should that be librarian?) sketch:
C: I saw it over there: 'Olsen's Standard Book of British Birds'.
P: 'Olsen's Standard Book of British Birds'?
C: Yes...
P: Yes, well, we do have that, as a matter of fact....
C: The expurgated version....
P: (pause; politely) I'm sorry, I didn't quite catch that...?
C: The expurgated version.
P: (exploding) The EXPURGATED version of 'Olsen's Standard Book of British Birds'?!?!?!?!?
C: (desperately) The one without the gannet!
P: The one without the gannet-!!! They've ALL got the gannet!! It's a Standard British Bird, the gannet, it's in all the books!!!
C: (insistent) Well, I don't like them...they wet their nests.
P: (furious) All right! I'll remove it!! (rrrip!) Any other birds you don't like?!
Brendan Whyte
Australia, where we are also wrestling with this insane tendency to ban anything at the drop of a hat for fear of offending the professionally-offended.
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Date: Fri, 29 Mar 2019 17:44:27 +0000
From: Kathy Stroud <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Outdated/Culturally Insensitive Maps and Atlases
All,
Not sure if we've had a discussion about this before. However, it's coming up in my mind as I'm contemplating weeding our atlas collection. (At this point I'm mostly looking at duplicates, since all the old reference atlases from branch libraries seem to have been transferred to the main library.)
Perhaps you could share any institutional guidance you have or merely your collective wisdom from over the years.
We have a significant collection of 19th and 20th century atlases. Since we have a strong cartography component in our Geography department, I think it is important to keep these. On a personal level, I also think it's important as a cultural record of how our society previously viewed the world. However, some of the portrayals of the culture of non-Euro-American areas of the world are offensive to people. (I'm currently looking at a 1944 "Atlas of Global Geography." I had not realized that in 1944 bushman/hottentot was one of the races of mankind.)
How do you treat older cartographic (and geography) materials that contain outdated, offensive viewpoints?
1) Transfer to a mediated access area (such as special collections) so the casual user does not stumble across it?
2) Keep in general, circulating shelves along with modern materials to hint that they should be taken in historical context?
3) Deaccession?
4) Ignore issue and hope no one else raises it?
Working in an academic setting, I am for keeping at least a sampling of "objectionable" materials and against censoring what we consider embarrassing aspects of our history. How we talk about race has evolved significantly even in my lifetime, but if we don't understand our past, how can we understand where we are now and where we want to go?
This issue with older atlases and other cartographic materials reminds me a lot of how geographers do and don't deal with "environmental determinism." In graduate school, there always seems to be an awkward discussion about environmental determinism when studying the history of geography. It's along the lines of ... er, we don't really believe this theory anymore, it was popular among geographers over 100 years ago, you should know about it so you understand how it influences modern geography, but we don't really talk about it because it's embarrassing.
Any thoughts for a Friday?
Kathy Stroud
David and Nancy Petrone Map/GIS Librarian Knight Library
1299 University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97403-1299
541-346-3051
"A map is not just a picture-it's also the data behind the map, the methodology used to collect and parse that data, the people doing that work, the choices made in terms of visualization and the software used to make them."
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