Kenneth J. Guest - Cultural Anthropology: A Toolkit for a Global Age

THE HOBO-DYER MAP

Can a map challenge your assumptions about the world? The Hobo-Dyer map reorients the world, placing south at the top and, like the Peters map that follows, uses an equal-area presentation, presenting accurate proportions of countries, continents, and oceans in relation to one another, rather than emphasizing shape or compass bearings. What do you see differently from this new perspective?

THE PETERS WORLD MAP

How do maps shape the way you think about the world and its people? The Earth is round. So every flat, rectangular map involves distortions. But which distortions? The Peters world map is an equal-area map, showing countries and continents in accurate proportion with one another and reducing the visual dominance of the Northern Hemisphere by shifting the equator to the middle of the map, both in sharp contrast to the more familiar Mercator projection.

NATIONAL BOUNDARIES

While humanitys impact is quite evident, and even striking, on many remotely sensed scenes, sometimes, as in the case with most political boundaries, it is invisible. State, provincial, and national boundaries can follow natural features, such as mountain ridges, rivers, or coastlines. Artificial constructs that possess no physical reality-for example, lines of latitude and longitude-can also determine political borders. This world political map represents humanitys imaginary lines as they slice and divide earth.

The National Geographic Society recognizes 192 independent states in the world as represented here. Of those nations, 185 are members of the United Nations.

Kenneth J. Guest is Professor of Anthropology at Baruch College, CUNY, and author of God in Chinatown: Religion and Survival in New Yorks Evolving Immigrant Community . His research focuses on immigration, religion, globalization, ethnicity, and entrepreneurialism.

Professor Guests ethnographic research in China and the United States traces the immigration journey of recent Chinese immigrants from Fuzhou, southeast China, who, drawn by restaurant, garment shop, and construction jobs and facilitated by a vast human smuggling network, have revitalized New Yorks Chinatown. His writing explores the role of Fuzhounese religious communities in China and the United States, the religious revival sweeping coastal China, the Fuzhounese role in the rapidly expanding U.S. network of all-you-can-eat buffets and take-out restaurants, and the higher education experiences of the Fuzhounese second generation.

A native of Florida, Professor Guest studied Chinese at Beijing University and Middlebury College. He received his B.A. from Columbia University (East Asian Languages and Cultures), an M.A. from Union Theological Seminary (Religious Studies), and the M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. from The City University of New York Graduate Center (Anthropology).