ABSTRACT
This entry investigates the relationship between space, imagination and the map with a media-anthropological approach, that is, from a perspective that assigns an active and primary role to technology and media in the constitution of the human and its cultural forms. The subject of discussion is the concept of cartographic imagination and the idea of the map as a cultural technique. The analysis of the mediality of the (western) cartographic imagination is developed in three steps: first, the preliminary concepts of a medial theory of space (without media) are presented; second, the instrumental constitution of the original space is examined in a palaeoanthropological key; finally, the idea of the map as a reference system for a media-history of space is discussed.
