ABSTRACT
Chapter two, “Map: U.S. colonial science, geo-politics, and the remapping of the Philippines,” surveys the explosion of governmental mapping under the new Insular Government, as American colonial scientists, soldiers, and bureaucrats sought to turn the distant archipelago into knowable and hence governable territory. It sketches the development of a distinctive “‘geo-politics’” of knowledge (alongside biopolitical dimensions of colonial science and medicine) through the work of a diverse set of geographical knowledge producers, from Jesuit cartographers to Insular scientists to the paramilitary Philippine Constabulary, in their efforts to fix the position of Philippine lands, resources, and peoples within grids of power and knowledge. Drawing connections to the inheritance of Spanish geographical and ethnological knowledge, the chapter traces the emergence of a cartographic model of governmental knowledge production that worked not only to produce more accurate representations of the islands on paper but also to facilitate the extension of territorial sovereignty, and governmental techniques of calculation, at multiple sites and spatial scales.
