Ground Rules and Social Maps

Definition

The titular pair of Shirley Ardener's Women and Space: Ground Rules and Social Maps (1993). Social maps are "structural relationships, such as in hierarchies or other ranking patterns, and systems of relationships like those of kinship," which are "frequently, but not necessarily, realised on 'the ground' by the placing of individuals in space." Ground rules are the culturally determined rules by which societies "make boundaries on the ground" — dividing "the social into spheres, levels and territories with invisible fences and platforms to be scaled by abstract ladders and crossed by intangible bridges." The pair carries two cautions. First, a social map is a logical rearrangement, not a picture: "No map corresponds to what can be seen: the London underground system is not accurately and completely portrayed on the map provided to the public." Second, the term is used as "a temporary and handy 'folk' term, rather than as having the status of a definitive scientific label" — extended even to 'historical time' (where 'yesterday' may seem 'closer' than the 'distant' past) and to metaphysical space ('private' vs 'public,' 'inner' vs 'outer'), regardless of whether some 'private places' can really be walked into. Complex situations are "spaces within spaces" or "overlapping universes" that must be 'pulled apart' into simple maps (of 'X' and 'non-X') before being recompiled.

Key Thinkers

• Shirley Ardener — deploys and delimits the pair as the organizing framework of Women and Space (1993).
• Edwin Ardener — the volume's theoretical background: simultaneities, remoteness, the semiotics of spatial position; not yet paged (see log).
• Pierre Bourdieu — the classification schemes that underlie the maps: oppositions "between male and female, east and west, future and past, top and bottom, right and left" (quoted p. 19); his Outline of a Theory of Practice is a key reference of the volume.
• Durkheim & Mauss — Primitive Classification (1903): "Cosmic space and tribal space are thus only very imperfectly distinguished" (note 2); not yet paged (see log).
• (Related, not yet paged — see log: Judy Matthews on community identity; Renée Hirschon on interior/exterior in urban Greece.)

Related Concepts

• Partition of Space — the ordering system the maps describe; the ground rules are its rules.
• Mutedness — what the maps reveal: positional dominance and muting across universes.
• Boundaries — the perimeters the ground rules govern.
• Dual Symbolic Classification — the symbolic machinery from which the maps' oppositions are drawn.
• Space — the map is not the space: "No map corresponds to what can be seen."
• Separate Spheres — the 'private'/'public' opposition as one criterion for "mapping metaphysical space" — the ground rules of the nineteenth-century interior.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The Partition of Space (Ardener 2006) — the source: social maps defined (p. 17); the London Underground analogy and the 'folk term' caveat (p. 18); the topological notion of 'conceptual space' (note 2, p. 20); time as mappable space (p. 20).

Open Questions

• Ardener extends 'social map' to historical time — where "by a change of place time had been collapsed, or elided." Could interiors be read as maps of time (the house museum, the preserved period room) rather than only of social position?
• If a social map's ordering can be "jumbled up to the eye, or intangible," what is the design discipline's responsibility toward orderings it renders invisible — can a plan be a misrepresentation?
• The map/space distinction (geographers' 'place' vs 'space' is deliberately not emphasised) — does the interior's own place/space vocabulary survive contact with the mapping framework?