North, South, East and West — the cardinal directions have a surprising history of cultural and social significance. Jerry Brotton, professor of English and history at the University of London, joins host Krys Boyd to discuss how something as simple as a compass has come to define our world — from how “the West” defines political power, what we mean by “the Global South,” and why cardinal directions might have been some of the very first words used in human language. His book is “Four Points of the Compass: The Unexpected History of Direction.”
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Transcript
Krys Boyd [00:00:00] The things we refer to as the cardinal directions, north, south, east and west. They, of course, help us describe and navigate physical space. But as essential as they are for wayfinding, they are also hugely important to our social and cultural and intellectual lives. When we talk about the West, we may be thinking about the location of countries in the Americas and Europe relative to, say, Asia. But we might also be referring to certain shared values or cultural distinctions. Like when leaders in Russia talk about the West, they may not just mean going left on a map. They are using the term to draw comparisons between their political and economic and cultural traditions and ours. From Kera in Dallas, this is Think. I’m Krys Boyd. I say going left, but here’s another question. Why couldn’t West be right on the map? How did it happen that the direction we call North ended up at the top rather than the bottom of modern globes or just floating out in space? There is no reason we couldn’t have decided to imagine Argentina and Australia at the top of the world instead of Greenland. If your mind is a little blown by this, and I can tell you mine is, you’re really going to get a lot out of today’s conversation. Jerry Brotton is professor of English and history at the University of London and author of a fascinating book called “Four Points of the Compass: The Unexpected History of Direction.” Jerry, welcome to Think.
Jerry Brotton [00:01:23] Thank you. Lovely to be with you. So, yeah, it’s great. I’m in New York, actually, so I’m north of you.
Krys Boyd [00:01:31] Wonderful. That’s right. We’re here in Texas. So that iconic blue marble photo of the earth taken from space in, I think, 1972, it is every bit as stunning all these years later, despite the fact that it’s pretty familiar to us today. Why did NASA have concerns about releasing the image exactly as it was captured?
Jerry Brotton [00:01:52] What I discovered when I saw the contact sheet that NASA first had when the astronauts took the pictures. I mean, it’s amazing story in its own right that nobody knows which of the three astronauts actually snapped that picture. But they did. They went to their graves saying that they each had done it. And it’s fascinating that NASA couldn’t name who did it, but whoever did it took the most reproduced photograph in the world. When NASA saw it, what they noticed is that the image showed the globe with south at the top. So if you can imagine, you had Southern Africa, Madagascar to your left and the South Pole at the top. Nelson looked at that and saw if they released it because they knew what the power of that image, I think, would be. They knew that most people globally would be disoriented by it. So they flipped it. So they put north at the top. So I think it’s an extraordinary story and really begins the book because I was so amazed to see that this had happened, that we are so hardwired now in the West to think about the north as being on top. So this begins this sort of game in the book, in the way in which I talk about what you were just describing there, the way in which in certain moments we talk about directions in terms of directions, you know, if you’re sailing north, there’s a certain in north and south are specific in terms of how you orientate yourself. But when you think about your identity and they can change and morph in different ways. So, you know, I’m from the U.K. In the U.K., I said I’m from the north of England and I’m a northerner. But now I’m here in New York. And when I meet people, you know, from rest of the globe, I’ll say I’m a Westerner. So those terms change and shift. And they’re not absolute. And it’s one of the things I was just fascinated by looking at the book and thinking about how both the symbolism of these directions have become so naturalized for us in our everyday lives in terms of who we are and how we travel and also how they change now in terms of how we move online. But that’s another story which I’m sure we’ll get to. But yeah, that NASA thing, which I think was such a powerful story to really begin the book to, to to talk about the way in which north and south and particularly north being at the top is, is a very historically specific moment in the western, you know, Atlantic world that north is placed at the top, but there’s no need for it. There’s absolutely no need. And it’s one of the things I’m sure we’ll discuss about why that happens. But you could just as easily have south at the top. You could have any direction, really. So there’s no reason why it should be north. But the book tells the story of why that is.
Krys Boyd [00:04:30] Well, there’s no reason why that should take us by surprise. And yet it does because we just most of us have not seen images that go the other direction.
Jerry Brotton [00:04:38] Yeah, exactly. Exactly. You know, I think really of the last it’s really the last 4 or 500 years that north comes to sit at the top. But there’s no need why it should be so. In China, classical Chinese are maps and mapping their compasses. How the south at the top. So there’s no need to go north. You could just as easily go south. And it’s one of the things I found in the surprise is the people choose in the north because for most people, especially in the Western Hemisphere, north is a place of darkness. It’s a cold place. It’s it’s associated with death and disappearance. It’s not somewhere you necessarily want to go, but of course, it just depends where you are. But it is odd because there’s no reason really, because you might think of geomagnetic of the earth. Okay. So you have a magnetic draw that’s going north and south. But again, that just depends where you put your the pointer and your arrow. So the South would work just as well. And classically in classical Islam world, maps have south at the top. And this is quite extraordinary to look at. You look at maps from the ninth, 10th, 11th, 12th century in Islamic culture. And south is at the top. That south is at the at the top, because in the first decades after the rise of Prophet Muhammad and the expansion of Islam, the people who converted were due north of Mecca. So they understood the direction in which they understood that their divine orientation was up south. So all early Islamic maps of south of the top, and it makes absolute sense if you’re part of that culture, you’re just naturalized. You understand that as we are now pretty much in the Western world, to see the north at the top. The brilliant thing is that I discovered in the process of the book, no cultures ever put West at the top. And that’s because West is of course, this goes right back through archaic human culture and societies that West is where the sun sets. So it’s a symbol of of darkness, of disappearance and also of death. It’s the idea, you know, that the you know, your life is here from sunrise to sunset. So it’s a place that you don’t associate with, you know, hope and renewal. So there is no culture I discover that has West at the top of its maps. So there are really sort of deep seated beliefs connected to the natural world about how we understand those those four points of the compass.
Krys Boyd [00:07:04] North, south, east and west, the cardinal directions. I mean, obviously they have different names in different languages, but they seem to be common to many, if not all, cultures. Why do cognitive psychiatry psychologists think that spatial words were probably some of the first to find their way into use as humans around the world began to develop languages?
Jerry Brotton [00:07:25] Because I think that’s the first thing that you do, really, isn’t it? If you think of babies, what they do, they try and sort of understand themselves in relation to what is out there in the world. So they understand front and back and gradually they understand up and down. And then we understand the concept of left and right and all those terms, literally those terms up, down front, forward, backwards behind. They are all synonyms. In early classical cultures for linguistic terms to understand direction and orientation. And somebody said to me, in terms of talking about this around psychology, that it’s a basic issue about safety. You need to orientate yourself in terms of the wider world because you face threatened danger. Everything’s going to try and basically kill you. So if you start to understand what’s in front of you, behind you, and then what’s to one side and the other, that is the way of giving some meaning and some sense to the world around you. So it comes through Hebrew. The word for East also means front or forward. The word for West in Hebrew means behind. In Arabic, north is our shamal is left, and south is aljunied, which is right. So this goes right back to the sort of foundational roots of language and I think really understand language. And you communicate in a way to understand your place in the world. And that sounds more philosophical. It’s literally where do you go to get food? Where did you go to get water? And what seems to happen in these early linguistic moments is that east and west become the first terms that really people use. And that’s because you look east and you see the sunrise and you look west and you see the sunset. So once you have that east west axis, then cultures start to develop a sense of north and south. So at midday, the sun is, you know, at Zenith and that’s due north. You also can then understand the pole star, the North Star in the Western Hemisphere. That’s also north. And so then you have an understanding of south. So east and west comes first. North and south come subsequent to the words start to develop really from a sense of of your body. There are these amazing pieces of doggone rock art from Marley which show a representation of the body where the head is north, the Lexus south, the left arm is east, the right arm is west. So it’s literally about the way in which your body is almost a compass. It’s funny with the book, because the time for points, the compass really doesn’t tell the whole story because it’s relatively recently that the compass emerges to give us a sense of those four cardinal directions. But for thousands of years before that, people are using these terms for particularly the four directions. You know, they ask texts, use these terms. They even have a fifth direction, which is really the centuries is them. So the way in which different cultures all use cardinal directions, but they don’t necessarily all use for they are pretty they’re not quite universal, but they’re quite universal. But other cultures will use different conceptions of the cardinal directions. So they go right, right back. And in fact they start I mean, I start in the book. I go right back to the Akkadian period in 2500 B.C. first clay tablet maps that we have, which have words being used for north and south and east and west. And they’re actually about winds. So it really goes right back to the idea of where wind comes from. You say, this wind comes from that direction and it’s a dangerous wind because it flattens the crops. This wind brings warmth. So that’s a more positive wind. So it’s really a meteorological issue. And of course it’s about agrarian societies that are understanding direction and what comes towards you. The wonderful moment that I realized that the book is about a point where that shifts and then you start to say, a direction is not what comes towards you, but it’s a place that you go towards because of course, in classical culture, traveling is a dangerous thing. You don’t want to travel because you’re going to get killed. So the idea is that gradually people start to orientate themselves to say, okay, that is what we call east and we go east because there’s more food there. And then we come back from that direction. So we start to use that as a basic point of orientation and the word orientation. Again, these terms, I mean, the book is a short book, but it’s sort of started blowing my mind because as I was getting into it, it became really difficult. Almost to write through what I was talking about. When you say, well, in the Western world, you know, north is at the top and then you say you feel disoriented and well, the word disorientation comes from the Latin origins, which is the east, because that’s where the sun rises. So that’s the Latin term for the sun rising. So you see how our languages are just completely embedded in these terms and shape, just not not only how we move, where we go, how we move from one place to the other, but how we define ourselves, who we are as northerners, Southerners, Westerners, easterners. But that has its own politics because that’s often a term that’s used instead, which is Orientalism people from the Orient. But that’s a whole other story. So those terms are very embedded around language. And so they themselves are very based on very much based on how we understand ourselves. I’ve always said this because I’ve written about maps for many, many years, and I’m fascinated by how much shape who we are, because I set a to understand that and answer that philosophical question Who are we? Such a driver of all philosophy? Who are we? We often have to ask, Where are we? Because we situate ourselves within a wider world and we can only say where we are by giving direction and saying, Well, I’m here, I’m in the north, I’m in the east and so on and so on. That then shapes identity. So the book was really trying to do the two things. I guess it was part science history book and part really philosophy. As I say, I feel very much I talk about myself and joke about myself and not here because I’m in New York, but here when I say here in the UK, I talk about myself as being a northerner and that has a certain there’s certain stereotypes and certain beliefs and ideas that come with that. You know, here in the US, of course, that term actually interestingly means quite the opposite because in the UK the North is often associated with poverty, backwardness, you know, people not being so smart. I mean, all these kind of weird stereotypes. Of course, in the US, in a way it works in a different way that the South has that, you know, tradition to some extent, you know, of being somehow, you know, not as industrially developed, not as kind of cosmopolitan. Now they’re all stereotypes.
Krys Boyd [00:14:06] Okay, Jerry, today we broadly think of Asia as East the Americas and Europe as West. But given that all of these places are relative to one another and the Earth rotates, how did those differences get established? Like who decided the dividing line between East and West?
Jerry Brotton [00:14:24] I mean, I think that what really starts to happen is when you get European empires and colonies really from the 15th and 16th century. So the Europeans, of course, go east and west. So 1492 with Columbus landing in the Americas, the Portuguese are going eastwards via the Cape of Good Hope. And what you then start to get is, I think, the mix of both a navigational process, which is saying we go east that way and west that way, and then therefore north and south are up and down. And once you have that, you then start to say, and those people are from the East, they are Orientals and we will therefore colonize them and we will control them and we will teach them Western civilized values. So I think it’s really that period of man, I guess we’d call it the Renaissance period, the Enlightenment within European culture, which is a moment when you start to get that fusion of both navigational techniques because it’s really only until 12th, 13th century that the compass emerges out of nowhere. It’s amazing story. You know, the Chinese have an understanding of compasses for several thousand years. Certainly in the medieval period, they pop up in European sailing charts and nobody really knows how they migrated. The Chinese weren’t necessarily using them for navigational purposes. But once they do, that kickstarts a navigational moment. The Europeans then start to understand geomagnetic systems. North and south then becomes a big thing. But what they’re really interested in is going east and west because there’s nothing to get north and south. That seems to be changing at the moment, maybe with Greenland. But this idea that in this period there’s nothing to get by going to the north and the south poles, they’re rarely they’re not very well understood.
Krys Boyd [00:16:17] Excuse me for interrupting. You mentioned Greenland, which President elect Trump is very interested in controlling. He’s also talked about renaming the Gulf of Mexico. This is a little bit of a diversion, Jerry, but how how much does it take to rename a place that the world already has a term for?
Jerry Brotton [00:16:37] It’s very hard. You know, I mean, this is what’s interesting about how it pushes the limits, I guess, of global governance and legality. Can you really do that? I mean, in the 15th century, the Europeans, of course, would do that as they liked. You can’t rush to it these days because there’s certain binding forms of international law. And the Greenland issue, I think, is fascinating because people have commented on this, that this is an issue about map projections and really what we’re talking about. And people have been writing that Greenland on a map that President elect Trump may have seen look huge. It’s actually in terms of its surface area, half the actual size that you see on a map. But that’s the Mercator projection and that’s a 16th century European projection, which is used for trade and exploration by Europeans, which deliberately distorts the size of land north and south. So if you look at a mercator projection, anybody can go online now and have a look and you’ll actually see that the north and south poles are projected to infinity. That’s because Michael Mercator knew that nobody at that time really wanted to go there. And it’s one of the things I talk about in the book. The irony is that the triumph of the North being put on top of all world maps is because really of Mercator, because Mercator gives everybody this great navigational method of sailing east to west. So either side of the equator, his map projection is really accurate. Put the further north and south it goes because he thinks nobody’s really bothered about that. It gets more and more distorted until it gets to maximal distortion at the North Pole and the South Pole if ever looked. So as a result, Greenland is massively distorted. So there is a certain argument about. You know, size obviously matters, it seems, in these arguments. And this is perhaps why one of the reasons why when Claire Danes Greenland. So those issues go really, really deep. I mean it is interesting that you saying how easy is it to do that? I mean, in terms of renaming places. Yeah. Because they have such long, deep political, colonial and imperial histories, As you know, in the Americas, more than anything, the whole continent is named after a moment of exploration and discovery. And we know this in terms of how the British Empire does something similar, but it’s often through using navigational techniques that foundational to how you do that, because you then work out how you can get from one place to the another and do it again repeatedly. And to do that, you need maps and you need compasses, and you need to understand that you create a sort of standardized world picture. You know, I do think it’s fascinating because, you know, if you’re Chinese, if you’re Indian, if you’re Muslim, your heritage does not immediately have north at the top of its world pictures. So the the way in which the West or really sort of Europe and North America is exported, the idea as being one of the great triumphs and successes in a way of that history of an empire because it won’t change. There’s not a way it’s going to change. Maybe it will. Who knows? I mean, I’m intrigued now by the fact that maps online. When did you last look at a world map? You rarely look at world maps. I mean, I’m 55. I remember growing up as a kid. You have printed Atlas and we understood the world by looking at those printed atlas. Now we just use our phone to move from one place to the other, and we don’t really have a a similar sense of orientation. I think it’s one of the things I say in the book that we move from the beautiful image that we start to talking about. Chris, that NASA’s whole Earth image, which is often referred to also as the blue marble. You know, we saw that people saw that in the in the from 1970 to throughout the 70s. It kickstarted the environmental movement, you know, whichever way it was. We looked at that and we said, what a beautiful image, what a beautiful planet, whatever, let’s take care of it. And I say in the book that we’ve gone from that to the blue dot that we follow on our mobile phones. You know, I’ve been doing it today. Yeah, I’m here in New York. I’m finding my way around. I am not looking up. I’m looking down at my phone all the time. So we’ve moved from the blue marble to the blue dot. And I think that that has certain consequences for how we relate ourselves to the world because my kids don’t know what cardinal directions are anymore. They don’t know north and south, east and west. And often in urban environments, we grow up in places where we don’t see the sunrise, nor do we see it set. And we don’t therefore understand north and south as a result. So we were hard wired as as humans as part of our survival technique to understand, you know, the way in which the natural rhythm of the world gave us those directional points and now we don’t have them anymore.
Krys Boyd [00:21:30] When monotheistic religions came along, Judaism and Christianity and Islam, they wanted to distance themselves from sun worship. But there are lingering traces of earlier associations between the sun and the east with the divine right, like the Garden of Eden is supposed to have been planted by God in the East.
Jerry Brotton [00:21:51] Yeah. So, I mean, what happened is that monotheism says, right, we can’t get into the of the worshiping of multiple gods because they tend to that in the East because it’s about worship of the sun, of heat, of light. But they also know that they still need to sort of take some of those ideas with them. So Judaism and Christianity particularly sort of cool the idea of thinking about the East as the prime direction, but as you were just describing what they do is then then they’re their creation. Stories are very much about the origin of life in the East. So absolutely, God creates, you know, Eden in the East and indeed Adam and Eve leave the Garden of Eden. They’re expelled and they go east. East of Eden, goes so east still becomes the prime direction for both Christianity and Judaism. It’s still the point at which you’re supposed to pray. And that remains a sort of constant and is still a bit of discussion within within the Catholic Church to this very day. So that is really, really central to those monotheistic principles. Islam, of course, takes literally a different direction. It’s really very much comes out of that that tradition, but wants to again mark itself as being different. And so you get this orientation about South being at the top because of the early cultures that convert you north of Mecca. And that’s different from what subsequently happens in Islam, which is that you work out the direction of prayer, which is known as Kibler. And Kibler is very much you have to pray in the direct. Of Mecca and Medina in that direction, in that area, into that holy area. So it’s very much about where is your holy site and which way in which direction. How do you orient, how you pray in those directions? So monotheism is very interesting because I say in the book that, look, what happens east is at the top. And you can see this in these wonderful medieval mappa mundi mappa meant just means the map of the world. It’s a beautiful wooden Cathedral and made in 1300, and it shows at the top of the map. It shows the Garden of Eden. And then you move down the map and you go effectively west. And the final point on that map is Gibraltar, because, of course, it’s pre any understanding of the Atlantic and the Americas. So Christianity has east at the top. But at the same time, if you were to travel to Saudi Arabia today, you would see bear maps had south at the top. And then it’s really only from the 15th and 16th centuries. The question you’re asking earlier, when did that shift really take place? Well, it’s then whenever again and is using compasses and he’s thinking about north and south as a as an orientation. But he’s traveling and he’s trading and he’s colonizing from east to west throughout the Atlantic and into the Pacific and Indian Oceans. So once you’ve got that kind of axis going on, that’s how North then ends up triumphing and is ends up at the top, goes back to the Greeks as well as the Greeks. The Greeks really start the tradition of putting north at the top, but they do it for geometrical or mathematical reasons more than anything. So all these stories have very, very deep sort of long, long, sort of tangled histories. So I guess with the book was just trying to sort of unpack a little bit.
Krys Boyd [00:25:13] Jerry, if it was European imperialism that broadly established the idea of what is near, Middle and Far East, have the people in those places so labeled by Europeans tried to push back on that predetermination of their relative location on the globe, or have they just sort of accepted? This is what everybody understands.
Jerry Brotton [00:25:33] I think now it’s become sort of to some extent accepted. But there are throughout, I think particularly the last couple of hundred years, definitely culture to reject it and then sort of see it as a political act to invert the way in which those stories about north of the top become established. There are two lovely examples in the book. One is rather mischievous. It’s an Australian is a kid, really is called Stewart MacArthur. And in the 1970s he’s asked by his geography teacher to draw the world. So he draws it, but he puts south at the top, such as Australia, at the effectively at the top. And if imagine how he thinking of that he has Australia at the top. So in the top right is south is is Africa and the top left is South America. Just get your head around that. And he draws that and his geography teacher says, No, Stuart, that’s wrong. You’ve done it the wrong way. So he gets across by this that in 1979 he publishes a map which is called MacArthur’s Universal Corrective Map of the World. And he puts south at the top and he’s got a great little legend within it where he says, you know, this is how the world should look. Long live Australia. And actually there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s just an inversion. It’s just put south at the top and that’s absolutely fine. There’s nothing wrong with that. And the map is using a standard kind of projection. It’s fine. And there are other traditions. Slightly earlier, Uruguayan artists like Joakim Torres Gauthier, he does this beautiful. Anybody interested in contemporary art may have seen this beautiful image that he produces, which is called Inverted America. So he again puts South America at the top. So you see the tip of southern America at the top with the sun next to it. And the line of Ecuador running along the bottom of the map. And again, it’s just a very clever, I think quite subtle, but visually very powerful, powerful way of saying it’s only a sort of political and colonial story of why you might put north at the top. And if we turn it around, it’s absolutely fine. But I guess in answer to your question, I think that we’ve we’ve ended up just sort of saying north is at the top. I think most now globally, most societies and cultures would still orientate with north at the top might be different where you put the center. It was a great moment under the Clinton administration. I remember having talks, I think it was with China, and he stood in front of a map which was had north at the top, but it was centered on the Pacific. And again, we often think of that world map with north at the top, and it’s centered really on the Atlantic. So, you know, when we think about the Middle East, I mean, often do this with my students in the UK, many British Muslim students whose heritage is from that region. And I say, what does it mean to talk about the Middle East? It’s it’s an Irish thing, right? But what that imagines is the world picture, which has north at the top, but is pretty much centered on the Atlantic world. North America is to the left, Europe party to the right and then to somewhere called the Middle East and then somewhere called the Far East, which I guess would be Japan, China, Korea. That’s just a question of where you where you tilt your map. Yeah, there’s nothing really weird about that. And there is nothing real about a place called the Middle East. And I notice that the US State Department, when it tries to define countries within in that area that they call the Middle East, there’s no concrete, definitive sense of which country is there in the Middle East in which, you know. And so you start to realize that these terms again, are so imaginative. In a way. What Edward Sider Orientalism talked about, imaginative geography, the power of its imaginative geography that runs so very deep within it. And when using it now, when we think about it, we talk about the global South. So the global South has replaced, I guess when I was growing up, people would talk more about the Third World, and that would be about sub-Saharan African countries, many countries in South East Asia, and that’s now the Global South. But of course, it’s not consistent with a place on a map because Australasia is part of the global North. Yeah, So these are again, they’re imaginative terms when we talk about global south, global north, that they’re not they’re not wired to any sort of natural form of geography. You know, even the idea of what the North Pole is in the South Pole, many of your listeners will probably know this, but it’s important to remember there is no such place as the North Pole, the North Pole. That’s a term which comes from the Greek thinking that the earth is at the center of the universe and the enormous flippin great big pole running right through the entire universe that runs through the North and South Pole. There is a geographic North Pole, there is a magnetic North Pole. They’re both different. They both move. So when we talk about, you know, the North Pole and we talk about the discovery of the North Pole, you know, Robert Peary claims to discovering the North the North Pole in 1909. Nobody knows actually absolutely where that point is. So how can we be so sure about where a place called the Middle East is when we don’t even really know where the North, the South Pole pulleys and the terms themselves are completely imagined conceptions. And there’s a great race, you know, people use when they get to the pole. They say there’s no here, here.
Krys Boyd [00:31:08] Jerry, I said north, south, east, west, because that’s how we always say it. In the United States, we start with North, we end with West. Do any countries go sort of clockwise, starting with a different direction?
Jerry Brotton [00:31:22] Yeah, the Chinese do a completely different thing and they follow the idea of the seasons so they don’t use the same system. So you would literally use that, you know, and E. S w in completely different ways. North, east, south, west. I do it in the book. I start with east because I follow, as it were, the arc of the sun through the day. So it goes from east and it ends with west. And again, that’s slightly counterintuitive, but it is to challenge the idea of the assumptions about how we, as it were. Slight moving around a clock face, isn’t it? North, east, south, west. But again, it’s been hard wired because of how we think about the compass within Western culture. But no, the Chinese tradition is fascinating. And the way in which you can look at how the Chinese talk about orientation and they have this south pointing compass for them, that’s the South is often the prime direction. So the word in Chinese for Compass, we would translate into English as the thing the point south. So it’s just a question of where you put the arrow. And so yeah, different cultures privilege different directions and also different movements through the directions themselves. Chinese are interesting because their maps also interestingly have north at the top classical imperial Chinese maps. But it’s because of a certain imperial idea that the emperor looks down and that’s a synonym for South. And the subjects look up in subjugation to the emperor. And the idea is that South in China is a place of warming winds where you can get, you know, the warmth that, you know, ripens your crops. And north you look upwards. So the emperor has a privileged position to look down into the lovely southern areas, whereas North, again, is a place of darkness. So north is at the top on Chinese world maps, but not because they adopt Western tradition. They do eventually by the century, but actually it’s because of a certain imperial ideology. And again those words in Chinese for up down back from there. Related to that a sense of the body. You look up, you look down. It’s north. It’s south.
Krys Boyd [00:33:40] Well, you mention you know, north is associated with coldness and darkness in the northern hemisphere. Presumably that’s where the lion’s share of our listeners are. But do those associations flip for civilizations that are located south of the equator?
Jerry Brotton [00:33:55] Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So of course, everything works differently. And you have to watch this when you’re describing it and writing about it. And I found this because you realize that you’re making certain assumptions about the North Star, for instance. Well, that’s only in the northern hemisphere. In the Southern Hemisphere, you can’t orientate yourself in the same way. So things flip. The Europeans discovered this as soon as they were sailing south of the equator. So the 15th century Portuguese navigators, once they go south of the equator, really from the 14 6070s, they realized that they’ve got to work out completely new methods of navigation because they just have a completely different star chart that they’re looking at. So absolutely, you know, again, that that thing and and I say this in the book that the South is often seen as this place, which is not as developed. It’s connected maybe to the Pacific a lot of the time. And of course, their traditions and their navigational histories and their cosmologies are completely different, totally different, and in many ways remain quite alien to how Western European, North American, Anglo American traditions understand direction and orientation.
Krys Boyd [00:35:06] I will acknowledge here that Americans have a well-deserved reputation for being a little solipsistic. But as you know, in the United States, the West has an almost mythological significance. In our case, the West represents, whether accurately or not, adventure and freedom. How familiar is that sense of the American West to the rest of the world?
Jerry Brotton [00:35:27] I don’t think as much. It’s a really good question because I don’t think as much as you might imagine and I was realizing this when I was doing the research into the book and the way in which that sense of manifest destiny, of always, always moving westwards and that pioneers spirit is something which of course is is has a very mixed heritage, right? It’s both very sort of exciting and it’s sort of dynamic and it’s about breaking boundaries, but it’s also about colonizing and it’s about taking other people’s land than it’s about going ever, ever westward. And it is this it comes right really from the 16th, 17th century English descent in religious tradition. So I thought that was really interesting, that early moment of the way in which dissenting religious figures go west from England. And the idea is this. Will be not only the promised land, but it will really be a whole new beginning and a whole new heaven and new earth by going westwards. And then really, once you get that tradition going in the 18th and 19th century, West is always the direction that you go in and you go onwards to the Pacific and then you carry on. And of course, again, within histories of geography, navigation, there’s that funny story that you can go westwards, but you never start going east, but you can go north and you do start going south. Why is that? Well, it’s still a manmade idea because that’s about you create this idea of the poles, right? There’s a North Pole on the South Pole, but there are no defined points going east and west. So I think what Europeans I suppose some Europeans understand the way in which that certain part, the American the American imagination, which is always so restless, is always wanting to push boundaries, is always wanting to go further westwards, goes right, right back from me to those traditions of Elysium, of Atlantis. There are all these classical and medieval ideas that to go west is to go into a kind of paradigm, but it’s also a place where you go where everything is wonderful, but it is also where you go to disappear and to die in effect. So in many ways, the West, this idea of West is is a kind of really powerful, very mythologized idea. And again, I discovered in the book that as soon as you start talking about America and Manifest Destiny, and that takes a kind of harder edge in the late 19th century, when people start talking about the Western world, they immediately start saying that it’s decaying and it’s dark. So this great tradition, people are still writing about this. But was it Pat Buchanan, who wrote a book recently about, you know, the decline of the West? Many are many right wing conservative commentators in Europe are talking about, you know, the death of the West. And I’m just interested, as somebody who trades in maybe thousands of years of history, I think it’s really interesting that from the moment the idea of the West was invented as a geopolitical concept, people called time on it. But of course they did because the West itself was always a synonym for sunset for the ending of life. It’s where things ended. It was about death and decay and disappearance. So again, it’s kind of hardwired into our idea. I don’t think the West is necessarily going to disappear in the next year or two. It’s always just being questioned in terms of how it’s going to end. What is it? What do we mean when we talk about the West? It goes right back and it’s there in the Germanic roots of the word. When Oswald Spangler, he’s a 1920s German, think he writes this very influential book called The Decline of the West. It’s influenced a lot of U.S. foreign policy in the late 20th century onwards. And you literally translate his idea of the decline of the West. It is the sunset. It’s about the disappearance, the going down of that place. And again, I think it just shows you these long, long routes that we have that we immediately respond to the idea of the West. It’s it’s dying, it’s decline mining, it’s death. But yeah, that goes all the way through, I think, from the Manifest Destiny and the way in which now I think geopolitics is changing the understanding of how we think about East and West. Of course that’s happening. Look at what’s happened in the Ukraine, the way in which there’s been a real revival of that sense of the West, the West as a democratic geopolitical concept in relation to somewhere Eastern and the way in which Putin’s Russia is definitely being marked in that way and how America is sort of taking that role as the sort of center of the West. And that’s shifted, I guess, since the Cold War. You know, I grew with that sense of Eastern Europe. You know, Eastern Europe was, you know, Stalinist Soviet Russia. And, you know, it was about, you know, terrible tyrannical regimes. And then it shifted. And now we all go on holiday to those places. And it’s lovely. You know, again, it shifts very, very quickly those ideas. You know, the most wonderful thing that sort of reminded me about this is I used to live in Berlin just after the wall came down, and I befriended an artist who told me this amazing story, which sort of really summed up in many ways, I think what this book that I’ve written was about. And he said that when when he was living in East Berlin with the City Divided, he used to listen to West Berlin Radio and he found he found in a junk shop an old map of Berlin before the wall divided it. And he’d look at the map. And so he listened to the West Berlin Radio and they talk about certain places, and he’d follow it on on the map with his finger. And the night that the wall came down, he went through the wall and. He said he was running around everybody so excited. And he said a West Berliner came up to him and he said, excuse me, can you tell me where is such and such a street? And my friend looked because he had that map in his brain. He said, yeah, it’s down there, three blocks turn left and it’s on your right. And he said to me something really moving. He said, At that moment I was no longer an Ossie, which was the word for an East Berliner. He said, I was just a Berliner. And that and I just it was such a powerful moment to sort of think about how he had this idea of a city that was undivided and he knew his way around it. And I found it very moving that he probably thought for most of his life he’d never see the other half of the city in which he lived. But as soon as he could inhabit that and he could say to somebody from the West, yeah, it’s down there. His identity itself changed and everybody knew what an Aussie was looked like because they were so badly dressed. So, so there was a kind of powerful way in which it suddenly changed every sense of like, who he was. He was just a Berliner lived the story and shows you how quick those ideas change from east to west.
Krys Boyd [00:42:28] Jerry these days, even very young children in school are aware that we inhabit some place on this round thing known as the Globe. May be aware of other countries, the very first humans making the very first maps to represent the spaces where they traveled did not grasp the size of the planet they inhabited, did not know what else was out there. It’s hard to even get our heads around this, but people in Papua New Guinea, I guess, talked about directions that either indicated going toward land or going toward sea because that was their home world.
Jerry Brotton [00:43:02] Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And I think it’s a massive leap. We talk about mapping and, you know, animals can sort of understand they have a sort of map. They can move around, they can migrate. They might have a sort of toolbox that sort of geographical cartographic toolbox. And we now know that animals, you know, have magnetite often in their bodies, in their beaks, in their in their heads, which enable them to orientate themselves. Again, according to north and South, they are literally hardwired to the earth and to its geomagnetic core. But we are different as humans because we start to make maps. And once I think you do that, you start to understand, you know, you draw those lines to to move in and take yourself and to travel. That’s a massive game changer. I think once that starts to happen and it’s really interesting to see again, I guess you’re touching on how it works in Western or non-Western cultures and the differences because we’re now trying, I guess, a lot as historians and geographers to understand those different cultures, indigenous cultures where a lot of those mapping techniques have been wiped out. So say in Australia, the way in which the songlines work, those maps are difficult to comprehend. Sometimes they’re literally drawn in the sand and they disappear. So we’ve again, absolutely privileged a certain way in which maps first in print but now online have shaped our sense of who we are and how we move around. But they’re not the only ones there are. The tradition is there. And so I think a lot of the work that people like me do is to sort of say, what are they? And let’s let’s look at those again, because maybe they had some pretty good ideas of understanding how they oriented themselves in relation to the natural world, where there was a greater sense of respect for that natural world and often think this about the way in which we maybe use these compass points now that it’s almost quite therapeutic. So I say to people, you know, take the time. It’s almost like doing mindfulness therapy. So, you know, when you sort of say, you know, look up, I say, Yeah, look up, feel the wind on your face, What direction is it coming from? Where is the sun setting today and where will it rise tomorrow? And how do you understand where North is in relation to looking up at the sky? And that’s a sort of it’s not a mastery of nature. It’s a way of just sort of acknowledging it and maybe respecting it and saying, yeah, this is part of what I am and who I am in relation to the natural world.
Krys Boyd [00:45:46] Jerry Brotton is Professor of English and History at the University of London. His book is titled “Four Points of the Compass: “The Unexpected History of Direction.” Jerry, thank you for making time to talk about this.
Jerry Brotton [00:45:57] Krys, it was a real pleasure to talk to you. Thank you.
Krys Boyd [00:46:00] Think is distributed by PRX, the public radio exchange. You can find us on Facebook, Instagram and anywhere you get podcasts. Search for KERA Think to find it. Our website is think.kera.org. Again, I’m Krys Boyd. Thanks for listening. Have a great day.
