The Place Names of French Guiana in the Face of the Geoweb: Between Data Sovereignty, Indigenous Knowledge, and Cartographic Deregulation

Abstract

French Guiana, the only overseas region of Europe located in South America, is faced with the claims of identity politics, particularly those of the indigenous peoples, who propose alternative place names. This critical analysis of the process for a posteriori recognition of toponyms is based on deconstruction of local, national, and international toponymic databases circulating on the geoweb, supported by interviews with the advocates of these corpora. We propose a critical analysis of toponymic data flows, examining how these data transit through the web and disappear into the limbo of the internet or gradually become definitive. This highlights the complexity of the current digital geographic information landscape: national institutes defend a form of data sovereignty for their territory, but they are caught between the digital empowerment of local communities now able to produce counter-cartographies and planet-wide cartographic deregulation emanating from the web giants. Résumé La Guyane française, seule région ultramarine d'Europe située en Amérique du Sud est confrontée à des revendications identitaires, en particulier celle des peuples premiers qui proposent des toponymies alternatives. Une déconstruction des bases de données toponymiques locales, nationales et mondiales qui circulent sur le géoweb couplée à des entretiens avec les promoteurs de ces corpus permettent de proposer une analyse critique des processus de reconnaissance des toponymes en aval de leur création. En s'interrogeant sur la façon dont ces données transitent sur le Web, disparaissent dans les limbes d'Internet ou font progressivement autorité, nous proposons une analyse critique des flux de données toponymiques. Celle-ci permet de souligner la complexité du paysage de l'information géographique numérique actuel : alors que les instituts nationaux défendent une forme de souveraineté informationnelle de leur territoire, ils sont pris en tenaille entre l'empowerment numérique des communautés locales qui leur permet désormais de produire des contrecartes et des dérégulations cartographiques planétaires issues des géants du Web.

Farewell to Maps: Reformulating Critical Cartography in the Digital Age

“…This counter-mapping is not new, but such initiatives -led by environmental activists, indigenous communities or even groups of committed artists -tend to multiply by taking advantage of the opportunities offered by digital technology. Challenging the cartographic authority of states, this double deregulation opens up an era of post-sovereignty cartography (Noucher 2020) that can appear both as a symptom and as an agent of the crisis of nation-states confronted with globalization (Desbois 2015).…”

“…While interoperability facilitates the transmission of data flows and makes it possible to spatially connect datasets (forming a continent), which could not previously interact and which evolved independently of each other (forming an archipelago), its implementation also has the corollary of plunging many datasetssmall maps of the web -into Internet limbo, for reasons that must also be questioned. For example, the analysis of the orchestration of data flows between different state platforms has made it possible to highlight the political and cultural reasons for the disappearance of Amerindian toponyms during the transition from Guyanese infrastructures to French national infrastructures; these reasons being linked to issues of national sovereignty and to an imaginary world forged on the basis of past border conflicts (Noucher 2020). By multiplying this type of empirical studies in hollow, by practicing a geography of the remains of the Internet or by remobilizing the white of the maps in the era of the geoweb, it seems to us that critical cartography could go beyond its original fascinations around the finished product, cartographic successes or even great narratives.…”

Plural Toponyms: When Place Names Coexist

“…Theoretically speaking, situations of toponymic plurality raise questions as to the binary opposition between exonym/endonym, by highlighting the relational and sometimes relative dimension of these two registers (Woodman, 2012). Finally, methodologically speaking, the identification of these numerous situations opens the way for a study of their cartographic expression in a context where cartographic media is proliferating on the geoweb (Noucher, 2020). Indeed, the end of the public monopoly on geographic information -or cartographic sovereignty -opens the way for the promotion of potentially competing toponymic corpuses (whether private, vernacular or official) in signage and in various online or embedded media.…”

Data-driven remote governance of sparsely populated areas: measurement and commensuration of wildcat gold mining in French Guiana

“…These tapped conversations between garimpeiros can help identify common toponyms, some of which have become official, as in the case of Guérilla(Noucher, 2020).11 In the words of the civil servant from the ONF responsible for this initiative, during an interview conducted in Cayenne on April 2, 2019.…”