Seeing Through Blindness: Disability, Geography, and Tactile Relief Maps

Geography was under attack in the last decades of the nineteenth century in America. Educators labelled geography as difficult for the mind to grasp, as exercising no powers of intelligence, as beyond one’s entire sphere of existence, and as pure absurdity. At this same moment, however, students at the Perkins School for the Blind (Watertown, MA) employed tactile maps to sensorially and mentally experience concepts of space and place. This paper attends to the entanglements between geography, vision, and blindness from the 1870s to 1890s in the United States. In so doing, it probes how tactile relief maps made for the blind influenced broader developments in geographic pedagogy, the artistry of mapmaking, and knowledge production. Rather than considering tactile maps as peripheral to the advancement of geography and cartography, I argue that disability and maps for the blind propelled the resurgence of geography as an effective, thought-inducing field worthy of study—one that stimulated the mind and imagination in unconventional and non-visual ways. Relief maps disclosed to late-nineteenth-century audiences that geography encompassed more than an accurate rendering of the world; they revealed that geography exercised the mind, incited creativity, and challenged one’s faculties of perception. As material objects, tactile maps compelled audiences to see complex physical, social, and scientific relations between human and environmental phenomena. In other words, relief maps for the blind encouraged users to rely less on seeing through their eyes, and more on seeing with their imagination.