Schutzian social cartography

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to explore an uncharted aspect of Schutzian description of the structure of the stock of knowledge. The linkage between the stock of knowledge and the life-world isexamined through the cartographic metaphor of the map. Starting from an analysis of different manuscripts, it is shown that the cartographic metaphor is the heuristic resource used by Alfred Schutz to depict the complex relationships between knowledge and life-world. It is argued that the allegorical reference to the use of maps expresses the conversion of our perception of the life-world into contour lines or hatchings, which corresponds to the phenomenological insight that objects are given in perception through manifesting sides or adumbrations. Moreover, it is stated that the metaphor of the relevance-isohypses helps Schutz to describe not only the structurization of our stock of knowledge into theme and horizon and the levels of familiarity and typicality we perceive in the objects of the world, but also the incomplete character of our knowledge, i.e., the shadows and hatchings sketched in it as a consequence of the opacity of the life-world. It is maintained that far from belonging solely to geography, the metaphor of the unknown world as a «terra incognita» suggests an inquiry into the process of production of knowledge. The cartographic blanks do not preclude the impossibility of knowledge, but, on the contrary, they constitute its original source.