Map

Abstract

In March 2020, Lee Hsien Loong, Singapore’s prime minister, appeared on television to announce that despite the ongoing pandemic, the government intended to go ahead with the general elections in a few months. Sometime after this announcement, a map was posted on the Singapore subreddit, which depicted the city-state divided into constituencies. However, instead of the electoral constituencies, the lines represented the territorial holdings of the 18 known otter families in Singapore (first posted on the group’s Facebook page). The map was created by a group called “Ottercity,” which is a collective of otter enthusiasts who follow the lives and movements of these animals in the city. As a member of the Ottercity community explained over an online chat, the Otter Representative Constituencies (ORCs) map was drawn in jest. However, read in relation to the effect of the city-wide lockdown on its resident animals, the ORCs map opens the space for rethinking human-animal relationships in its reconfiguration of the otter as an urban inhabitant. Moreover, read in relation to other maps that followed the progress of the pandemic across global and local geographies, the ORCs map is a window into the relationship between maps and landscapes and into mapping as a visual method in anthropological research. Show more