Mapping with ticks in some Italian mountains. Collective reflections on whose knowledge goes onto a map, why and how.

Abstract (English)

The mountain province of Belluno, in Northeast Italy, is endemic with tick-borne diseases and has long attracted medical and epidemiological research and, more recently, my ethnographic exploration of the perceptions, preoccupations and imaginations of local communities about living with ticks. Among the outcomes of this project is a map that brings together the knowledge of more than 1600 people about the localities where it is most likely to encounter these parasites. Personal reflections and discussions with the people involved in this participatory map-making effort have raised several significant questions. Apparently just practical, they indeed reveal deep epistemological tensions, which mostly condense around the issue of who (what discipline) should produce maps, because they would be “good maps” (Kukla 2017).
Maps that show the geographical distribution of tick-borne disease cases based on hospital records, or the presence of ticks in woods based on citizen science projects involving hunters have already been produced by other scholars. Can a map quantitatively grounded on a remarkably high number of respondents, yet still qualitative – based on community “hearsay” (Dove 2024) about the risk of human-tick encounters – aim at being considered by tick scholars, who mostly belong to the hard sciences, as useful to tick research as the others? While the other maps mostly remain within scientific literature, my project’s participatory map will first be circulated locally. Will local people see the utility of this research outcome or dismiss it because they do not need the “science of local hearsay” but only that of hard data? As a social scientist, I have to be concerned about the unexpected negative consequences of research. Could this map lead to the boycott of certain areas, to the detriment of already fragile local tourist businesses? In essence, would this map – like any other map based on ethnography – be a good map for anthropology as well as integrated, interdisciplinary research? The broader goal of this presentation is to reflect on the epistemology of map-making with other species and other disciplines.