ABSTRACT Maps have long been used to deal with menacing waters, to make them comprehensible and governable. Cartography and governing water are both deeply entangled in modernist rationalities and modes of control. This paper takes as its starting point the floods that have affected southern Brazil in recent years and the scientific and journalistic maps that have emerged around them. Following hydrofeminist and political ecology debates, it argues for a hydrocartographic approach in relation to the examination of social water relations that affect both the way we understand cartography and the mapping of waters. It aims to rethink relationships with the more‐than‐human water bodies we inhabit, precisely in the light of the threats they pose. The paper draws on years of collaborative research with the indigenous communities in the southern Brazilian states of Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul and their relations to water. While colonial water politics continue to threaten the Ibirama‐Laklãnõ indigenous land, the affected Xokleng communities have endorsed a movement for territorial reappropriation that also connects to ancestral relationships to the territory's waters. Building on our mapping experience with this movement, we propose hydrocartography as a dual shift: watering cartography and mapping bodies of water .
Schweizer et al. (Thu,) studied this question.