Invisible Cities: The Cognitive Maps of Israelis and Palestinians

Abstract

A map, according to the Multilingual Dictionary of Technical Terms in Cartography, is “a representation normally to scale and on a flat medium, of a selection of material or abstract features on, or in relation to, the surface of the Earth or of a celestial body” (Meynen, 1973). But there are also other maps — maps of the mind, maps which reside, in a way that we cannot fully determine, inside the mind/brain. These are termed mental or cognitive maps. Though one cannot actually observe cognitive maps, they are of the utmost importance, as it is according to them that we navigate in a city, commute to work, find our way home, search for a new house or a place to live, and so on.