Who decided that north was up?

KERA's Think

KERA

Society & Culture, 071003, Kera, Think, Krysboyd

4.8 • 861 Ratings

🗓️ 17 January 2025

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

North, South, East and West — the cardinal directions have a surprising history of cultural and social significance. Jerry Brotton, professor of English and history at the University of London, joins host Krys Boyd to discuss how something as simple as a compass has come to define our world — from how “the West” defines political power, what we mean by “the Global South,” and why cardinal directions might have been some of the very first words used in human language. His book is “Four Points of the Compass: The Unexpected History of Direction.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	The things we refer to as the cardinal directions, north, south, east, and west, they of course help us describe and navigate physical space.
0:18.6	But as essential as they are for wayfinding, they're also hugely
0:22.7	important to our social and cultural and intellectual lives. When we talk about the West, we
0:28.1	may be thinking about the location of countries in the Americas and Europe relative to say,
0:32.9	Asia, but we might also be referring to certain shared values or cultural distinctions.
0:38.1	Like when leaders in Russia talk about the West, they may not just mean going left on a map.
0:43.5	They are using the term to draw comparisons between their political and economic and cultural traditions and ours.
0:50.0	From KERA in Dallas, this is think. I'm Chris Boyd.
1:11.5	I say going left, but here's another question. Why couldn't West be right on the map? How did it happen that the direction we call North ended up at the top rather than the bottom of modern globes? We're just floating out in space. There is no reason we couldn't have decided to imagine Argentina and Australia at the top of the world instead of Greenland. If your mind is a little blown by this,
1:16.7	and I can tell you mine is, you're really going to get a lot out of today's conversation.
1:21.1	Jerry Broughton is Professor of English and History at the University of London and author of a
1:26.4	fascinating book called Four Points of the Compass,
1:29.6	The Unexpected History of Direction. Jerry, welcome to think. Thank you. Lovely to be with you.
1:36.3	So yeah, it's great. I'm in New York, actually. So I'm north of you.
1:40.6	Wonderful. That's right. We're here in Texas. So that iconic blue marble photo of the earth taken from space in, I think,
1:48.5	1972, it is every bit as stunning all these years later, despite the fact that it's pretty
1:54.1	familiar to us today.
1:56.3	Why did NASA have concerns about releasing the image exactly as it was captured?
2:01.6	What I discovered when I saw the contact sheet that NASA first had when the astronauts took the pictures,
2:08.6	and it's amazing story in its own right, that nobody knows which of the three astronauts actually snapped that picture.
2:14.6	But they did. Apparently, they went to their grave saying that they each had done it.
2:20.7	And it's fascinating that NASA couldn't name who did it. But whoever did it took the most
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