See how thoroughly the map and its categories govern our perception. In a famous experiment, the Me’en people of Ethiopia were presented for the first time with photographs of people and animals, but were unable to “read” the two-dimensional image. “They felt the paper, sniffed it, crumpled it, and listened to the crackling noise it made; they nipped off little bits and chewed them to taste it.”4 Yet people in our modern world easily equate the photographic image with the object photographed—even though the two resemble each other only in a very abstract sense.
