ИСТИНА

Cartography is often taken to be a neutral instrument — a technical mirror of space whose value lies in accuracy and legibility. Yet the modern social sciences and humanities have shown that maps are never merely mirrors. They are models that select, classify, silence, and foreground; they are rhetorical devices that travel through institutions; and they are infrastructures that coordinate perception and action. In short, maps both represent and produce social realities. This paper offers a concise account of how state power and mapping co-evolve, moving from conceptual distinctions and ontological stakes to a compressed genealogy, and then to contemporary tele- and web-cartography. It closes by framing mapping as a method for modeling sociocultural processes—powerfully generative, but ethically demanding.