Abstract

This article takes a cross-disciplinary approach to numbers and maps to demonstrate the performative power that emerges from their technopolitical intersections, such as the concept of population density and regional delineation of territory. Applied to the Brazilian context, this combined analysis sheds light on aspects related to the construction of State authority and its power to create categories of people and places. To do so, this paper examines trends that bring statistics and cartography together in the Brazilian Empire, indicating a common status for maps and numbers as descriptive instruments of sovereign power, including their modes of use and conditions for producing and validating truth. Subsequently, it addresses the factors leading to the growing importance of numbers and maps for collective action and the production of shared identities. Drawing on references from the sociology of quantification, this paper focuses on the emergence of statistical cartography and the increasing regionalization of official data between the 1920s and 1940s – linked to a new way of defining Brazilian identity, organizing territory, and managing population. It concludes that quantifying is also visualizing demographic and economic quantities in a coherent and unitary spatiality, once stabilized by conventions of equivalence.

statistical cartography; regionalization; State; nationalism; quantification