Mapping the Master
Mapping the Master is a collective reflection and body-mapping exercise that invites participants to examine how extractive relations are reproduced through the figure of the “Master,” an ontological position grounded in domination, anthropocentrism, and separation from the more-than-human world.
Tools
Participants trace how extractive values and attachments shape their ways of seeing, relating, and inhabiting the Territory. The activity creates space to collectively witness complicity not as a personal failure but as a structural condition embedded within extractive worlds.
When extractivism or resource extraction is brought up in public conversation, it is only associated with the infrastructure of mines, oil wells, or deforestation. However, extractivism is a storyworld — meaning it is supported through stories that create particular ways of relating that materially translate to how we come to be in the world.
Among the stories supporting extractivism is the Master, which positions humans as separate from and above the more-than-human world. In this activity, we center on “the Master,” which following Val Plumwood is not only a specific person or identity (white European bourgeois male) but a way of relating based on domination grounded in the reason/nature binary, control, separation, and the idea that land, water, animals, and even people can be treated as resources. The Master adapts to specific contexts and can, in uneven ways, be inhabited by those who benefit from and reproduce extractive relations.
Mapping the Master invites participants to reflect on how extractive ways of relating live within us and shape our everyday lives. The activity invites participants to think about the values, desires, fears, attachments, and habits they have inherited from living within extractive worlds. It asks us to reflect on how we intentionally and unintentionally reproduce forms of domination even while trying to challenge them.
Through body mapping, participants explore how these stories and relations are felt emotionally, physically, and socially. As participants create their maps and later encounter one another’s reflections, patterns often begin to rise across the group. People notice shared feelings, repeated contradictions, common fears, or similar ways of distancing themselves from extractive realities. These repetitions help participants recognize that extractivism is not simply an individual issue or moral failure, but a structural way of organizing relationships, values, and possibilities for life.