mistaking the map for the territory?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation
If you wanna make one up you could call it geographic materialism. I don’t know what the term for this is in historical or anthropological literature, but this is not a new concept. Geography has made an impact on the material conditions of societies all over the world that’s hard to overstate. Early civilizations formed around large rivers because the fertile soil was good for farming. You can trace towns along rivers and you’ll find them an oddly consistent distance apart: roughly how long it takes people to walk from one place to another in a day. And then the presence of animals which could be domesticated within Eurasia was essential to the eventual dominance of the global north. Combine that with the fact that humans tend to cluster around an area and you’re either getting population maps or poverty maps across the board.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics
this is the general field of signs and signals and such
Does it have a special term? But I know what youre talking about. I called it the "that xkcd where it says 'its just a population map'"
