Compare methods

	Body Mapping	Participatory Mapping
Field	Anthropology	Anthropology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2017	1994
Originator	Arts-based and participatory health research tradition (codified in Bernard)	Participatory rural appraisal tradition (Chambers)
Type	Arts-based visual method for externalizing embodied experience	Participatory method in which community members produce maps of their own space
Seminal source	Bernard, H. R. (2017). Research Methods in Anthropology: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches (6th ed.). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN: 9780759112421	Chambers, R. (1994). The origins and practice of participatory rural appraisal. World Development, 22(7), 953–969.
Aliases	Body Maps, Body-Mapping Storytelling, Body Map Drawing, Embodied Mapping	Community Mapping, Participatory GIS, PGIS, Counter-Mapping
Related	4	4
Summary	Body mapping is an arts-based, participatory method in which people draw life-size or templated outlines of their own bodies and fill them with images, symbols, colors, and words that externalize embodied experience — illness, pain, identity, trauma, or healing. The body becomes a canvas on which interior states that are hard to put into words are made visible and shareable. The resulting body map is analyzed not as a picture alone but as a visual narrative, read together with the story the participant tells about it.	Participatory mapping is a family of methods in which community members themselves create maps of their territory, resources, land use, and boundaries — sketched on the ground or paper, drawn to scale, or built in a geographic information system. Rather than the researcher mapping the community from outside, local people hold the pen, so the map encodes their own spatial knowledge, categories, and claims. The products range from rough sketch maps made in an afternoon to participatory GIS (PGIS) layers that can stand in formal land negotiations.