mapping a method to a list?

[gyromagnetic at excite.com]

Hi,
I am a relative newbie to Python, so this question may be quite naive.
Is there a way to 'map' methods to a list of items?

For a simple example, suppose that I want to convert the items in a
list to uppercase. Currently, I might do something like
>>> import string
>>> val=['abc', 'def', 'ghi']
>>> map(string.upper, val)
['ABC', 'DEF', 'GHI']

Is there a way to map the .upper method to these items? Something
like, for example,
>>>>map(?.upper, val). 

I think that map currently works by applying a function to each of the
items in the list, but would it be useful for 'map' to be able to take
a method instead of a function?

-Brad