John William Dawson was born in Nova Scotia in 1820 and died in Montreal in 1899. Raised a Scottish Presbyterian, he was a life-long defender of Protestant Christianity. He was also a celebrated geologist, president of Montreal’s Natural History Society, founder of the city’s Natural History Museum, and principal of McGill University. Dawson saw no contradiction between Protestant revelation and evolutionary science. He hunted for ancient fossils across Eastern Canada, even as he insisted that humanity had been divinely created only relatively recently. He viewed cataloging scientific specimens and creating taxonomies as bolstering his Protestant faith, as he wrote in several treatises on the topic.
Dawson exemplifies mapping practices among Protestant scientific elites of his day. He created cartographic maps of field sites, as well as (and more interestingly) taxonomic maps of how the world was arranged. The Natural History Society, as conceived by Dawson and his peers, recognized the mutual interdependence of Protestant minds: they were in constant dialogue with each other to reify their emerging maps. At the same time, it defined an exclusionary space in which “men of science” created a sense of themselves as the special few among humankind who discovered the world on behalf of the rest. For these European settlers and their descendants, the experience of collecting things and reorganizing them according to their own classifications was foundational to how they came to know and possess North American land. It was a type of “aestheticized possession” (Merish 2000, 2-4) of sensorial landscapes: through ostensibly discovering and cataloging the land’s features, they came to possess it vicariously. It affirmed their sense that, as Dawson contended, the Protestant God was supreme and had ordered the world’s wonders for their benefit.
This paper begins by reflecting on Dawson’s study of natural history as a form of mapping of a socio-material Protestant world, both in the social connections it cemented with other men like himself and in the way it linked material fossils (Dawson called them God’s “works”) to his cosmological vision. It then jumps to the present, discussing how Dawson inspired my experiments with inhabiting and undoing this kind of mapping after I was awarded funding bearing William Dawson’s name (at the same university where he once worked). In 2021, I used the funds to organize my own “Natural History Society” called TERA (technology/ecology/religion/art), which brought together 5 scholars and 2 artists every month on Zoom to present artifacts, such as bits of writing and poetry, sounds, and art. Our project was a “serious parody” (Wilcox 2018), a ludic protest that parodies a dominant cultural institution while claiming certain aspects of it and gaining real insights by imitating its forms.
Even the scientific task of cataloging artifacts has never been the rigid process that many social scientists assume: taxonomists “are continually open to new data and new visions” as they collectively reassess the links between things (Hartigan 2014, 70). In that spirit, we remixed categories as we presented artifacts to each other. After each meeting, we circulated transcripts of the conversations as a method of observing our collective knowledge-making process in action. Later, we made our own weird taxonomic maps. In November 2022, we converged in Montreal to reimagine the connections between our artifacts. Instead of following norms by which Dawson might have presented his fossils, we made taxonomies based on color wheels or geometries or creative chronologies. Working with a web creator, I then translated our maps into an online pedagogical tool where students can experiment with their own mapping. To illustrate, this paper follows the multiple lives of one artifact – The Golden Record – as it moved from our initial conversations to our in-person mappings to its digital “afterlife.”
Thinking of maps as methodology and pedagogy in religious studies, I draw on scholars, in fields such as geography, who recommend mapping exercises. These exercises usually refer to moving through a space and collecting photographs, making sketches and observations, or recording stories as one goes to compile a multilayered inventory. This process can be complemented by another type of mapping that graphically represents connections between elements spatially, which may or may not exist in tangible terms. Mapping in both senses is a long-standing method used to reveal what is hard to discern otherwise, such as the emotions and symbol systems in subjective experiences of the built environment (Genz and Lucas-Drogan 2017). In some cases, it foregrounds subjective knowledge and is meant to lead researchers to question the colonial forms they reproduce (März 2022). The same can be said of TERA’s engagement with the Protestant-inspired taxonomies in Dawson’s Natural History Society.
While social scientists typically use mapping to better understand how people interact within a space, TERA’s interest lay in making our own scholarly methods into a site of observation. We acknowledge the legacy we have inherited from nineteenth-century, largely Protestant, ways of ordering the natural world. TERA’s ludic taxonomic mapping helped us better visualize Dawson’s Protestant world in his time as well as its lingering effects today. Yet we also engaged in experiential forms of critique by remapping what we have inherited. Our broadest goal was to experience knowledge-making as a process, in line with Donna Haraway’s comment (1991, 106) that “[n]ature is constructed, constituted historically, not discovered naked in a fossil bed or tropical forest.” Ultimately, this paper asks: how can we think about the legacy of Protestant-inspired taxonomic mapping in the natural sciences as a pedagogical tool in religious studies? As a methodological intervention, making our own taxonomies is a way of experiencing critique, that is of moving “map” closer to “territory” in J.Z. Smith’s terms. Can it help us to reimagine complex relationships with each other and the planet?
William Dawson was a staunch Presbyterian. He was also a celebrated nineteenth-century geologist, president of Montreal’s Natural History Society, and principal of McGill University. In his view, cataloging scientific specimens bolstered his faith. This paper begins by considering Dawson’s taxonomic work as a form of Protestant mapping. It then jumps to the present when it inspired my experiment organizing a new “Natural History Society” at McGill, which included scholars and artists. We presented artifacts to each other, created our own weird taxonomic maps, and made a digital pedagogy tool. The project was a “serious parody” (Wilcox 2018), a ludic protest that parodies a dominant cultural form, while gaining real insights in the process. Making our own taxonomies was also an experiential form of critique, a way to move “map” closer to “territory” in J.Z. Smith’s terms. Can it help us to reimagine complex relationships with each other and the planet?