Weird Taxonomies in the Wake of Natural History

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?