Diagramming as a Method of Mapping Protestant Subjectivities: Three Examples

This paper thinks diagrammatically about how to visualize Protestant subjects and subjectivities. Thinking about subjects through diagrams allows us to ask: How are subjects made in and through their spatial existence? Rather than starting from the classic trope of Protestant interior individualism, I argue diagramming is a method that can help us shift toward a deeper understanding of Protestant subjects-in-the-world. I especially build on recent scholarship on diagrams as methods of mapping in cultural anthropology (e.g. Engelmann, Humphrey, and Lynteris 2019), and I extend this into religious studies.

The Protestant “self” or subjectivity has often been thought of as a modern, belief-centered self that yearns to be free from the disenchanted materiality of the body and its physical environment (Keane 2007). In other words, Protestants are typically assumed to be interior individuals. However, once we think about subjects through the lens of space – or through their “spatial lives” (Green 2017) – it becomes clear the Protestant tradition also incorporates a multitude of other types of cartographic subjectivities. This paper discusses three example diagrams of Protestant subjectivity: the subject as concentric circles; the subject as a relational ensemble; and the subject as a friction-filled coupling. I base these diagrammatic interpretations on historical and ethnographic scholarship on how particular Protestant communities themselves think spatially about what it means to be “a Protestant” in the world. (During my presentation, I will draw each diagram.)

The first diagram is of the Protestant subject as concentric circles. Protestants across several Protestant communities seem to experience themselves with and through physical objects they arrange around themselves or carry with them. For example, Protestant settlers in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American colonies desired to place certain types of furniture surfaces in their homes, such as wood veneer with splendid grain patterns (Chuong 2020). In more recent times, evangelicals in today’s American Midwest may carry around marked-up and well-worn personal Bibles (Bielo 2009), and a nationalist-informed strand of evangelicalism has led some Protestants to photograph their family members holding guns for their Christmas cards (Manseau 2021). How can we map this type of Protestant subject? I suggest we can diagram this Protestant subject as a body with “attachments,” in Frantz Fanon’s sense. Fanon (1952) proposed subjects extend themselves through layers of space, such as, for example, bodily, mental, and/or social space. “Attachments” are, in Fanon’s thought, body aspects or physical objects that participate in or extend one’s subjectivity in these spaces, such as the color of one’s skin in an unfamiliar group, or the child’s teddy bear when going to bed. In the same way, the examples mentioned above – colonial Puritans sitting at home among smooth veneer surfaces, or today’s nationalist evangelicals holding guns on a Christmas card – present Protestant subjects who are extended through concentric circles, from their bodies into and through material attachments. If we use diagrams as method, we can visualize how the attachments that surround the bodies in these spaces, such as domestic surfaces or guns, become an integral part of the spatial diagram of this Protestant subject-in-the-world.

The second diagram is of the Protestant subject as a relational ensemble. For example, when some American Protestant women began interpreting the Bible through poetry in the nineteenth century (Wolosky 2002), each of them may have experienced herself as an ensemble of different relations coming together in the various social spaces involved in considering, composing, circulating, and publishing their poems. These relations might have included the woman’s own sense of acting as either an affable vessel or a critical hammer (or something in between) in relation to biblical words, as well as the relations of her individual and communal histories. There were family pressures on each woman, alongside friendships, experiences of spiritual connections, and gendered, racialized, or classed interactions. Each of these Protestant women experienced her presence in the world through a collection of relations – and moreover, the relations would shift into new configurations when she withheld or shared her poems with different audiences in different private or public spaces. We might diagram this Protestant subject as a shifting ensemble of desires, histories, interactions, and other relations that limited and/or facilitated her being in the world. 

The third diagram is of the Protestant subject as a friction-filled coupling. In some Protestant worlds, a Protestant might experience herself, and might be studied, as two or more “selves” who are connected yet stand in tension with each other. For example, in nineteenth-century colonial Southern Africa, a Zulu convert to an American Congregational mission church might experience himself as two types of subjects simultaneously: on the one hand, he was a convert gaining new types of knowledge and authority, but on the other hand, he was a convert newly positioned on a low rung in the racialized hierarchy of the mission station (Hovland 2023). These two subject positions were closely connected yet also contradictory, and I suggest this subject is an example of “partial connections” (Strathern 1991): the space in which he found himself – the colonial-era mission station – turned him into an internally split, partially connected self. If we think diagrammatically, we can visualize how the two or more subject positions he took up in this place pulled apart from each other yet necessarily remained coupled.

In conclusion, these three examples of subjectivity diagrams show that Protestants frequently see and sense themselves as operating in and through their spaces and material environments. They develop their subjectivity spatially. However, the sensorial, experiential landscapes and spatial configurations of Protestant subjectivity are not always the same; they emerge as different in different Protestant worlds. I propose one way of moving beyond the trope of Protestant interiority, and instead better understanding different emplaced Protestant subjects-in-the-world, is to map Protestant subjectivities through diagrams.