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Abstract
This paper draws upon assemblage theory to challenge the familiar argument that nineteenth century craniometry – the practice of head measuring – was simply a racist practice. Approaching this practice as constitutive rather than derivative of racial discourse, we consider how race might be rethought if the head were regarded, not as just another focus for the racialization of the body, but as integral to the elaboration of a ‘biological’ conception of race. Taking up the post-Linneaun context in which this conception of race was elaborated, the paper documents how early nineteenth century debates about the distinctiveness of the human – classically identified with the soul or the mind – centred precisely upon the head. The practice of head measuring has to be understood in this context. And the emergence of an idea of racial biology can be traced, not to some attempt to ‘naturalize’ racist or ethnocentric prejudices, but to the effort of craniometrists to demonstrate the material existence of the mind. An alternative view of race thus comes into focus: beyond its usual characterization in the terms of an inter-subjective dynamics or identity politics, it appears as intimately bound up with this effort to maintain the privilege of the human over all other life-forms.
Notes
1. It is, for example, usually maintained that craniometry ‘served from the start as a prop to racism’ (Fryer Citation1984, p. 170), or ‘served to legitimate racial hierarchy’ (Turnbull Citation1982, p. 17); or, in the similarly ideological terms of critical race theory, that it was ‘framed’ by ‘race … [as] the organizing grammar of an imperial order’ (Stoler Citation1995, p. 27), or that it was about ‘the relationship between the West and the Rest’ (Fabian Citation2002, p. 28).
2. After Latour's defence of Foucault against a social constructivist reading, we will use the term ‘discourse’ interchangeably with that of ‘assemblage’. On ANT and Foucault, see also Bennett (Citation2005).
3. We are not able to consider here how the multiple faculties that the phrenologists of the 1820s and 1830s sought to locate in specific regions in the head gave way to a single faculty of intelligence that, arguably, gave renewed relevance to the earlier work of comparative anatomists such as Cuvier. It was, however, Cuvier's protege, Pierre Flourens, who produced one of the most influential critiques of phrenology's attention to a variety of mental faculties, maintaining ‘with Descartes the incontrovertible existence of a unified moi’ (cited in Williams Citation1986, p. 108).
4. These measurements are Camper's own (see Meijer Citation1999, p. 108).
5. Mosse claims that as ‘[a]nthropologists accepted the ‘facial angle’ as a scientific measurement … they also accepted a standard of beauty as a criterion of racial classifycation’ (Mosse Citation1978, p. 23). And, similarly, Cornel West argues that ‘Camper … made aesthetic criteria the pillar of his chief discovery: the famous “facial angle”’ (West Citation2002, p. 101). We are unable to fully take up the way in which an eighteenth century ‘aesthetics of the head’ is invoked here as a vehicle for ethnocentric or racist interests. We will, though, be noting how it is with reference to such an aesthetics – and so also to these interests – that Cuvier is ‘linked’ to Camper and, beyond him, to what Goldberg refers to as the ‘aesthetic empathy or aversion’ that accompanies all racial classification (Goldberg Citation1993, p. 50). Also see Stepan, who – after Winthrop Jordan – describes the association of ‘blackness’ with ‘inferiority’ as an ‘aesthetic device’ (Stepan Citation1982, p. xii).
6. In addition to Stepan (Citation1982), ch. 1), see Goldberg for whom a biological conception of race was based on a ‘principle of gradation’ that derived from ‘Aristotle's “hierarchy of being’” (1993, p. 50).
7. See Stepan, for whom: ‘In addition to the concepts of continuity and gradation, the great chain embodied the idea of naturalism’ (Stepan Citation1982, p. 7).
8. Cuvier makes a similar argument with reference to the ‘upright’ position of man compared with other animals. In ‘man’, ‘[t]he plane of the foramen magnum is nearly perpendicular to that of the eyes, and parallel to that of the palate; on which account the eyes and the mouth are both directed forward when we stand upright’ (Cuvier 1802, p. 232).
9. In this direction, and in a reconsideration of familiar analyses of colonial views of indigenous so-called ‘savagery’, see Anderson and Perrin (Citation2008).
