The Problematic Use of Race in Facial Reconstruction

ABSTRACT

Facial reconstructions have gained importance in museum exhibitions and in forensic sciences in recent years. These objects aim to represent faces from the past and present to elicit recognition in the public. Even though the face is a highly individual object, its reconstruction depends on the application of a number of general categories. One of the most central is race. When reconstructing a face, experts carry out a particular way of seeing – a skilled vision – that interprets visible differences in bodies as racial differences. This makes race a crucial component in the process of reconstructing a face, even though experts try to downplay its importance and rarely consider race to be biologically real. In addition, experts introduce alternative naming strategies, which nevertheless do not overcome the logic of understanding skull shapes and facial traits as markers of racial difference. These practices involve a paradox: a tension between practicing race and disavowing it. In other words, experts attempt to ‘make race absent,’ but with little success. As a consequence, the reconstruction of faces reiterates a racial perspective on human differences, as museums and forensic investigations present these race-based images to the public. Therefore, looking closer at facial reconstruction helps to understanding the complex ways that race arises in contemporary anthropology and the biosciences, as well as in public and social spheres.

KEYWORDS:

• Facial reconstruction
• race
• visible differences
• skilled vision
• presence made absent

Acknowledgements

I thank my informants for their time and will to share with me insides of their work. I also thank Amade M'charek, the Race/Face ID team and Jan Baedke for the useful comments on previous versions of this paper and the anonymous reviewers for the time and effort put into the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Abigail Nieves is a postdoctoral fellow of the Center for Anthropological Knowledge in Scientific and Technological Cultures (CAST) at the Ruhr University Bochum, Germany. Her research centers on the history and philosophy of physical anthropology and the human sciences. Currently, she works in her new project funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation on facial recognition technologies, racial categorization, and security.

Notes

1 For two-dimensional reconstructions, planimetric and superposition techniques are used. These reconstructions offer a drawn projection of a face based on the image of a skull (Valencia, 2010).

2 IACI was established in 1992 to standardize and evaluate techniques, as well as to foster discussion and development in the field (IACI homepage).

3 This paper focuses on the use of the expert eye, not on its education. For studies on training of the expert eye (especially in medicine), see for instance Saunders (2008) and Holtzmann Kevles (1997).

4 Experts have different degrees of confidence regarding different facial regions. Especially problematic are the nose, mouth, and ears, and their reconstruction involves informed guessing. On the complexity of the skull-face relation, see for example Wilkinson (2010).

5 Biological distance refers to the ‘measure of relatedness or divergence among groups separated by time and/or geography based on morphological variation’ (Pietrusewsky, 2014, p. 889). This means that biologically closer human groups are also phenotypically more similar.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst: [Grant Number 242618, 91655074]; Gerda Henkel Foundation.