ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Educating the Heads: Biological Determinism, Reform, and Race in Ottoman Cranial Sciences

• In Event: “Facing” the Past: Race, Craniometry, and the Afterlives of Human Skulls

English Abstract

This paper examines how late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ottoman intellectuals translated phrenology and craniology into a vernacular moral philosophy. Far from being provincial echoes of European ideas, Ottomans' creative engagements with cranial sciences unfolded as part of the same circuits of print and technological spectacles that made these disciplines a transnational fascination. Ahmet Rasim Barkınay's "scientific" excursion to Coney Island, for instance, inspired his 1911 translation of Heads and What They Tell Us, complete with crudely reproduced illustrations, while Gustave Le Bon's study of cranial measurements of Parisian hat shops lent scientific authority to the elitist worldview of many young Ottoman officers.
Ottoman authors adapted European cranial sciences as part of a broader effort to articulate moral and philosophical systems aligned with the Western human sciences. While they made explicit their purpose to materialize the soul by grounding it in neural and cranial structures, they simultaneously emphasized education and upbringing as the means to "correct" or "improve" cerebral deficiencies. This tension, I argue, reflects a deliberate epistemic sidestep from the biological determinism embedded in European racial sciences. Rather than accepting the hierarchies which might relegate Ottomans to a lower racial rung, Ottoman thinkers reframed phrenology as a science of perfectibility and moral reform.
Drawing on a range of Ottoman scientific works on cranial sciences, this paper situates Ottoman phrenology and craniology at the intersection of positivist physiology, racial anxiety, and educational modernity, revealing how the skull became both a site of materialist inquiry and a metaphor for moral and national regeneration.

Author

• Baek Kyong Jo, University of Toronto, Canada