ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Craniometry's Afterlives: Race, Data, and Repatriation in Historical Perspective

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

English Abstract

This talk offers a new historical perspective on repatriation by connecting it to two underexamined histories of craniometry. The first is the history of antiracist race science – the recurrent appropriation of the tools and measurements once central to scientific racism for antiracist aims, including the contemporary work of repatriation. The second is the history of standardization, a long and fraught effort to define uniform methods for measuring human difference in skeletons. These standardization projects repeatedly failed, yet in doing so they helped entrench the skull and its racialized measurements within anthropological practice. When Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) was enacted in 1990, it revived these earlier debates in a new form in the United States, as researchers sought to digitize and systematize skeletal data prior to repatriation. This talk thus reflects on the dual legacy of biometric race science – its power both to reproduce racial hierarchies and to serve the ethical work of repair.

Author

• Iris Clever, University of Chicago