ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The Persistence of Race in Forensic Craniofacial Depiction Practices

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

English Abstract

Despite the rejection of race as a biological concept, the discipline of biological anthropology remains haunted by it. As an applied version of the discipline, also forensic anthropology continues to struggle with the legacies of race science. The debate on race in forensic anthropology has seen many iterations in the past decades. Critical anthropologists addressed how the shift from race to ancestry from the 1990s onward, was primarily a matter of discourse and did not reflect a change in practice. Some anthropologists called for a complete abandonment of ancestry estimation practices, while others continue to advocate for its usefulness in casework. In this presentation, I take the case of forensic craniofacial depiction to shed light on the persistence of race in forensic anthropology. The making of craniofacial depictions relies on the premises that 1) all skulls and therefore all faces are unique, and 2) differences in facial features and soft tissue thickness distribution differ on average for different populations. Historically, such reference data have been organized following a racializing logic that is not easily left behind. Drawing on the study of scientific literature and ethnographic fieldwork, I argue that a biological concept of race persists precisely in dominant methodological configurations, while work in the disciplinary margins can provide clues for alternative knowledge production practices that do not necessarily reproduce race.

Author

• Lisette Jong, University of Amsterdam