ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Craniometry and the Construction of Anti-Popular Racial Science in Victorian Britain

• In Event: Physiometry: Contesting the Arts of Bodily Measurement from Phrenology to Dermatoglyphics

English Abstract

In 1933, the British anthropologist Arthur Keith praised the sculptures depicting racial types that were exhibited at the Chicago World’s Fair. They made it obvious that the naked eye, ‘at a single glance’, could pick out racial features more certainly than a ‘band of trained anthropologists, who depend on measurements’ to distinguish between types. Yet for almost a century, racial differentiation had relied on the collection and analysis of minute cranial measurements. This paper examines why nineteenth-century race scientists came to rely on a process that made the basis of racial classification invisible and illegible to the majority of the public, and how it served their professional interests to construct a ‘science of man’ out of quantitative data. Not only did it legitimise racial research as a scientific pursuit, but it also suggested that only experts could accurately identify races, through mathematical proficiency rather than sight. The result was the creation of endless sub-races whose cultural differences were ascribed to minute cranial variations. While craniometry’s flawed, racist premises have been thoroughly discredited, this paper argues that its value to nineteenth-century anthropologists lay in its ability make racial classification an exclusive, expert-led, anti-popular science.

Author

• Elise Smith, University of Warwick