Reimagining Collections of Skulls and Measurement Instruments: The Shifting Fortunes of Objects in the Circulation of Anthropometric Knowledge

• In Event: How Collections End: Objects, Meaning and Loss in Laboratories and Museums - I

Abstract

As a once widely acknowledged methodology in anthropology, anthropometry relied on the availability of international collections of human skulls as well as of measurement instruments. Based on an ethnography of anthropologist Irawati Karve’s (1905-1970) work and legacy in India and Germany, I shed light on the coming into being, transformation, ending or halted circulation of two different collections that composed this scientist’s anthropometric practice. First, I look at the tortuous trajectory of the collections of human skulls that Karve used for her doctoral research in Berlin, and their troubling presence in Berliner archives. Second, I examine the collection of anthropometric instruments, from their invention for the production of racialized knowledge to their current presence in anthropology labs and in a museum in India. As the decline of racial frameworks pushes for a halt of the circulation of the anthropometric knowledge enacted from these collected objects, their ghostly presence impulses, if not an end, a reimagination of these collections. While the fortune of skull collections is being contested in heated postcolonial mobilizations in Germany, the presence of a collection of anthropometric measurement devices account for the contingency of their use, though also through novel ways, in the teaching of anthropology in India today. Thus, beyond examining the push for an ending of such collecting practices, in my analysis of the case of anthropometry I shed light on the shifting circulations of these collected objects in order to account for transformations in knowledge practices and outcomes.

Author

• Thiago Pinto Barbosa, Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient