ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Facing Racial Science: Reflections on the Khoekhoe Woman in Petrus Camper’s Facial Angle

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

English Abstract

Here I consider the emergence of racial craniometry in the late eighteenth century, attending to the work of the Dutch anatomist Petrus Camper (1722-1789). Camper’s construction of the “facial angle” posited a diagrammatics of racial difference in the skull that served as foundation and prompt for the elaboration of cranial race science in subsequent decades. I trace the development of the facial angle ca. 1768-1785 through new archival research, here focusing on Camper’s unpublished 1774 illustration of the head of a Khoekhoe woman, among the Indigenous people of southern Africa. This illustration and associated letters were essential to reconstructing the provenance of this Khoekhoe woman’s remains, including both her skull and ears, which Camper preserved after dissection of her head. This provenance research established that this woman’s head was removed from her grave a day after her death by one of Camper’s former students near Cape Town in the Cape Colony, today’s South Africa. This attention to Camper’s archive sheds new light on longstanding debate around Camper’s role in the development of racial science. I conclude with reflection on the effects of “facing” this history today, attending to how the provenance research outlined here – particularly the illustration of the Khoekhoe woman’s head - resulted in the removal of this woman’s remains from display in 2025, among other shifts around human remains at the University Museum at the University of Groningen, where Camper’s collection has been stored since 1820.

Author

• Paul Wolff Mitchell, University of Leiden