ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

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

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

This session examines the epistemologies, politics, and enduring legacies of cranial measurement practices from the 18th century to the present. Bringing together case studies from Central Europe, the Middle East, southern Africa, and North America, the session traces how practices of measuring and visualizing human skulls shaped and were shaped by racial and nationalist ideologies, scientific internationalism, and projects of colonial governance and postcolonial repair.
Francesco Cassata analyzes the interwar scientific collaboration between Italian anthropologist Fabio Frassetto and German eugenicist Eugen Fischer, reconstructing how efforts to define Dante Alighieri’s “race” intersected with attempts to standardize physical anthropology and forge Fascist and Nazi racial policies. Iris Clever traces the long afterlives of craniometry within repatriation debates, showing how racialized biometric data—initially used to naturalize hierarchy—has also become a tool for antiracist repair and Indigenous data sovereignty. Baek Kyong Jo investigates Ottoman engagements with phrenology and craniology, demonstrating how late imperial intellectuals reworked European cranial sciences into a moral philosophy that emphasized education and perfectibility over racial determinism. Lisette Jong analyzes the persistence of race in forensic craniofacial reconstruction, arguing that dominant methodological configurations continue to reproduce racial categories even where disciplinary rhetoric seeks to abandon them. Finally, Paul Wolff Mitchell reinterprets Petrus Camper’s development of the “facial angle” through new archival work on the provenance of a Khoekhoe woman’s remains, reflecting on how confronting colonial violence has reshaped museum ethics and display practices.
Collectively, these papers show how skulls have been made to speak: as icons of national belonging, tools of scientific racism, resources for moral and political reform, and catalysts for repatriation and reckoning.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Elise K Burton, University of Toronto

Individual Presentations

• Educating the Heads: Biological Determinism, Reform, and Race in Ottoman Cranial Sciences - Baek Kyong Jo, University of Toronto, Canada

• Reconstructing Dante’s Race: Fabio Frassetto and the International Committee for Anthropological Standardization - Francesco Cassata, University of Genoa, Italy

• Craniometry's Afterlives: Race, Data, and Repatriation in Historical Perspective - Iris Clever, University of Chicago

• Facing Racial Science: Reflections on the Khoekhoe Woman in Petrus Camper’s Facial Angle - Paul Wolff Mitchell, University of Leiden

• The Persistence of Race in Forensic Craniofacial Depiction Practices - Lisette Jong, University of Amsterdam

Session Organizer

• Francesco Cassata, University of Genoa, Italy