The vanishing Black Indian: Revisiting craniometry and historic collections

Abstract

Recent articles discussing the merits and weaknesses of comparative craniometry focus on methodological issues. In our biohistoric approach, we use the patterning of craniometric allocations across databases as a platform for discussing social race and its development during the 19th century, a process known as racialization. Here we propose that differences in repeatability for the Seminoles and Euro-American soldiers reflect this process and transformation of racialized identities during 19th century U.S. nation-building. In particular, notions of whiteness were and remain tightly controlled, while other racial categorizations were affected by legal, social, and political contexts that resulted in hybridity in lieu of boundedness.

Books, bones and bodies: The relevance of the history of anatomy in Nazi Germany for medical education today

“…However, one example shall be mentioned, and it concerns insights from the history of anatomy in Nazi Germany that may be informative for the question of what to do with anatomical and anthropological collections in the US (see also work by anthropologist Pamela Geller : Geller, 2015;Geller & Stojanowski, 2016). As bioanthropologist Rachel J. Watkins noted, these collections often originate from persons "on the social and economic margins of the societies in which they lived" and require a "humanistic study of these collections" with a structural violence framework that "situate[s] collections within the history of medicine, science and the social and biological lived of the people in the collections" (Watkins, 2018, pp.…”

The quantification of intelligence in nineteenth-century craniology: an epistemology of measurement perspective

“…More precisely, many craniologists were driven by the pressing aim of finding new justification for the existing social hierarchies on biological grounds, under the supposition that the prestige of science would put those hierarchies on a safer and less questionable footing. The impact of this research has been far-reaching, stimulating further historical and critical scholarly work on how socio-cultural and epistemic factors interacted in situated craniological practices (Anderson & Perrin, 2009;Challis, 2016;Douglas, 2008;Fabian, 2010;Geller & Stojanowksi, 2017) and, more generally, in nineteenth-century racial science and sexual science (Daston, 2008;Geller, 2020;Perrin & Anderson, 2013;Russett, 1991;Schiebinger, 1989;Tuana & Peterson, 1993). The long echo of this research also reached the public sphere, as in the case of Stephen J. Gould's reassessment of Samuel G. Morton's craniological research (Kaplan et al, 2015;Lewis et al, 2011;Mitchell, 2018;Weisberg, 2014;Weisberg & Paul, 2016).…”

Revisiting historical Khoe-San skeletal remains in European collections: A search for identity through craniometric analysis

“…In particular, when craniometrics is explored on a small spatio-temporal scale (region, cemetery), subtle gene flow fluctuations can be detected, as was the case in a number of South African studies exploring past morphological variation during the Holocene (e.g., Grine et al, 2007;Stynder et al, 2007, Stynder, 2009Ribot, 2011). A number of recent bioarchaeological studies have focused on the effects of colonialism throughout the world (Rankin-Hill et al, 2000;Blakey, 2001), and African skeletal collections dating to between A.D. 1600 and the present and located on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean have been (re-)analysed to inform various aspects including health and past variation (Renschler, 2007;Nystrom et al, 2011;Botha and Steyn, 2016;Geller and Stojanowski, 2016;Ribot et al, 2017). Since the 17 th century, the composition and distribution of the population of the world has been dramatically re-shaped as a result of Colonialism, war, genocide, epidemics, forced migrations of individuals, and gene flow between local and non-local groups.…”