Touch in anthropometry: Enacting race in Dutch New Guinea 1903–1909

Mak, Geertje

doi:10.1080/02757206.2017.1281268

Cited by 3 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…When people felt less constrained by their labor contracts, Hagen had to maneuver more cautiously. Perhaps—like most other anthropometrists—he used his position as a physician to secure the cooperation of people from other groups of workers for his anthropometric projects (as the many bandages of the photographed people suggest), or he might have compensated their cooperation with money or gifts (Mak 2017, 14–19; Sysling 2013, 85–124).…”

Section: Sites Of Productionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Many portraits in Hagen's atlas were accompanied by facial measurements. These gave Hagen's atlas its scientific status, both by linking faces to the established science of craniometry and by objectifying visual observations through quantification and standardization (Dias 2004; Mak 2017). Moreover, measuring involved an even more far‐reaching fragmentation of a unique individual face into numerous, depersonalized, measured parts.…”

Section: Measuringmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A Colonial‐Scientific Interface: The Construction, Viewing, and Circulation of Faces via a 1906 German Racial Atlas

Mak

2020

American Anthropologist

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Atlases of anthropometric portraits—a scientific genre that emerged during the last quarter of the nineteenth century in the context of classical physical anthropology—invite readers to compare different races from all over the world. Concentrating on Bernard Hagen's Atlas of Heads and Faces of Asian and Melanesian People (1906), this article describes the apparatus that enabled such a way of viewing. A microanalysis of Hagen's facial atlas reveals the circumstances under which the portraits were produced, the reading strategies the atlas stimulates, as well as the reification of data through their circulation. It shows how precisely a facial atlas could function as an imperceptible interface between harsh colonial practices and German public support for colonizing “missions,” between individual subjectivity and racialized category, and between everyday colonial recognition and scientific analysis of “races.” Obscuring the apparatus facilitating such a vision naturalizes the position of a viewer surveying, analyzing, and comparing people of different geographic backgrounds as races. [colonial history, photography, face, racial science, Dutch East Indies]

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Section: Sites Of Productionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Measuringmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Colonial‐Scientific Interface: The Construction, Viewing, and Circulation of Faces via a 1906 German Racial Atlas

Mak

2020

American Anthropologist

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“… 1 Serialized information or data collected by the colonial administration cannot pass as neutral (Fischer et al 2020), and the involvement of many sciences in producing colonial dominance has been key to “braided” histories of science and colonialism (Thomas 1991; Zimmerman 2001; Spennemann 2007; Steinmetz 2009; Midena 2015, Mak 2017; Mukharji 2017) and colonial land tenure (Duve 2014; Eckert 2007). …”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Measures crystallize around conflict, and thus the history of measurement and census taking should be used by historians as trace fossils in the complex history of (colonial) capitalism. The numbers found in 1 Serialized information or data collected by the colonial administration cannot pass as neutral (Fischer et al 2020), and the involvement of many sciences in producing colonial dominance has been key to "braided" histories of science and colonialism (Thomas 1991;Zimmerman 2001;Spennemann 2007;Steinmetz 2009;Midena 2015, Mak 2017Mukharji 2017) and colonial land tenure (Duve 2014;Eckert 2007).…”

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confidence: 99%

Formative encounters: Colonial data collection on land and law in German Micronesia

Echterhölter

2021

Sci Context

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Argument Data collections are a hallmark of nineteenth-century administrative knowledge making, and they were by no means confined to Europe. All colonial empires transferred and translated these techniques of serialised and quantified information gathering to their dominions overseas. The colonial situation affected the encounters underlying vital statistics, enquête methods and land surveying. In this paper, two of those data collections will be investigated—a survey on land and a survey on indigenous law, both conducted around 1910 on the Micronesian island of Pohnpei, which had fallen under German colonial influence a decade earlier. Strikingly, there are no enumerators or envoys of the state visiting the doorsteps of Pohnpei. To facilitate the data collection on homesteads, the whole population of the island was called upon to measure their respective plots of land themselves, without resorting to certified land surveyors. The preserved cadastral lists and spreadsheets testify to a rather peculiar contact between the colonizing administration and the colonized peoples. I argue that the production of data made encounters necessary, which are best observed though a methodological focus on data practices. I argue, furthermore, that the Pohnpeians were prompted during the surveys to define their homestead in new terms. This did not only entail new two-dimensional plots but also a new regime of private property. The change in the legal concept can be seen as a continuation of colonial violence by other means, given that it happened in the aftermath of the defeated Pohnpei Rebellion. The argument of the paper is, therefore, that data collection can have formative effects on society, and that measurement and quantified information are often, as Witold Kula argued, a scene of conflict. At its core, the installation of these metric regimes signified a change in patterns of justification, resource management and the unwritten constitution of the Pacific island.

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Magnus Hirschfeld’s 1899 psychobiological questionnaire: the paradoxes of de-narrativizing sexual and gender nonconformity

Mak¹

2022

Intellectual History Review

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Touch in anthropometry: Enacting race in Dutch New Guinea 1903–1909

Cited by 3 publications

References 19 publications

A Colonial‐Scientific Interface: The Construction, Viewing, and Circulation of Faces via a 1906 German Racial Atlas

A Colonial‐Scientific Interface: The Construction, Viewing, and Circulation of Faces via a 1906 German Racial Atlas

Formative encounters: Colonial data collection on land and law in German Micronesia

Magnus Hirschfeld’s 1899 psychobiological questionnaire: the paradoxes of de-narrativizing sexual and gender nonconformity

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