Copyright

Marianne Sommer

Published On

2024-07-30

Page Range

pp. 29–44

Language

  • English

Print Length

16 pages

2. Samuel George Morton and His (Paper) Skulls

  • Marianne Sommer (author)
Chapter of: The Diagrammatics of ‘Race’: Visualizing Human Relatedness in the History of Physical, Evolutionary, and Genetic Anthropology, ca. 1770-2020(pp. 29–44)
In Chapter 2, the now decidedly diagrammatic and metric approach to human crania of Samuel George Morton, ‘the father of American physical anthropology’, takes center stage. Morton drew on figures like James Cowles Prichard, Petrus Camper, and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, but his work was of different theoretical and political intent, and it was taken on by polygenists and advocates for slavery. Through his skull atlases, in particular Crania americana (1839), Morton instructed in a new kind of diagrammatics. Besides making available his huge skull collection through the lithographs in the book’s appendix, Morton used diagrams to introduce and explain measuring devices and the carrying out of measurements. He taught the reader in diagrammatically constructing ‘racial types’.

Contributors

Marianne Sommer

(author)
Chair of Kulturwissenschaften at the Department for Cultural and Science Studies at University of Lucerne

Marianne Sommer holds the chair of Kulturwissenschaften at the Department for Cultural and Science Studies at the University of Lucerne, Switzerland. Prior to that, she has held postdoctoral positions and professorships at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Pennsylvania State University, the ETH Zurich and University of Zurich, and has been a guest at many institutions, including Stanford University. For her research in the history of earth, life, and human sciences, encompassing processes of narration, visualization, and exhibition, she has received the Swiss National Latsis Prize. Her monograph History Within (published with The University of Chicago Press in 2016) engages with the science, politics, and culture related to reconstructions of human evolutionary histories; it traces the generation and circulation of such knowledge from the late nineteenth century to the present, including through venues like the museum, the zoo, literature, or the web. Among her monographs are also Bones and Ochre: The Curious Afterlife of the Red Lady of Paviland (published with Harvard University Press in 2007) and Evolutionäre Anthropologie (published with Junius in 2015). Bones and Ochre tells the scientific and cultural history of paleoanthropology and to a lesser degree archeology through the ‘biography’ of the most likely first fossil human skeleton discovered in 1823. Evolutionäre Anthropologie is an introduction to the history of evolutionary anthropology for scholars, students, and the interested public.