Thinking with the head : race, craniometry and humanism

This paper draws upon assemblage theory to challenge the familiar argument that nineteenth century craniometry – the practice of head measuring – was simply a racist practice. Approaching this practice as constitutive rather than derivative of racial discourse, we consider how race might be rethought if the head were regarded, not as just another focus for the racialization of the body, but as integral to the elaboration of a ‘biological’ conception of race. Taking up the post-Linneaun context in which this conception of race was elaborated, the paper documents how early nineteenth century debates about the distinctiveness of the human – classically identified with the soul or the mind – centred precisely upon the head. The practice of head measuring has to be understood in this context. And the emergence of an idea of racial biology can be traced, not to some attempt to ‘naturalize’ racist or ethnocentric prejudices, but to the effort of craniometrists to demonstrate the material existence of the mind. An alternative view of race thus comes into focus: beyond its usual characterization in the terms of an inter-subjective dynamics or identity politics, it appears as intimately bound up with this effort to maintain the privilege of the human over all other life-forms.