Race and Racism by Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban

Author:Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781442274600
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
Published: 2018-03-17T00:00:00+00:00

Anthropometry, Craniometry Amounting to “Skeletomania”

Craniometry: Cranial Capacity, Facial Angle, Dolichocephaly, Brachycephaly

The cephalic index was invented by Paul Broca, a nineteenth-century French physical anthropologist who was a polygenist committed not only to the idea of separate origins of races but to a hierarchical view of human races. Anténor Firmin’s response to European racializing of race in his 1885 work De l’Égalité des Races Humaines: Anthropologie Positive (The Equality of the Human Races: Positivist Anthropology, 2000) is largely directed against the science of race constructed by Broca’s craniometry, including the all-important cephalic index. The index was measured by calculating the breadth of the head above the ears expressed as a percentage of cranial length from the forehead to the base of the skull. Broca invented many of the instruments of the “science” of craniometry, including the craniograph, the goniometer (to measure facial angle), and the occipital goniometer (to measure angle of the back of the skull). Broca painstakingly took 180,000 measurements of the approximately five hundred skulls in the Anthropology Society of Paris Museum in order to scientize his theories about race.

For Broca, a head with a cephalic index above 80 (assuming a length of 100) was classified as a brachycephalic head; when the number fell below 75, a head was classified as dolichocephalic. Indexes falling between 75 and 80 were classed as mesocepahalic. Some scientists became skeptical of craniometry when it was discovered that the shape of the skulls of Negroes and Scandinavians was similar enough to be classed together as dolichocephalic; it was apparent that something was wrong! (Haller 1971: 16). The basic formula for cephalic index held that northern European peoples were dolichocephalic, and that was the superior type; inferior types were characterized as brachycephalic, including Mongoloids from East Asia and Mongoloid-contacted groups such as Eastern Europeans. Poles, Hungarians, Ukrainians, and other eastern Europeans were also scientifically categorized as “inferior brachycephalic” types by Nazi physical anthropologists using these same craniometric measurements seven decades later.

Cranial Capacity and the Ranking of Race

The “science” of race progressively moved from the gross measurement of the skull and its exterior surface to the interior measurement of the brain, its gross weight, and cranial capacity. It was only logical that the next step would be to measure the difference in the capacity for intelligent thought among the various races, and the development of the intelligence test followed on these gross measurements of the brain.

Measurement of the brain cavity was the focus of anthropological studies by Samuel Morton in the United States, as well as by Broca, Paul Topinard, and J. J. Virey in France. Their technique was to pour anything from mustard seed to buckshot to water into human crania to measure their capacities in cubic centimeters. The assumption was that the size of the brain case was linked to the development of intellectual faculties, and that European brains were the largest, especially when compared with smaller, inferior African brains. A parallel relationship in the evolutionary stages of man—from savage, to barbarian, to civilized—was also

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