Bodies and Boundaries
The year 2020, with all of the suffering and wrenching transformations of ways of life brought about by a global pandemic, has brought with it a host of new interactions between bodies and boundaries in the proliferation of technologies of biological surveillance. This paper was written a little over 13 years ago and last delivered in 2009. Despite its heavy emphasis on the at times shocking early history of anthropology and anthropometrics, it continues to be broadly relevant in illustrating how ‘technologies’ of reading biological bodies into social and political classifications is anything but new.
The human body as conceived in social theory is at once the basis of a visceral unity of humankind and the individuation and dissection of humanity along cleavages of identity and power. It is the conditio sine qua non of consciousness and social history, operating simultaneously as subject and object. At issue here are the ways in which particular conceptualisations of the human body have been constituted through the bio-technological interactions which the umbrella terms ‘biometrics’ and ‘anthropometrics’ encompass, how these support particular truth claims regarding the embodied identities of individuals and groups, and how such claims are operative in the constitution of subjectivities.
In addressing these concerns I proffer an account of how the body to come to stand in scientific, legal, and socio-political discourses as the measure of man in the modern era. With reference to techniques of anthropometrics and biometrics as they are operative in proto-anthropology, Victorian science, and in the criminal anthropology movement in the United States, I address how these technologies have been and continue to be deployed as mechanisms of social inclusion/exclusion.
Among social anthropologists anthropometrics invokes images of a what Boas terms a “cephalic-index-loving” discipline (Boas in Allen, 1989); conjuring ideas of an emphatic concern for measurement and classification against which the Boasian critique of racial formalism won significant victories at the turn of the twentieth-century (Allen, 1989, Stocking, 1966). Despite the advent of a strong vein of cultural relativism, the race concept has remained pertinacious within theories of culture, psychology, and biology. This discourse shares common subject-matter with the anti-essentialist battles waged in recent decades by feminist writers such as Sherry Ortner (1972) and Donna Haraway (1991), whose attempts to wrest sexual politics away from the strictures of a positivist, biological ontology in favour of a basis in text and culture have further impelled the historicisation of the body, wherein nature, life, and subject are dissipated into the cultural order of things, throwing the embodied status of the universal bearer of rights into sharp relief.
Standing at once as an individual and as the archetype of the polis, this universal bearer of rights became the basis for imagining a common political community during the eighteenth-century. Divested of all differentiating features of social biography and bodily morphology, thereby effectively immunised against the pronunciations of empirical sciences, the transcendent liberal individual found its antithetical expression in racialised and sexed bodies, which became the privileged discursive resource of the politico-scientific (Stepan, 2000). To rephrase Judith Butler (1993), matter came to matter in discourses of morality and political status where social and religious frames once dominated.
Quantitative measurements and observations concerning human bodies were not at all statements of anatomical fact. Rather they were discourses that served, through their performance in medicine, law, anthropology, and public policy, to incarcerate bodies within categories of race, gender, and class. Embodied differences have continued to articulate with rights and social policy discourse across over two centuries. Benjamin Ginzburg, writing for The journal of Philosophy in 1927 outlines this issue succinctly: “we have regarded equality for whites as a purely ethical problem not involving assumptions as to reality and therefore outside of the domain of empirical science”, whereas “we have regarded race as if it were purely a question of fact and we have turned over this question of fact to empirical scientists in the expectation that their decision would be binding upon our ethical policy with regard to races”.
Following the ascendancy of the Darwinian theory of natural selection in the mid-nineteenth-century, a menagerie of arguments spawned which sought to combine taxonomic schemas of biology and evolutionary logic to produce rich new veins of determinism. This is the context within which Italian physician Cesare Lombroso elaborated his theory of the born criminal. Lombroso united contemporary readings of racial and social evolution, recapitulation theory, and atavism into an unfalsifiable and thus highly unscientific theory of the hereditary criminal, portrayed as a creature who betrayed its hereditary propensity to deviant activity in the degree to which their physiological features approximated those of adolescents or primates. Indication of criminal type was to be found in extreme values of physiological measurements that approach average measures for the same trait in great apes on a normal curve.
The impact of Lombroso’s “L’uomo delinquente”, first published in 1889, upon society was of concern not only to practitioners of anthropometrics but also to reformers and novelists. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1993 [1897]) Lombroso is invoked by Mina Harker as an authoritative diagnostician of the degenerate criminal type: “The Count is a criminal and of criminal type. Nordau and Lombroso would so classify him”. Within a decade of each other, both Lombroso and Stokerset about the construction of gnarled and uncivilised bodies that could readily represent a pernicious ‘other’. Novelistic narrative and scientific discourse engaged in a dialogue of atavism, each attempting to demarcate boundaries and vanquish moral ambiguities arising from far-reaching cultural transformation, industrialisation colonialism and rapid urbanisation.
The eugenics movement swept through European and American intellectual communities in the 1880s and 1890s, attracting reformers searching for a positivist, evolutionarily sound social morality. By the turn of the century, a group of North American scientists, social welfare workers, ministers, physicians, and educators had become acquainted with the works of Lombroso and sought to implement his ideas of the born criminal within the U.S. penal system (Rafter, 1997). These successors to the Italian School adopted the position that persistent criminal behaviour and improper moral disposition were the inevitable, often immutable, and certainly measurable results of heredity.
Drawing upon evidence from craniometry and physical anthropology Dr. Hamilton Wey addressed the National Prison Association of America in 1890, positing that there is a physical basis for all mental action. Yet the criminal body did not, apparently, appear in all of its gnarled malformations until rendered visible under the gaze of the expert criminologist and subjected to objectifying apparatuses such as calipers, the aesthesiometer, and the camera lens. To borrow from Foucault (1989), these measuring techniques constructed the individual in their “irreducible quality” around which a rational language could crystallize. Once taken up by techniques of recording bodily information in the form of morphological and biometric data, the human form no longer stood in metaphoric relation to the social problem of crime and criminal identity. Rather it was the criminal subject, actively constituted through the techniques, technologies, and knowledge of an emergent form of disciplinary biopower power.
The positivist criminological movement in the United States is significant to this discussion not only because it repeats and honed the methods outlined by Lombroso but because the pronunciations of criminologists directly informed judicial ruling and social policy. Invoked in favour of indeterminate sentencing, the positivist argument was instrumental in securing changes in the U.S. legal system. Proponents of a new science of the criminal asserted a victory for nature over nurture and attempted, with great success, to shift juridical notions of criminality and the criminal subject onto invented foundations of biology. The social nature of the criminal individual would no longer be subject to forms of moral judgment once directed against the evil action in itself, or immoral motivations; it had been recast as the inevitable consequence of biology; neither subject to the will of the individual nor open to reformation (see Nietzche, 1996 [1878]).
An explicitly biological etiology of criminality emphasised identification and prevention over rehabilitation. By this logic, the primary role of institutional mechanisms was not that of disciplining the mind and body of the individual offender. Rather, the techniques of disciplinary power would be utilised to render disruptive components in a productive/reproductive population as visibly biologically ‘other’, sequestering them physically and categorically. Within such a context, judicial, medical, psychiatric, and anthropometric technologies, premised as they are upon regimes of distinction and classification, operated to divide the subject either within or from others. These divisions would be sustained through capillary power structures and reiterative norms of biopower (Foucault, 2003). Emergent pseudo-sciences started patrolling the margins of the intelligible and classifiable, where the “monstrous” (Foucault, 2003), the amoral, the criminal, and the insane were thought to lurk.
Among the earliest systematically implemented anthropometric techniques, the system of measurement elaborated by Alphonse Bertillon gained the greatest favor among law enforcement in Western Europe. Throughout the 1880s Bertillon set about elaborating what Foucault (2002) would term a “technically controlled form of observation” that was to bear his name. He did so whilst employed within the Paris Prefecture of Police. Aware of existing anthropometric identification techniques and their failings, his stated aim was to develop a means by which to identify recidivists and those prone to giving false names upon arrest with greater accuracy, and with reduced administrative effort.
Bertillon's system consisted of four initial anatomical measurements considered to remain constant throughout adult life: head length, head breadth, middle finger length, and foot length. These measurements form the basis of the classificatory system. To these, up to eight more measurements and observations were added. Measurements of height, span, cubit, length and breadth of the ear, and height of the bust were combined with observations of eye colour, hair colour, and defining or abnormal characteristics considered as less immutable aspects of adult physiology. These principles of measurement served to restrict and structure the predominantly visual field of the anthropometric technician, as it passed over the body, to the variables outlined by Linnaeus; number, form, proportion, and situation. In the process of measuring the body was to be discursively born again as encoded geometrical elements. It was then situated in encoded relationality with other ‘deviant’ bodies, open to identification in quantitative terms that could be quickly relayed to prefectures across France.
It must be noted that the greatest significance of this system of identification lay not in its capacity to identify individuals. Photographic plates were already in widespread use for this purpose and whilst of little use in rapid identification across geographical distance, they did occasionally prove useful in identifying repeat offenders. Neither did the measurements yielded by Bertillonage serve to classify individuals within the bounds of hereditary groupings, as was Galton’s objective. Rather Bertillon’s system, a systematically deployed biometric rendering of the human physiology for identification and surveillance purposes, constituting one of the first instantiations of the systematically encoded body; the antecedent of the informationalised biometric citizen.
At the same time the anthropometrist Sir Francis Galton was amassing the most comprehensive scientific collection of fingerprints in the world at his laboratory within the South Kensington Museum in London. Discussions continue over the respective roles of Galton, Scottish scientist Henry Faulds, and British colonial officer William Herschel, in establishing the utility of fingerprints as immutable, individual, and classifiable epidermal structures. However, By the time Galton’s first treatise on Fingerprints was published in 1882, it was already well established that the ridge patterns on human hands and feet display distinctiveness in their minutiae. Plans to implement fingerprinting as a means of individual identification were well underway.
Galton’s primary concern was not with the individuating minutiae of friction-ridge skin, but with the range of overall patterns apparent on human volar pads. His initial thesis posited that these patterns, which permit systematic classification, indicated racial heredity or individual character. Herschel, in a letter to Nature in 1882 - based on 20 years of experimentation and use of fingerprints on contracts in India - cast doubt on the assumption that fingerprints could be used to identify the race of an individual, and Galton’s hope of utilizing fingerprints to determine hereditary affiliation to ethnic groups was dashed after successive statistical studies comparing the fingerprints of various Welsh, Jewish, African, English and Basque groups revealed no significant correlation between fingerprint patterns and ethnic identity (Rabinow, 1996).
Fingerprints did, however, find great utility as an adjunct, and later successor to anthropometric techniques of identification of the time. Indeed, the metonymic capacity of unique, patterns of ridges and furrows on the friction-ridge skin of human hands and feet is undeniable in late-modernity where populations are being tracked, identities issued or confirmed and access allowed or denied based on correlations between these and a range of other immutable bodily patterns and their now digitized counterparts. Such practices of identification and differentiation are indicative of, and indeed instrumental in bringing about a general shift in bodily percept and practice resonant with new patterns of living and techniques of governance.
Bertillonage and fingerprinting represented means of extending surveillance into populations that were becoming increasingly differentiated and mobile at the height of the industrial revolution. In some areas heightened social and geographical mobility disarrayed the networks of personal, tactile connections on which identification had previously relied. The lack of sustained interaction within the burgeoning cities and the diffusion of traditional markers of social status in a free-market fostered new anonymity for some across Europe’s cities (See Sennett, 1994). Where early colonial anthropometric projects had sought to emplace the individual body in relation to a group perceived as sharing arbitrarily designated characteristics, emerging urban spaces demanded methods of identification and classification which ordered the coded bodily data of persons vis-a-vis each other based on conventions of pattern and code.
Thus we turn to the distinction between anthropometrics and biometrics. Biometric identification predominantly concerns methods of individuation whilst anthropometrics is primarily associated with identifying the characteristics of groups. However, in many instances the individualizing anatomo-political mode of power, which takes as its object what Foucault (2003) terms “man-as-body”, dovetails with forms of power which treat “man-as-species”. Elaborating upon this distinction I posit a conceptual division based upon the social function of biometric and anthropometric practices and the relationship of these to the respective postulates of identity and embodiment present in modernity and late-modernity, to which I now turn.
The fundamental principles of late-modernity, as illustrated by Emily Martin in her paper “The End of the Body?” (1992), are those of re-bordering/de-bordering and communication. Martin’s immunological body, metaphorically rendered from concepts native to biomedical discourse, indicates a reconceptualisation of bodily borders. Exterior surfaces can no longer act as primary symbolic thresholds as they could for Mary Douglas (1966), for in all of its atomised complexity, the body now harbors myriad interior dangers. On the macro-social level technology and the imperatives of late capitalist economics both openly affront boundaries set in place at the height of modernity. In the globalizing world fear of the enemy at the gates has given way to the enemy within; the identity-less illegal immigrant or apocryphal ipseity of the identity-thief lurk amidst the population and where the void left by the visible threat of physical force and economic control has diminished it has been replaced, as if by Foucauldian decree, by technologies and discourses of surveillance, in which the biometric body appears as an axial figure.
Unitary identities have been displaced by a controlled and fluid array of fragmentary, strategic, encoded identities which proliferate in global networks, and which the biometric body serves in part to mediate. This emergent mode of being has given rise to ontological confusion among some analysts working with the informationalised body. When sociologist David Lyon (2001) asserts that bodily surveillance is never about anything more than “abstract data”, taking no cognizance of “sociality”, “souls” or consciousness as aspects of an embodied humanity, he adopts an untenably narrow analytic focus on bio-technological sociality. This tendency to distinguish between notions of identity as embodied self-knowledge and as information about embodied persons and their physiological characteristics obscures the significance of the complex material and cultural circumstances that create the conditions necessary for the so-called informational body to emerge. As Haraway (1991), Hayles (1992) and Van der Ploag (2003) have variously argued, information of and about the body is increasingly consonant in determining modes of thinking, feeling and being-in-the-world. Biometric practices of identification and differentiation cannot be viewed as isolated techno-scientific advances that merely extend the efficacy of existing means of identification (Van der Ploag, 1999). Such a conceptualization not only fails to grasp new forms of embodiment and subjectivity produced through the interactions of body-as-technology but also reduces the lived, feeling body to a mere component in informational systems.
The biometric body in its simultaneous viscerality and technologically mediated informationality, is a socio-technico-anatomical chimera. It is not subject to biopolitics characteristic of industrial-organic society, for its ontology affronts the integrity of dualisms undergirding biopolitical forms. Rather it appears as a being of the control society.
This notion of “control society” is drawn from the work of Gilles Deleuze (1992) for whom it represents an analytic framework more suited to social orders emergent in late-modernity. In this context, the productive tension between the mass and the individual develops into a relationship of populations and “dividuals”. Within the Deleuzian control society the significant mediator of identities is not the individual signifier relevant to a particular embodied individual - of which the signature, or fingerprint, is a primary example - but the code, which interfaces seamlessly across systems and constitutes data, the market analysis and the contingency of risk (See Deleuze, 1992; Beck, 1992). Any component in this informational system can theoretically be interfaced with any other, provided it is properly encoded and each physical interaction may be recorded across multiple databases, effecting multiple changes to the informational dynamics of the population. This system does not rely on the one-to-one correspondence between forces - be they coercive or inductive/seductive - and effect/affect upon individuals. It is, but not limited to, the bodily politics of big-data. Within this society pattern and randomness become more significant than presence and absence in a given spatiotemporal frame (Hayles, 1992). Crucially, however, biometric bodies, as the locus of constellations of data gathering mechanisms, carry their messages with them in a uniquely present and visceral form. The efficacy of biometric technologies in determining the sameness of identity across contexts relies on the presence of a body interacting with biometric readers. Once enrolled into a biometric system the physiological coding is difficult if not impossible to change on the side of the user whose body at once begins to act as that which requires identification and also that which identifies (Lyon, 2001).
Biometrics have been incorporated into identity cards and passports the world over, are deployed as a means to prevent welfare fraud and identity theft in Japan, Nigeria and South Africa, and are have long been operational in immigration control across Europe, the United States and Australia. Launched with the tag line “everyone’s unique, let’s keep it that way”, a national identity card bearing several items of encoded biometric data was the subject of widespread fierce debate since it’s unveiling by the British government. The 9/11 Commission Report (2004) made explicit recommendations for the immediate incorporation of a biometric “entry-exit screening system” at ports across the United States, to be linked with the existing databases regulating the distribution of benefits to foreign nationals. Such developments indicate that the bodies of all citizens, consumers, patients, travelers and workers will increasingly be subject to encoding. However, as a consequence of the global proliferation of biometric systems, technological enchantment has often given way to moral outrage and searching questions as to the relationship of physical bodies to systems of control, classification, and unwanted surveillance.
Historian Keith Breckenridge (2005), tracing a direct line of bureaucratic descent between the Dompas system of the 1950s and the South African HANIS scheme, cautioned a decade ago against the possibilities for “data-creep” and the unchecked spread of biometric technologies into new areas of commercial and bureaucratic surveillance. Similarly, in a vociferous attack launched in LeMonde, Giorgio Agamben (2004)[1] equates what he terms “bio-political tattooing” with practices of sub-cutaneous tattooing during the Holocaust; railing against a perceived criminalization if not outright biological incarceration of entire populations. Much of the current furor over the introduction of biometric data to identity cards, passports and even as a ‘cash-less’ means of paying for school meals, draws its particular fervency from the historical association of bodily measurement with the ‘Other’, as well as with abhorrent processes of ‘Othering’ peculiar to the modern era.
Such debates act as reminders that the body is not easily divested of its privileged position in the social imaginary as the base of individuality and selfhood. Further proof of this can be found enshrined in criminal law across the European states, wherein conditions of proportionality and privacy still apply to the gathering of data from the body. The legal body itself remains subdivided along the boundary marker of the skin. Internal and external data about human bodies is thus subject to different legal constraints, with violation of the cutaneous boundary through invasive processes such as blood-testing bound by far stricter controls than identification techniques based on exterior physiology (Hastings and Wilson, 1999).
As early as 1997 the member states of the European Union opted to incorporate biometric data into the records of anyone seeking asylum within any EU country. Upon request for asylum being made the fingerprints of the asylum seeker crossing into the EU will be taken via electronic means and stored with a unique reference number. This centrally held biometric database, named ‘Eurodac’, served to identify whether a person has previously requested asylum in any EU country. The registration of asylum seekers into a biometric database is an exercise in constructing a new normative identity. Once enrolled, the bodies of asylum seekers are apt to identify them, if and when required, as a bureaucratically encoded other. This is not to deny that biometric enrollment can also be utilised to convey privilege. Frequent flyer pre-registration systems operating within the United States allow security-vetted travelers to fast-track through border controls using boimetrics to verify their identity. Suspicion and trust are thus constituted depending upon registration within a particular database, with access to physical space increasingly enabled or denied according to this criterion.
The contextualization of practices of biometric identification within a wide socio-political frame reveals not only the emergence of new cyborg identities (to use the term coined by Donna Haraway) but also their enmeshment within existing structures of privilege and power. Biometric technologies serve to read certain bodies into existing cleavages of social and political inequality in the act of reading from them. Thus where Haraway entreats us to revel in the “pleasure” of the cyborg form’s transgressive tendencies and capacities to produce “potent fusions” of form and knowledge, the present discussion asks that attention be given to the structures of control that emerge in the social relations between bodies and technologies. Whilst the cry to “pollute" code, generate static and make noise within informational systems of control appears at first as a plausible method of resisting, the steady creep of surveillance, literary theorist Katherine Hales’ (1992) assertion that non-information or noise is an intrinsic aspect of complex systems - facilitating the fine-tuning of informational processes - returns us to the functioning of the prison or the psychiatric institution addressed by Foucault. Transgression of boundaries in these instances becomes a source of renewed knowledge/power relations.
A genealogy of the measurable body highlights the close historical association between Anthropology and Anthropometrics. Often footnoted as a regrettable episode in the development of the anthropological discipline, systems of measurement, classification, encoding, and ultimately of the constitution of bodies and boundaries are becoming increasingly significant to conceptions of embodiment, identity/identification, and society into the 21st Century.
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