The science of skulls from a global perspective

  • PDF / 424,101 Bytes
  • 3 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
  • 40 Downloads / 235 Views

DOWNLOAD

REPORT


The science of skulls from a global perspective James Poskett: Materials of the mind: phrenology, race, and the global history of science 1815–1920. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019, 373 pp, $45.00 HB Amos Morris‑Reich1,2

© Springer Nature B.V. 2020

Materials of the Mind provides the first global history of the nineteenth-century science of phrenology. Well-written, rich, broad-scoped, and politically provocative, the book is divided into six chapters. Each of these chapters focuses on a particular type of object—skulls, casts, books, letters, periodicals, and photographs—which is closely studied across its international career. While one of the book’s strengths lies in the material it explores, it also partially suspends its judgment of the subject, thereby allowing the strange, horrific, and violent nature of phrenology to emerge as a feature of modern history of science. In its overall framing and in several of its choices, Materials of the Mind seeks to challenge an earlier generation of the history of science. This short review addresses three facets I regard as demonstrating a dynamic or dialectic within history-of-science scholarship—namely, the problematization of an earlier aspect of the history of science that in turn spawns a new “problem”. The most central facet—because most general in scope—pertains to the global perspective. I shall thus analyze this in greater depth than the other two dimensions, which relate to materials/media scholarship, and historiography, and so figure on a “lower” analytic register. Challenging the earlier treatment of phrenology within “neat national contexts” (2), Poskett places the global perspective at the center of his inquiry in order to reconsider the history of phrenology as “part of a global history of science” (2–3). In answering the question “What exactly is a global history of science?” (3), he draws on Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori’s distinction between “first, the global as a meta-analytical category of the historian; second, the global as a substantive scale of historical process, and hence a property of the historian’s subject matter; and third, * Amos Morris‑Reich [email protected] 1

The Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas, The Lester and Sally Entin Faculty of Humanities, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel

2

The Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Antisemitism and Racism, The Lester and Sally Entin Faculty of Humanities, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel



13

Vol.:(0123456789)

Metascience

the global as a subjective category used by historical agents who are themselves the objects of the historian’s inquiry” (Moyn and Sartori 2013, p. 5). Poskett argues that “phrenology travelled across national, regional, and imperial borders in material form, and skulls, plaster casts, books, and letters were all exchanged over great distances. As an analytic element, phrenology affected the content and political uses of science. As an actors’ element, phrenologists wanted to explain how and why human n

Data Loading...