Scene On: Seeing White - Episode 8 Skulls and Skin

Seeing White - Episode 8 Skulls and Skin
Several good book references are in this link, books by the authors/ experts he speaks with.



I'm also reading this collection of Steven J. Gould's natural history essays called Bully for Brontosaurus:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33935.Bully_for_Brontosaurus
p229-240

One the same day I hear this podcast, Skulls and Skin, I also read the essay Petrus Campers' Angle.

I originally thought they discussed Camper and Gould was somewhat dismissive of much culpability, saying he was a product of his time, so I was thinking- uh oh. But I'm going to sort out who the podcast talked about and where this guy I just read about fits in- and how I should feel about him. 

Petrus Camper- b.1722 in Leiden. Artist who became a professor of anatomy in 1755.

He was bothered that for the one traditionally black Magi in paintings (one of three was always black), they apparently used a European model and just painted them black and he wanted to see a more accurate representation. Skull measuring would help him understand this difference as well as why children weren't painted in their proper proportion either, so he measured young and old too. 

His facial angle is the beginning of craniometry and later became known as the father of scientific racism as his work was used as a springboard for bigots who wanted to use science to justify a conclusion they had already made up. He is problematic in that he assigned beauty to white Nordic types and Greek statues - I say arbitrarily- but of course it's because that's his in group. The image of the progression of beauty in the book is racist in that it has an ape with the lowest angle, then a black man, then a Greek statue as representing perfect beauty. Though his work and question he was answering weren't racist, he left the door open for those who wanted to to make some pretty wild claims. He was a monogenist though and stated that the skin color is not obtained through your genes, so he's got that going for him.

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Now for these other guys mentioned in the podcast.

Samuel George Morton collected skulls from the 1830s- 1850s and considered the father of American physical anthropology. This is where I may have become confused. So many fathers. So this is the guy who was trying to prove the superiority of white people. Not to be confused with the guy who started measuring skulls. . .

Linnaeus (Sweden) is the father of taxonomy and he gave us the name homo sapiens in the mid 1700s. He described four types of humans.

Johan Friedrich Blumenbach (Germany) is the father of anthropology and named five types in the late 1700s. He gave us the term Caucasian because he thought people who looked like him were beautiful and also another arbitrary declaration of the supreme beauty of Georgian women, people of the Caucasus.