Raciology in Action: Phrenology, Polygenism, & Agency in Océanie

Abstract

Late 18th-century developments in comparative osteology prefigured the growing importance of the skull, initially for its own sake and ultimately as signifier of the size and qualities of the brain. Concurrently, the Zwinglian minister, mystic, and poet Lavater (1781–1803, I:vi) reconstituted physiognomy — the ancient ‘art of knowing a person’s morals and dispositions by inspection of the face’ — as a ‘Science inherently true, based in Nature’.¹ An impassioned monogenist, Lavater (1781–1803, II:36, 129, 134, 139) recruited comparative anatomy to his cause. Physiognomy, he wrote, must rest on the ‘osseous system’ because it is ‘always solid, fixed, durable, recognizable’ and bears the ‘marks’ of the ‘more invariable’ aspects of man’s character.² He envisaged the skeleton as the ‘plan of the human body’ with the skull as its ‘base & summary’, just as the face was ‘result & summary of the human form in general’. Flesh, then, was only the ‘colour that enhances’ the drawing and, since knowledge of man began with knowledge of the skull, the physiognomist should start by inspecting the ‘bones of the skull, their form & contours’.