Touch in Anthropometry: Enacting Race in Dutch New Guinea 1903–1909

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Touch in Anthropometry: Enacting Race in Dutch New Guinea 1903–1909 PDF hosted at the Radboud Repository of the Radboud University Nijmegen The following full text is a publisher's version. For additional information about this publication click this link. http://hdl.handle.net/2066/184005 Please be advised that this information was generated on 2021-10-02 and may be subject to change. History and Anthropology ISSN: 0275-7206 (Print) 1477-2612 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ghan20 Touch in anthropometry: Enacting race in Dutch New Guinea 1903–1909 Geertje Mak To cite this article: Geertje Mak (2017) Touch in anthropometry: Enacting race in Dutch New Guinea 1903–1909, History and Anthropology, 28:3, 326-348, DOI: 10.1080/02757206.2017.1281268 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2017.1281268 © 2017 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group Published online: 24 Jan 2017. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 1049 View related articles View Crossmark data Citing articles: 1 View citing articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=ghan20 HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY, 2017 VOL. 28, NO. 3, 326–348 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2017.1281268 Touch in anthropometry: Enacting race in Dutch New Guinea 1903–1909 Geertje Maka,b aHistory Department, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; bHistory Department, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY Starting from the idea that race is an assemblage, the author Received 9 January 2017 investigates two instances of touchinanthropometry.Firstly,the Accepted 9 January 2017 detailed instructions for mechanized measurements of “the living”. KEYWORDS Second, the practices involved in actual measurements of Papuans Anthropometry; Dutch New in Dutch New Guinea during two expeditions in 1903 and 1909. Guinea; race; ANT; science history Touch After a long day at the Dutch National Archives looking for traces of the physical anthro- pologists and their anthropometrical work in the archives of H. A. Lorentz—who was involved in three famous, early twentieth-century expeditions in Dutch New Guinea—I walked over to the nearby Royal Library to pick up a publication by one of them, L. S. A. M. von Römer. To my surprise I was not handed printed matter, but two stacks of loosely bound paper, one with handwritten, sloppily completed anthropometry forms used during the 1909 expedition and the other consisting of original foot and hand- prints (Römer 1909). A hand reaches out to me, almost in greeting. Over 100 years later someone is gesturing to me from a faraway place. There is a surreal realness to this. I can touch the ink this man from another world once touched. This moved my inquiry further into the history of anthropometry (Figure 1). Thinking of the latter has often made me imagine the strange encounter of bodies, a meeting between people who did not know each other, who—literally and figuratively —hardly spoke each other’s languages, and who nevertheless touched. Anthropological historian Peter Pels proposed taking the aspect of “tact” in contact more seriously in studies on ethnographic fieldwork encounters. As opposed to a visualist perspective or a focus on “conversation” (based on speech and the audible), which both allow distance, contact and material mediation would necessarily also touch the fieldworker’s body (Pels 1999,20–29). Contact as a concept and a focus on material practices thus allows for a criti- cal history of anthropology that literally affects the anthropologist. Following Pels’ call for attention to the materialities, practicalities and embodiedness of colonial contact, this CONTACT Geertje Mak [email protected] © 2017 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY 327 Figure 1. Lorentz’s handprint (Römer 1909). article will highlight the elaborate anthropometrical efforts made precisely to obliterate subjective embodiment. In her rich and innovative La mesure des sens, a study of nineteenth-century anthropo- logical scientists’ work on the senses, Nélia Dias describes how touch—the tactile sense— was scientifically analyzed at the time. Touch came close to vision in the scientific hierar- chy and was even often seen as the basis for all senses. Touch could observe volume, structure, form, temperature, weight, it could provoke pain and pleasure, it could be passive and active, even manipulative. With regard to bodies, touch could probe, palpate or penetrate. This active element was particularly valued for scientific experimen- tal purposes. But active touch did not necessarily exclude being touched: touching and being touched could occur at the same time and to varying degrees (Dias 2004). With Dias’ description of nineteenth-century notions of touch in mind, I want to describe the encounter between physical anthropologists and the people they measured as an effort to touch others without being touched. Often trained as physicians, physical anthropologists would of course not avoid physical contact. However they tried avoiding to be affected by strictly, precisely distributing the active and passive elements of touch. To this end, anthropometric touch had to be “mechanized”. This required an enormous anthropometrical apparatus. Adopting an actor-network-theory (ANT) approach as recently proposed in this journal by Bennett, Dipley, Harrison and others, this apparatus of anthropometry can be seen as an assemblage of skills, people, material objects, knowl- edge, “centers of calculation” (Latour 1986), infrastructures of travel and more (Bennett, Dibley, and Harrison 2014; Dibley 2014). At the time, anthropometry was meant to study race and racial difference, among other things. Recently, the history of racial anthropometry in Oceania has attracted increased 328 G. MAK attention and started to include both practicalities in the field and the actorship of the people measured (Douglas and Ballard 2008, 2012; Howes 2013; Roque 2010; Schüttpelz 2005; Sysling 2013; Sibeud 2012). Anthropometric photography has also been studied in depth (Edwards 1992, 2006, 2014; Morris-Reich 2016). These studies provide a rich context for a “praxeographical” analysis of race in which race is considered an enactment (Mak 2012;M’Charek 2013;Mol2002). I will thereby follow Amade M’Charek’s proposal to overcome the dichotomy between race as biological fact or race as societal fiction or “con- struction” by arguing how “race does not materialize in the body, but rather in relations established between a variety of entities, including bodies” (M’Charek 2013, 434). There- fore, rather than analyzing historical theories on race and racial classifications that reveal different, conflicting or shifting (European) ideas about race, I aim to examine which version of race came into being within a particular network of (human and non- human) actors. I will analyze the instances of “anthropometrical touch” as nodes of relating entities, together enacting a particular version of “race”. However, because these instances are themselves related to other nodes (where race is also, but differently enacted), I will outline a chain of nodes of which only two are central to this article: anthropometrical touch as it was envisioned and taught at Rudolf Martin’s influential school of anthropology in Germany (Morris-Reich 2013), in relation to anthropometrical touch in the field in Dutch New Guinea during the first decade of the twentieth century. Two scientific expeditions to Dutch New Guinea will be considered, one to the Northern part which was led by Arthur Wichmann in 1903, and one to the South led by H.A. Lorentz in 1909. The anthropologist on the first expedition was G.A.J. van der Sande, a Dutch colonial army physician who trained in physical anthropology with Rudolf Martin for a year in 1901. He was very dedicated to the latter and referred to him as “my friend”. Part of the German school that strictly separated physical anthropology from ethnography, Rudolf Martin was mainly interested in improving anthropometrical methods. His 1200 page manual from 1914 was re-edited and published until after the Second World War and is still used today (Morris-Reich 2013;Proctor1988). Reading his meticulous instructions is very helpful when trying to understand how “touch” was mechanized. In turn, Van der Sande instructed his successors by writing extensive letters to Lorentz who would become the leader of the next expeditions to Dutch New Guinea.1 In 1909, colonial army officer L.S.A.M. von Römer joined Lorentz’s expedition as its anthropometrist.2 Van der Sande promised Lorentz that he would also give Von Römer “practical training”.Together, Martin’s instructions, the forms Von Römer filled in, Van der Sande’s publication and letters, Lorentz’s diaries and Wichmann’s report on the 1903 expedition allow me to expose the apparatus of anthropometry these Dutch physical anthropologists used in order to re-embody the allegedly disembodied “mechanical” objectivity of anthropometric touch (Martin 1914;Römer1909;VanderSande1907; Wichmann 1917).3 Selfless
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