About one hundred and thirty-five skulls of Papuans: A. B. Meyer and the controversy around craniology, (A propos de cent trente-cinq crânes de Papous: A. B. Meyer et la controverse autour de la craniologie)

Abstract

This paper analyses publications by the German traveller-naturalist Adolf Bernhard Meyer (1840-1911) on his collection of 135 skulls from north-west New Guinea. I interrogate the processes by which Meyer endeavoured to produce racial knowledge from what he called ‘raw material’, the significance of field experience for his scientific truth claims, the impacts of differences in methodology, research priorities, instrumentation, and national paradigms of knowledge on the interpretation of craniometrical data, and the extent to which culturally-bound constructions of normality, pathology, gender, class and criminality became enmeshed in studies of race. I also track changes in Meyer’s attitudes towards craniology, and the ways in which skulls were valued during his term as Director of Dresden’s Royal Zoological and Anthropological-Ethnographic Museum. Show more