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Chapitre d'ouvrage Année : 2020

Producing Otherness through Resemblance. Bodily Orifices and the Measuring of the Human (1800-1860)

Résumé

While all societies produce otherness, the science of man at the beginning of 19th century pretended that it could systematize and scientifically measure the differences between human varieties. Through the discourses on bodily orifices (mouth, ears, eyes, fontanel, foramen magnum, genitalia…) in a corpus of French medical and anthropological texts, we show how the statistics, serial analysis, anthropometrical averages were anticipated and supported by diverse observation and data collection methods based on a visual approach. The ocular and mathematical paradigms, situated at the crossroads of science and politics, were far from mutually exclusive: they coexisted in tension, and consolidated each other. These measurements deployed through four models based on aesthetics, senses, morbid heredity and anthropometry. Their diversity was unified by the role of resemblance in providing a definition of biologized otherness (the savage, the primitive, the degenerated types, the poor). The resemblance was flexible and polysemic, it didn’t designate just the similitude between forms far away in space, it could also attest genealogical ties. Resemblance thus provided a tool to conceive the otherness, as it was ordered into taxonomic classifications spread in different milieus, as well as the “in-depth” otherness as a product of heredity, development and successive generations.
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Dates et versions

halshs-03562305, version 1 (08-02-2022)

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  • HAL Id : halshs-03562305 , version 1

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Nicoletta Diasio. Producing Otherness through Resemblance. Bodily Orifices and the Measuring of the Human (1800-1860). Palgrave. in I. Voléry, M.P. Julien (eds.), From Measuring Rods to DNA Sequencing: Assessing the Human, pp.31-64, 2020. ⟨halshs-03562305⟩
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