Materials of the Mind: Phrenology, Race, and the Global History of Science, 1815-1920
James Poskett
Abstract
This book reconstructs the global history of phrenology-the most popular mental science of the Victorian age-through a close study of its material culture. In doing so, it provides an answer to a basic but important question facing historians of science today: what exactly is a global history of science? This book argues that historians of science need to study the relationship between the global as an analytic category and the global as an actors' category. On the one hand, phrenology traveled across national, regional, and imperial borders in material form. Skulls were collected in China and ... More
This book reconstructs the global history of phrenology-the most popular mental science of the Victorian age-through a close study of its material culture. In doing so, it provides an answer to a basic but important question facing historians of science today: what exactly is a global history of science? This book argues that historians of science need to study the relationship between the global as an analytic category and the global as an actors' category. On the one hand, phrenology traveled across national, regional, and imperial borders in material form. Skulls were collected in China and Africa, societies cross-circulated journals between Edinburgh and Calcutta, and translations of French phrenological works were imported into Melbourne and Rio de Janiero. That's the analytic element-how the transit of phrenology, as well as failures of transit-affected the content and political uses of science. Yet on the other hand, phrenology was itself a science of the relationship between "the external world" and "the constitution of man." That's the actors' element. Phrenologists wanted to explain how and why human nature varied across the planet, mapping the different races of man as they went. This book claims that these two things are connected. How the sciences conceptualize the world is closely related to how the sciences are communicated.
Keywords:
phrenology,
global history,
history of science,
race,
material culture,
empire,
mind,
scientific racism,
intellectual history
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2019 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780226626758 |
| Published to Chicago Scholarship Online: January 2020 |
DOI:10.7208/chicago/9780226626895.001.0001 |
