Abstract
The article explores the transnational circulation of methods for identifying people in South America. It analyzes both the implementation of the anthropometric system at police departments in Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil starting in the 1890s, as well as the criticisms that were aimed at this method when fingerprinting took hold in the region in the early twentieth century. In a context of a heavy worldwide flow of ideas, experts, and technologies in policing, "bertillonage" was discussed and underwent hybridization in Latin America. The history of the anthropometric system in these three countries involved many travels by physicians, jurists, and police agents to Paris, debates over its suitability to local contexts, and an open controversy about identification techniques.
Highlights
Mercedes García Ferrari, Diego Galeano “There are two men of genius in France: Pasteur and Bertillon,” the anthropologist and anatomist Léonce Manouvrier wrote in the early twentieth century (Locard, 1914, p.167)
While coming from a long line of prestigious French scientists, Alphonse began his life as the family’s black sheep. After he failed to make a career as a physician, his father – director of Statistics – was obliged to use his influence within the government bureaucracy to arrange a discreet post for Alphonse as a clerk in the Paris police prefecture, where he started working in 1879
It was this obscure fate that, paradoxically, provided the springboard from which Alphonse Bertillon rose to fame and earned a place in the field of French science during the Belle Époque, even though he held no university degree. He soon began working in the criminal records office, where identification cards for those convicted by the courts were created and stored
Summary
Departament of History/ Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro. Anthropometry, and fingerprinting: transnational history of identification systems from Rio de la Plata to Brazil. Ciências, Saúde – Manguinhos, Rio de Janeiro, v.23, supl., dez.
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