Criminal Anthropologist Research Articles

The criminal in the prison-house of language: Conceptual writing to re-present Havelock Ellis’ use of “the criminal” in his book, The Criminal

Criminology has historically promoted positivism, a disciplinary orientation producing reward structures for some researchers committed to deductive work rooted in developing concepts, hypothesizing relationships, and empirical testing. Its is useful, then, to review where such tendencies were initially conceived and promoted. Havelock Ellis’ 1890 book The Criminal, a then-seminal review of literature in criminal anthropology, concerns many topics involving criminals and criminality. In the following conceptual writing, I present here, verbatim, all instances where Ellis uses the exact phrase “the criminal” in his book, along with any words following the phrase in the sentence. The resulting text then deconstructs and re-imagines the true object of Ellis’ work: the creation of the supposed object of his study as self-evidently Real, existing outside of linguistic and discursive parameters. Ellis as detective (searching for the criminal everywhere but right under his writing nose) could never fully apprehend his ever-escaping subject. Yet, through discourse, Ellis and his fellow criminal anthropologists laid claim as those best qualified for establishing the criminal’s essential identity, an ideal type still pursued through government funded criminological research.

The prejudice and the virtue. The re-education of the antisocial child in the pages of the “Rivista di Pedagogia Correttiva” (1907-1915)

In the European pedagogical culture, between the end of the Nineteenth century and the first decade of the Twentieth century, particular attention is paid to a category of children and adolescents who are called “corrigendi”. They are poor children, almost always from large families and deprived, left to their own and in a daily idleness. Medical Doctors, pedagogists, jurists and criminal anthropologists – in the wake of the pioneering works of Pinel, Itard and Séguin – agree on the need for the education of these children, who must be “corrected” in character and moral action. Since the Twenties of the Twentieth century, this category, further defined, described and identified, will be replaced by the other, more extensive but also more intrusive, of “antisocial and deviant boys”. In this perspective, the material contained in the “Rivista di Pedagogia Correttiva”, directed by Mario Carrara and Camillo Tovo, published between 1907 and 1915, allows to identify the genealogy of this process in the attention given by pedagogists, medical doctors and jurists on the need to “correct” any kind of deviant manifestation of the child and adolescent. This is the pivot of a reflection that has, since the second half of the Twentieth century, a specific place in the concepts and practices of “rehabilitation” and “occupational therapy”.

Giacomo Balla: A Painter in the Context of Neuroscience

Giacomo Balla, a famous Italian Futurist painter, was a great observer of both human motion and emotion. He showed a profound interest toward neurophysiological and neurological sciences. During his search of his personal artistic style, he attended the lessons of Cesare Lombroso, a criminal anthropologist, who at the time was also professor of neurology at the University of Turin. Some years later, he became a close friend of Doctor Francesco Ghilarducci, who had spent a few years in Paris at Jean-Martin Charcot’s “School.” Balla spent most of his career studying the dynamics of movement and speed. Some of his most famous paintings were inspired by photographic studies on the locomotor system, such as those of the French physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey. His personal painting style reveals his deep interest in neurosciences. We hereby illustrate the role of some of Giacomo Balla’s paintings as historical records of the neuroscience environment at the turn of the 20th century.

Pasquale Penta (1859-1904), un antropologo criminale non soltanto lombrosiano

In the updating of medical historiography the debate of positive or negative expressions about the criminal anthropology asproposed by Lombroso never seems to have ceased. Some critical remarks already began within the same boundaries of theschool that recognized him as a teacher. In retracing the incessant discussion, our attention focused on the almost forgottenfigure of Pasquale Penta, a psychiatrist and criminal anthropologist of the late nineteenth century who had a good reputationamong his contemporaries, presenting himself in the Italian scientific world as one of the most valid exponents of the studiesof sector. He soon knew the works of Cesare Lombroso and accepted his dictation, but with a personal position. It stood alongsidethose who felt they had to counteract a criminal determinism based on individual anthropometry and in particular on themetric observation of the skull. Our analysis also focuses on the text of his lectures dictated in the school year 1899-1900 inthe University of Naples collected in a lithographed volume, a really useful tool to learn the history of teaching psychiatry andcriminal anthropology in a fundamental period of the doctrinal development of these two disciplines.

РОЗВИТОК ДОСЛІДЖЕНЬ В ОБЛАСТІ ПАТОГРАФІЇ В ХУДОЖНІЙ ЛІТЕРАТУРІ (МЕТОДОЛОГІЧНИЙ АСПЕКТ)

У статті обґрунтовуються необхідність і перспективи інтегрованого підходу до вивчення і аналізу літературного твору. Зокрема, аналізується можливість використання методів патографії як частини біографії письменника для різнобічного сприйняття і більш глибокого розуміння творів художньої творчості. При створенні художнього тексту певною мірою проявляються особистість, психологічні особливості та стан його автора. З іншого боку, дані патографії, поряд з літературознавчим і текстологічним аналізом, сприяють більш повному та різноплановому сприйняттю твору і формуванню естетичної реакції на нього у читача. Показовим прикладом такого підходу може бути творчість Ф. Достоєвського, твори якого, та й сама особистість письменника викликали і продовжують викликати інтерес не тільки літературознавців, а й психологів, психіатрів, а також кримінальних антропологів. При тому, що наукова картина світу, яка формується психологами і психіатрами, може не збігатися з художньою картиною світу твору, їх симбіоз може мати значний вплив на процес читацького сприйняття поряд з іншими важливими факторами. У статті представлений огляд існуючих досліджень зазначеного напрямку в їхньому розвитку, у тому числі щодо творчості окремих письменників, зокрема, Ф. Достоєвського, і виділені перспективи напрямку, як для літературознавства, так і для психології, антропології, психіатрії. І якщо існує кількість наукових досліджень класичних літературних творів з боку окремо психопатології і патографії, а також з боку літературознавства і текстології, то інтегрований похід лише починає розвиватися

The Work of Cesare Lombroso and its Reception: Further Contexts and Perspectives

This special issue adds to the ever growing literature on Cesare Lombroso, reflecting a recent flourishing of scholarly interest in the Italian criminal anthropologist. As Paul Knepper and P.J. Ystehede note in the introduction to The Cesare Lombroso Handbook (2013): “A significant body of revisionist scholarship is emerging within criminology and other disciplines across the human sciences. New translations of Lombroso’s most widely known works by revisionist pioneers such as Mary Gibson and...

“Misfits” in Fin-de-Siecle France and Italy: Anatomies of Difference by Susan A. Ashley

Reviewed by: “Misfits” in Fin-de-Siecle France and Italy: Anatomies of Difference by Susan A. Ashley Robert A. Nye Susan A. Ashley. “Misfits” in Fin-de-Siecle France and Italy: Anatomies of Difference. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. ix + 300 pp. $114.00 (978-1-350-01339-1). The “misfits” of this book’s title represents the author’s effort to find a term that might encompass the vast range of physical and mental abnormalities that were identified by late-nineteenth-century “experts” in mental illness, developmental disorders, criminal deviance, and other antisocial behavior. Most of these “experts” were medically trained, but many were lawyers and jurists or social scientists who ventured into the medical domain to make their contributions to what appeared at the time to be a degenerative biological and social crisis of epic proportions. French and Italians did draw on the work of other European and American specialists, but the most consequential work and debates took place within and between these expert communities. The author sets up this great crisis as an emerging disjunction between the recently established liberal parliamentary regimes of the two nations and worrisome developments in their populations that suggested dramatic increases in human and social pathologies: mental illnesses, crime, vagrancy, and sexual disorders. She occasionally acknowledges the differences between French and Italian “expert” communities, but she is more interested in their common analyses of these problems. Thus, in each of her chapters on different kinds of “misfits” she finds more similarities than differences in the medical and social science literature, despite a sometimes fierce national competition between “Italian” and “French” schools of social deviance and human anomalies, which she believes to have been more about national pride than doctrinal or scientific issues. Her exhaustive discussions of the principal French and Italian texts by Cesare Lombroso, Raffaelle Garofalo, Giuseppe Sergi, Alexandre Lacassagne, Charles Féré, Jean-Martin Charcot, and dozens of other specialists reveal many agreements on the causes of these morbid phenomena, some of which were “occasional” or contingent, while others were embedded in inherited pathologies or functional [End Page 209] disorders. She occasionally acknowledges the manifold contradictions in this literature, but systematically pursues the shared etiologies and links between degenerative illnesses through case studies and textbooks in wearying and repetitive detail, summarizing everything again in each chapter. As has been well documented in earlier historical work, epilepsy, vagrancy, crime, neurasthenia, mental alienation, sexual abnormalities, and a host of other social and developmental pathologies were seen as symptoms of dégénérescence, the syndrome invented by the midcentury French psychiatrist B. A. Morel in which functional, physical, and moral flaws produced by a pathological environment were acquired and passed on to following generations in ever-worsening forms. The author’s elaborate textual analysis identifies the dizzying range of disorders that fell into this syndrome and were acknowledged by experts in both countries to a greater or lesser extent. She indicates how rising rates of mental illness, crime, and vagrancy provoked these investigations and reveals how all but the most pessimistic experts outlined penal and therapeutic policies to cope with the social conditions that contributed to the problems. She appropriates Ian Hacking’s notion of how certain historical illnesses have occupied an “ecological niche” reflective of their times and concludes that many degenerative conditions, neurasthenia and hysteria among them, thrived briefly then faded away to be redistributed among “modern” disease categories. The author’s concentration on the interrelated interpretations of these “misfits” overlooks the real differences between French and Italian specialists and the professional and disciplinary contexts in which they worked. The French psychiatrists and criminologists were sensitive to the free-will convictions of French penologists and politicians and sought a doctrinal middle way that they believed would strengthen their professional credibility and lead to practical policy outcomes, while relations between Italian penologists and criminal anthropologists were anything but smooth. There is no examination in this book of the political processes that produced the few reforms that eventually emerged, no acknowledgment of the influence of public opinion, nor of French fears of degeneration that were based on stagnant population growth and how this affected marital family “norms” and the crucial importance of procreative sexuality...

Mad‐Doctors in the Dock:. Defending the Diagnosis, 1760–1913 Joel Peter Eigen. Baltimore, MD.: Johns Hopkins University Press (2016) 224pp. £35.97hb ISBN 9781421420486

The role of ‘Mad-Doctors’, alienists, criminal anthropologists, criminal psychologists, criminalists, psychiatrists and psychiatry in the courts, and their influence on the rule of law have throughout the last 40–50 years accumulated quite a large literature in history, law and the social sciences. The modern metamorphosis of thought on knowing right from wrong, the development of medical diagnoses from labels such as moral insanity and moral epilepsy to modern-day psychopathy have attracted the interest of historians, criminologists, and legal scholars. This is a fruitful interdisciplinary field, yet also, at times, quite a politically-contentious research area. Joel Peter Eigen's Mad-Doctors in the Dock is the final volume of a trilogy that started with the 1995 publication of Witnessing Insanity: Madness and Mad-Doctors in the English Court (Eigen 1995). The focus of his latest book is on the emergence of the diagnosis homicidal mania and its reception (see especially Chapters 5 and 6), but also more generally concerns the rise of forensic psychiatry. Since the publication of Foucault's Madness and Civilization, much scholarly attention and debate has been devoted to the history of notions and treatment of insanity, but rarely have scholars, whether sympathetic or critical, looked with any sustained concern beyond the narrow world of medical authorities. The related study of insanity in law has similarly confined its purview to leading cases, such as McNaughten's. This estimable book breaks new ground by looking outside the medical realm and beyond major cases. (pp.375–6) The ability to look at the court and legal process without having too myopic a focus on medical authorities remains one of Eigen's most important contributions to this area of research. His impressive work stands as a vital empirical corrective to much literature that fails to clearly provide a balanced presentation of how much power ‘Mad-Doctors’, alienists et al. actually exerted in the courts and on the rule of law. As Eigen puts it, although the ‘Victorian alienist became a regular cast member in the Old Bailey drama … he would have to earn his hour upon the stage’ (p.10). That the testimonies and scientific perspectives of ‘Mad-Doctors’ were often challenged is per se not a novel finding, but Eigen manages to bring out important nuances and presentations of the diverse actors and forces involved in cases of insanity and criminal justice. Eigen's source material covers 994 trials collected in over a 20-year time span, this in contrast to the majority of research which still most often uses examples from singular (or few court) cases. Eigen's Mad-Doctors in the Dock should be compulsory reading for those interested in understanding the development of English insanity defences and trials in the 19th Century especially. It is a pity, however, that he does not explicitly, in this final part of his project, engage more with the role and influence of the psychiatric professions in the courts examined by former researchers in this area. While, in the introduction, he acknowledges the support and influence of scholars such as Nigel South and Andrew Scull (to mention just a couple) and testifies to inspiration from historical sociologists, he abstains from reflecting on the meta-positions which, arguably, exist in the research on the influence of psychiatry in the courts. However, it would be bad form to critique a text for what is absent when there is so much to appraise. Eigen's trilogy will, for a long time, undoubtedly stand as among the most important contributions to the history of insanity trials in English courts. When it comes to what, in this review, is considered lacking, hopefully this is something we will get to look forward to in his later publications.

The legacy of Cesare Lombroso and criminal anthropology in the post-war Italian police: a study of the culture, narrative and memory of a post-fascist institution

This article examines the employment in post-war Italy of positivist scientific policing originally inspired by the work of the criminal anthropologist Cesare Lombroso at the end of the nineteenth century and subsequently developed at the scientific policing institute (Scuola Superiore di Polizia) in Rome. It analyses how the post-war police addressed the fascist regime’s employment of scientific policing for oppressive purposes and how far post-war scientific policing reflected the legacy of fascism. The article argues that post-war police narratives stressed the international importance of Lombroso and Italian criminal anthropology in order to ‘normalize’ the activities of the Scuola Superiore di Polizia during the fascist period and legitimize its work after the Second World War. Positivist criminological theories continued to influence police repression and criminal investigations in post-war Italy. However, the extent to which police officers and officials working outside the Scuola Superiore were convinced by such theories is questionable.

Bloody Murder: The Homicide Tradition in Children’s Literature by Michelle Ann Abate (review)

Reviewed by: Bloody Murder: The Homicide Tradition in Children’s Literature by Michelle Ann Abate Ramona Caponegro (bio) Abate, Michelle Ann. Bloody Murder: The Homicide Tradition in Children’s Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2013. If Americans are obsessed with violence, we are also fixated on puzzling out the roots, the cultural representations, and the effects of our nation’s bloody obsession. In her most recent book, Michelle Ann Abate examines how homicide, one of the most horrific acts of violence, “has formed a beguiling subject and recurring theme in narratives popular with American youth for centuries” (10). Employing an interdisciplinary framework, Abate positions children’s books involving murders within the legal and sociocultural history [End Page 349] of the United States and within a media culture in which killings and other depictions of violence can be readily found in books, films, television shows, video games, news programs, and even “murderabilia.” Arguing that literary works for children previously have been excluded from cultural analyses of homicide in the United States, Abate aptly corrects this oversight, offering detailed readings of seven well-known stories for children and young adults in order to link the lethal violence in children’s literature to historical events and figures, as well as to different understandings and attitudes about murder. Abate observes, “Far from existing outside of or even separate from the history of homicide, popular American children’s literature is both influenced by it and exerts an influence on it” (25). Several of the featured children’s books address issues related directly to homicide and relevant investigatory policies and trial procedures. For example, Abate’s analysis of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) relates the British antigallows movement that emerged during Lewis Carroll’s lifetime to his satirical portrayal of the two capital trials of the Mouse and the Knave of Hearts in the novel. Similarly, Abate draws connections between the conclusions of early criminal anthropologists, most notably Cesare Lombroso, and the physical descriptions that Edgar Rice Burroughs provides of murderers in Tarzan of the Apes (1914). Discussing Tarzan’s homicidal characters, Abate argues that “their similarities to the Italian researcher’s portrait of the ‘born criminal’ are too numerous to be merely coincidental” (105). Burroughs’s description of Tarzan’s “finely formed features, well-proportioned face, and good-looking appearance” (113) absolves him of being Lombroso’s “criminal type,” despite the numerous murders that he commits throughout the book. Just as Abate situates Tarzan within the developing field of criminal anthropology, she also locates Nancy Drew and her “famous hunches, her powerful sense of intuition, and her unfailingly accurate gut feelings” (120) within the arena of parapsychology, comparing Nancy and Eugenie Dennis, a real-life psychic from the 1920s and 1930s, and showing ways in which Nancy uses her psychic ability to prevent murders and to solve other crimes. Yet children’s books about homicide and attempted homicide deal not only with crimes and related legal policies and applied theories. They also reflect changing cultural beliefs about murder and evolving representations of murderers in different genres. According to Abate, S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders (1967) preserves the legacy of the paperback pulp novels of the 1930s through the 1960s, particularly the accounts of juvenile delinquency, for an intended readership of young adults. Likewise, Abate demonstrates how Walter Dean Myers’s Monster (1999) combines the motivations and intentions of colonial-era execution sermons and more contemporary, sensationalized murder literature to introduce a sympathetic protagonist who may have been [End Page 350] involved in a horribly violent, graphically narrated murder. In her chapter on Monster, Abate reveals a changing cultural perception of murderers as individuals who are repellant rather than pitiable, whereas in her chapter on “Snow White,” the most psychoanalytic chapter of the book, she examines a longstanding need for parents to submerge their homicidal feelings for their offspring rather than expressing them openly. Finally, through a discussion of the killings of zombies in Stacey Jay’s My So-Called Death (2010), Abate speculates about the possible future of murder and the relevant social and legal ramifications if the United States indeed moves into a posthuman and perhaps “posthomicide” era. Though Abate references homicides...

Descontinuidades e ressurgências: entre o normal e o patológico na teoria do controle social

This text highlights ambiguities and gaps in the distinction between pathology and normality in the social and individual ambits dating back to the late nineteenth century and reemerging in another guise in contemporary times. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, many authors adopted the theory of atavic criminality defended by Italian criminal anthropologists led by Lombroso. The French school criticized Italian biological determinism and left to the 'psi' sciences the aspects it deemed to be the individual dimension of criminality. Taking advantage of this space, psychiatry created the 'psychopath', inheritor in many ways of the 'innate criminal', and today accepted as a psychopathological category. In this context, the article focuses on social control involving the distinction between pathology and normality in the social and individual spheres.

‘Medical Knowledge’ and 'Tradition' of Colonial Korea: Focused on Kudo’s "Gynecology"-based Knowledge

This article attempts to illuminate the ways in which Kudo's medical knowledge based on 'gynecological science' constructed the cultural 'traditions' of colonial Korea. Kudo appears to have been quite an influential figure in colonial Korea in that his writings on the relationship between women's crime, gynecological science and the Chosŏn society granted a significant amount of intellectual authority. Here, I examine Kudo's position within colonial Korea as a producer and propagator of medical knowledge, and then see how women's bodies were understood according to his gynecological knowledge. It also traces the ways in which Kudo's gynecological knowledge represents Chosŏn society and in turn invents the 'traditions' of Chosŏn. Kudo's knowledge of "gynecology" which had been formed while it traveled the states such as Japan, Germany and France served as an important reference for his representation of colonial Korean society. Kudo was a proponent of biological evolution, particularly the rules of 'atavism' put forth by the criminal anthropologist Cesare Lombroso, and argued that an unique social environment caused 'alteration of sexual urges' and primitive cruelty in Chosŏn women. According to Kudo, The social environment was none other than the practice of 'early marriage,' which went against the physiology of women. To Kudo, 'early marriage' was an old 'tradition' of Chosŏn and the cause of heinous crimes, as well as an unmistakable indicator of both the primitiveness and savageness of Chosŏn. While Lombroso considered personal factors such as stress as the cause of women's crimes, Kudo saw Chosŏn women's crimes as a national characteristic. Moreover, he compared the occurrence rate of husband murders by provinces, based on which he categorized the northern population of Chosŏn as barbaric Manchurian and the southern population as the superior Japanese, a combination of racism and scientific knowledge. Kudo's writings provide an insight into the appropriation of Western medical theories and criminal anthropological knowledge by a non-Western colony as well as the ambivalence and contradictions underlying Japanese empire as in the use of concepts like 'difference' and 'unity.' According to today's standards, Kudo's physiological arguments can hardly avoid being called pseudo science, which confirms that the power and authority of science standing on 'objectivity' and 'universality' are actually dependent on social contexts that are constantly being readjusted. In the end, the cultural 'traditions' of a nation/state often taken for granted are social constructions born out of transnational crossing points of knowledges, and on the basis of these constructs are the concepts of differences between nations/states. And one of the core references for these differences in colonial Korea was Western science/medical knowledge.

The Practise of Pastoral Power : The Swedish Prison Chaplains in the 19th Century

This article analyses the images of the criminal that Swedish prison chaplains developed during the 19th century. Following Michel Foucault, such images and relations are conceptualized as pastoral power. In the 19th century prison chaplains occupied a very important position within prisons, due partly to their status as clergymen, but also to their increasing influence on debates about crime and punishment. This article argues that in many respects prison chaplains came to develop a more sophisticated understanding of the criminal and the complexities of criminality, compared to many early psychiatrists and criminal anthropologists. This understanding was primarily the result of knowledge-gathering which took place within the penitentiaries. In the mid-nineteenth century prison chaplains generally depicted crime as morally determined and as caused by the lack of knowledge and insights into the truths of Christianity. However, during the last quarter of the century, references to social and structural factors were increasingly included in broader and more heterogeneous explanations for crime. However, if non-moral factors played such a central role as the prison chaplains gradually came to assign to them, then their own authority as experts on crime as well as the status of religion within the prison system was undermined.

Prostitutes and criminals: beginnings of eugenics in Croatia in the works of Fran Gundrum from Oriovac (1856-1919)

Fran Gundrum (1856-1919) was a Croatian physician, encyclopedist, and an advocate of medical enlightenment and healthy lifestyle. In order to identify and analyze Gundrum’s ideas about the problems of prostitution and criminality, we studied all of his books, booklets, and articles published between 1905 and 1914. We showed that Gundrum’s theories of heredity, morality, and sexual hygiene incorporated many of the important discussions of his time, especially those related to the Darwinian paradigm. Gundrum’s project of collecting statistics on prostitutes was the first such study published on the territory of today's Croatia. Although he rejected the notions of born prostitutes and born criminals, defended by Italian criminal anthropologist Cesare Lombroso, he still regarded eugenics as a convenient method of dealing with the ills of society. He believed that criminals were degenerate individuals representing a violent threat to the society and that it was legitimate to use radical means, such as sterilization and deportation, to deal with this problem. Organicistic view of the society prevented him from seeing the individual rights as important as that of the society to protect itself. Nevertheless, this view led to many humanistic ideas, such as the binomial illness/poverty in case of prostitution, which influenced many prominent works of social medicine movement.

Jan Verplaetse, Localizing the Moral Sense: Neuroscience and the Search for the Cerebral Seat of Morality, 1800-1930

The neuroscience of moral decision-making and moral cognition is one of newest and more fashionable developments of functional imaging of the human brain. There is a rapidly growing literature on the parts of the brain activated in different types of moral judgments and in the role of the part of the brain said to be involved in ‘theories of mind’ in moral decisions (J. D. Greene and J. M. Paxton, ‘Patterns of Neural Activity Associated with Honest and Dishonest Moral Decisions’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 30, 2009). As this field is only a few decades old, I was surprised by the title under review, Localizing the Moral Sense: Neuroscience and the Search for Morality, 1800–1930. Was this another example of modern imaging being reminiscent if not imitative of classical phrenology? Verplaetse's book begins with a long discussion of conscience and the moral sense through the eighteenth century. The next chapters deal with the moral organ in phrenology and then attempt to locate the moral centre in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century by the new brain localizers (Hitzig, Ferrier), clinical neurologists (Kleist), cortical histologists (Meynert, Flechsig, Brodman), criminal anthropologists (Benedikt), and psychiatrists (Rush, Pinel). Each chapter is filled with rather dense and detailed accounts of the views on the localization of higher faculties particularly related to the moral sense. After diligently ploughing through these chapters looking for the localization of the moral sense I discovered that almost no one except the phrenologists had believed that they had managed to localize the moral sense. Most speculations were just about the localization of higher intellectual faculties. These faculties were usually placed in the frontal lobe but occasionally elsewhere such as a motor or occipital cortex. The whereabouts of the moral sense seems to have eluded the speculations of most everybody except the phrenologists. As Verplaetse put it ‘localizations of a moral centre in the brain, mostly in the frontal area, did occur but were exceptional. The vast majority of neurologists and psychiatrists adopted a different attitude; On the one hand there were specialists … who resolutely rejected the existence of such a centre. On the other hand, there were those who believed that a cerebral function generated by a morality could be localized somewhere in the brain, but who never advanced a precise localization … ’ (p. 244).

Renovating Russia: The Human Sciences and the Fate of Liberal Modernity, 1880-1930 (review)

Reviewed by: Renovating Russia: The Human Sciences and the Fate of Liberal Modernity, 1880-1930 Marina Mogilner Daniel Beer , Renovating Russia: The Human Sciences and the Fate of Liberal Modernity, 1880-1930. ix+229 pp. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008. ISBN-13 978-0801446276. $45.00. This is an important and innovative book that investigates models and terms for social and political analysis offered by turn-of-the-century Russian experts in the "human sciences"—that is, criminology, psychology, and psychiatry. By putting together a broad picture of the circulation of biomedical discourses in the late 19th to early 20th centuries in Russia, the book joins a by now well-established trend aimed at returning studies of Russia/USSR to the framework of European modernity (thus normalizing Russian history and rejecting Sonderweg notions). At the same time, by exploring nuances of the Russian reception of Western concepts of degeneration, born criminality, moral contagion, and the like, the book points to specific features of Russian modernity. According to Daniel Beer, these were formed by the optimistic evolutionism of the era of the Great Reforms and by postreform disappointment; by experiences of revolution and political terror that brought to the fore the theme of the uncontrolled nature of the crowd; and by the "etiological catch" of viewing "degeneration" as the result of the existing sociopolitical order, which, therefore, demanded the radical revolutionary transformation so frightening to liberal professionals. Finally, Russian "liberal modernity" was a project of social modernization in a country that lacked a modern citizen-subject as a basic element of the rationally organized and scientifically regulated society. In the opening chapter, "Morel's Children," Beer begins his ambitious textual analysis with the study Usovershenstvovanie i vyrozhdenie chelovecheskogo roda (The Improvement and Degeneration of the Human Race) by Vasilii Markovich Florinskii. He identifies this text published in 1866 as the earliest example of a systematic treatment of degeneration theory in Russia (39), an early stage of turning the concept of degeneration into a lens through which experts in the human sciences considered the promises and disappointments of the Great Reforms. Developing this line of analysis, Beer turns to the narratives of heredity and types of pathologies derived from the legacy of serfdom, economic backwardness, and a low level of mass education. Another line of Beer's analysis is connected with the classical Foucauldian theme of experts' claims to superior social and political authority in modern [End Page 661] society. Beer complicates this model by stressing that Russian experts in the human sciences were not sure how their knowledge could be employed to correct a pathological social dynamic. They viewed Russian hereditary pathologies and the Russian "environment" of modernity as equally violent, unhealthy, and irrational. As Beer explains, when a society as a whole is pervaded by the abnormal, it is hard to confidently diagnose specific examples of abnormality. The chapter "The Etiology of Degeneration" specifically deals with the factors of modernity that were thought to foster the degeneration of the population. It is in this context that Beer treats biomedical discourses of capitalism, rapid urbanization, crime, and mass political participation. His main focus in this part of the book is the Russian reception of Cesare Lombroso's criminal anthropology. Russian criminologists, according to Beer, rejected the concept of biological atavism in favor of degeneration, as the latter concept recognized biological and psychological differences between deviants and the healthy majority but retained the importance of the "environment" factor. They blamed social forces for the activation of criminal impulses. In the 1910s, this discourse positing social causation of biological mechanisms was supplemented by a language of social responsibility. The application of degeneration theory to the genesis of crime thus held out the possibility of its eventual eradication through changing an unhealthy social environment. As Beer argues, Russian criminal anthropologists called for reforms of socioeconomic conditions along with the isolation of those persons having a criminal predisposition. Both theoretical urges, concludes Beer, "would ... find their apotheosis in the revolutionary project of the Bolsheviks" (130). The chapter "Microbes of the Mind" leads to a similar conclusion. It is the power of the revolutionary crowd and the threat of mass politics that provide a context...

Book Review: Cesare Lombroso, Criminal Man, ed. and trans. Mary Gibson and Nicole Hahn Rafter. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. ISBN: 0-82223-3723-1. £15.95 (pbk), xvii + 424 pp

Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909), physician and psychiatrist, is known outside Italy mainly as the founder of criminology. He is usually remembered for shifting the focus of legal thinking from crime to the criminal; for his claim that there existed a ‘born criminal’, and his theory on the constitutional and hereditary roots of criminal conduct and ‘criminal types’. His theories have heavily influenced developments in criminology throughout both Europe and the USA. This translation provides English-language readers with key extracts from various editions of his classic work, L’uomo delinquente (Criminal Man). Mary Gibson and Nicole Hahn Rafter, with the assistance of Mark Seymour, make available key excerpts in English from all five editions of Lombroso’s Criminal Man. The Italian fifth edition of Criminal Man was 1,902 pages long, but Gibson and Rafter have been able to summarize all five editions into about 350 pages. The work of Gibson and Rafter challenges the analysis of Lombroso’s thought available in most criminological textbooks and collections of criminological readings, and readers can follow the development of Lombroso’s ideas throughout his career. Gibson and Rafter successfully show the evolution and complexity of Lombroso’s theories, and even the contradictions within them, which are obscured in standard textbook summaries. They have relaxed Lombroso’s prose style, making it slightly more colloquial and modern; Lombroso wrote in formal, scholarly Italian, using medical and scientific terms that are today outdated. The editors of this translation provide some illustrations from Lombroso’s works, Lombroso’s original and their own additional footnotes, a glossary and a bibliography. The bibliography is rather lacking in reference to Italian studies on Lombroso, which is at odds with the explosion of Italian historiography on Lombroso since the 1980s. This work will be most useful to students who intend to approach the complexity of Lombroso’s thought, rather than scholars of the Italian criminal anthropologist. Nevertheless, this volume remains a valuable contribution towards the study of criminology, intellectual European history and social history more generally.

Prosper Despine's Psychologie naturelle and the discovery of the remorseless criminal in nineteenth-century France

At the end of the nineteenth century criminal anthropologists often referred to the French philosopher and psychologist Prosper Despine (1812-92). His three- volume collection of remorseless criminals Psychologie naturelle (1868) supported the popular claim that most criminals were born without a moral sense. In this paper I will show that the intellectual agenda of this so-called pioneer of criminal anthropology opposed the ideas of Lombroso, Ferri and Lacassagne. I argue that Despine's remarkable collection of criminals without a moral sense goes back to his ambition to build a new 'natural psychology' that could save most spiritualist dogmas.

Body piercing: Old traditions creating new challenges

Adolescents, who are the fastest growing group of pierced individuals, have always searched for ways to identify with their peers and break away from their parents. The renaissance of body piercing has provided adolescents with an opportunity to accomplish this rite of passage. Patients with body piercing may seek care for reasons directly related to the piercing, such as infection, bleeding, nerve damage, or allergic reactions. In addition, body jewelry may create potential hazards or interference with diagnostic or treatment needs. 1,2 Awareness of these hazards and of the precautions one must take when treating a patient with body piercings is essential to providing high-quality patient care. History For thousands of years, the decorative alteration of the human body has been invested with profound cultural and social meaning. Each culture has attached its own significance, whether religious or magical, to these adornments. Egyptian pharaohs and Mayans were some of the first people to pierce their bodies, often for spiritual and virility rituals. 3 Roman centurions pierced their nipples as a sign of bravery and functionally as a means of attaching cloaks. 4 England’s royalty practiced body piercing during the Victorian era. 5 Modern attitudes toward persons with body piercings can be traced to the writings of Cesare Lombroso, a criminal anthropologist living in 1896. He proposed the theory that persons with criminal behavior could be identified by their love of ornamentation. 6 Because of belief in this theory, combined with Western religious attitudes condemning the practice of marking the flesh, distaste toward the practice of body piercing remains prevalent. However, this longpracticed form of body adornment is gaining popularity in our community. Historically, piercing was an accepted practice, a way of being safe and secure by identifying with the cultural norm, and was not considered social rebellion. However, given society’s current perspective of disgust and nonacceptance of the practice of body piercing, the significance of this practice has switched from a way of being compliant with the requirements of traditional society to a manifestation of rebellion against traditional society.

The Shape of Fear: Horror and the fin de Siècle Culture of Decadence by Susan J. Navarette (review)

Reviews215 (227). In sum, that despite the many flaws in his character, he was really the "Grand Old Man" of Victorian politics. This convincing exercise in psycho-history is meticulously researched, objective, and exceedingly well written. Its merit is augmented by an informative endnote apparatus, an inclusive bibliography of Gladstonia, and some very pertinent illustrations. Crosby deserves the accolade of "a job well done". J.O. BAYLEN Eastbourne, England Susan J. Navarette. The Shape of Fear: Horror and the fin de Siècle Culture of Decadence. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1998. xii + 314. $37.95 US (cloth). In The Shape of Fear: Horror and the Fin de Siècle Culture of Decadence, Susan J. Navarette examines the way in which fin de siècle horror fiction reflected nineteenth-century scientific theories and the cultural anxieties these theories engendered. Ranging broadly over disciplines as distinct as biology, philology, geology, physics, and anthropology, Navarette stresses the uniformity of their methodologies, all of which involved reading "distinctive surface patterns and structures" in order to understand "occult mechanisms and processes" (5). Fin de siècle horror writers in turn drew upon this scientific methodology as they sought "to record and reenact in narrative form what they understood to be the entropie, devolutionary and degenerative forces prevailing within the natural world" (6). Ultimately these works register the imminent sense of doom and decay that we have come to associate with the fin de siècle mentality. One of the strengths of the book is its selection of primary texts. Sacrificing quantity of literary texts for quality of analysis, Navarette focuses on five key works. Of these five texts, three are examples of what Navarette calls "literary detritus" or "refuse" (6) — works that have been largely ignored by critics: Walter de la Mare's "A:B:0," Vernon Lee's "The Doll," and Arthur Machen's The Great God Pan. Navarette argues that these works have as much to say about the culture that produced them as do canonical texts such as Henry James's The Turn ofthe Screw and Joseph Conrad's Heart ofDarkness, works which are also included in her study. Her book is divided into two sections. The first section, comprised of four chapters, demonstrates the 216Victorian Review effect o the arts of science's rendering of the body as a text to be read. In this section, attention is given to works in which the apparently normal body masks degenerative tendencies. Fundamental to this discussion are de la Mare's "A:B:0," James's The Turn ofthe Screw," and "Lee's "The Doll." The second section focuses on the nineteenthcentury tendency to treat text or language as an organic body. In this section, Navarette discusses Machen's The Great God Pan and Conrad's Heart of Darkness — works in which cultural decline is reflected through language and textual disruption. At the beginning of the first section, Navarette sets up the parameters of her argument tracing the emergence of the ideas of body as text and text as body in the science and arts of the earlier nineteenth century. She skilfully interweaves scientific and literary material in a way that clearly demonstrates the increasing interest in and absorption of scientific ideas by artists. It was the new sciences, Navarette claims, which ultimately undermined the Romantic notion that "truth was beauty and beauty truth" by "revealfing] that even all that seemed benign or beautiful merely masked — was in reality symptomatic of or premonitory of — extensive processes of decay" (31). This notion of a deceptive surface caused most anxiety when applied to the human body, a fact attested to by the prominence given in the nineteenth century to the studies of criminal anthropologists such as Cesare Lombroso. Lombroso's criminalizing of the human body in turn had an impact on the criminalization of the artistic text, for he served as an inspiration to Max Nordau who used the artistic text to reveal the degeneracy of its creator. This "dynamic between external forms and internal disorders" (41) was fascinating to the writers of fin de siècle horror who exploited its possibilities to the fullest. Navarette concludes the chapter with an examination of Oscar Wilde...