From Measuring Rods to DNA Sequencing

This book provides a solid basis to understand two centuries of bodily measurement practices and their scientific and political scope throughout the Western world. By exploring various cases, it proposes a new approach of measurement from an epistemological point of view and demonstrates the central role of the measurement of the body for political purposes. By studying categorizations of race, age and quality of life between the 19th and 20th century, the first part of the book highlights how human body measurements extend from the flesh to subjective experience. The second part shows how genomic correction and life support technologies reshape the frontiers between things, humans and social subjects. The final part reveals how contemporary measurements of age, race and disease gave rise to new hierarchies between human beings and social groups. The book concludes by considering different styles of measuring the body and their ontological consequences.

Offers an original approach to the metrology of human bodies and to individual and group classification/identification, cutting across sociology, biomedical science, biotechnology studies and the anthropology of material culture Uniquely examines measurements of age, a topic so far neglected by researchers who have tended to focus on gender or racialization Alternating theoretical and historical contributions with contemporary case studies, this book will appeal to sociologists, anthropologists, philosophers and historians working in the fields of science, medicine, techniques, gender, racialization and age, and also postgraduate students following specialties in these fields and professionals or civil society actors intervening on these issues (NGOs, forensics, health practitioners, etc.)

Autorentext

Ingrid Voléry is full professor of sociology at the Université de Lorraine and member of Laboratoire Lorrain de Sciences Sociales (2L2S).
Marie-Pierre Julien is lecturer of sociology and anthropology at the Université de Lorraine and member of 2L2S.

Inhalt
Chapter 1: Introduction: What measuring means.- Part I. The Measurements of the human body between the 19th and the 20th century: from the flesh to the subjectivity.- Chapter 2: Producing Otherness Through Resemblance. Bodily orifices and the measuring of the human (1800-1860).- Chapter 3: Talking Bones: age in 19th-century forensic handbooks (1813-1906).- Chapter 4: Thinking quality of life: from measures to categorizations of the human beings.- Part II. Between objectivization and subjectivization: How forensic identification, genomic correction and life support technologies reshape the frontiers between things, human person and social subject.- Chapter 5: Being born in the era of genomics.- Chapter 6: From technicized bodies to body technologies: the human in resuscitative care, between objectivization and subjectivization.- Part III. Measurement and the Rise of New Hierarchies between human beings.- Chapter 7: Bone Geopolitics. Bone Age and the Racialization of Growth in UK and US Pediatrics (1940-1980).- Chapter 8: Models of corporeality and controversies around puberty.- Chapter 9: Everyone for himself and all together? Thinking race between social science, epidemiology, and medicine.- Chapter 10: Conclusion: Measurement as an ontological scalpel.