Explanations of Failure: Identifying Racial Logic, Scientific Authority, and Notions of Authenticity in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries

This chapter explores three case studies in the writings and work of 19th- and early 20th-century craniologists and museum curators. The debates in these case studies concern whether certain crania were ‘outliers’ – that is, whether their measurements failed to fit into the craniologists' pre-specified range of variation deemed to represent a particular racial type. Determination of crania as outliers generally led to conclusions about their authenticity rather than to broader questions around the validity of the scientific technique that sought to categorise them. Importantly, this chapter is not about assessing whether the identity of ancestral remains should be automatically considered anything other than described by the historical information associated with them. Instead it is about exploring how European imaginings of the ‘real’ Indigene gained existential concrescence from intellectual investment in racial typology and the ability to identify and classify racial types on the basis of cranial morphology. It also reveals that debates about authenticity were connected to value creation, both financially and in terms of a collection's (and curator's) status as reliable sources of research material.