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As social approaches to the history of science have shown (Cole 2001; Gould 1984; Pugliese 2010), biometrics were largely developed in nineteenth-century Europe. Biometrics – broadly understood as modern scientific techniques of measuring bodies rather than digitised and informatised technologies as in contemporary usage – emerged in the traditions of biological anthropology and criminology that sought to identify barbarous and criminal bodies, that is to say, to identify dangerous bodies.

An earlier analysis in this field can be found in Stephen Jay Gould’s 1981 famous work The Mismeasure of Man. Gould (1984) demonstrates various types of scientific ‘mismeasure’ of bodies that sought to calculate intelligence of particular populations in the manner of social Darwinism. For example, Gould (1984: 83) looks at the invention of craniometric identification by the school of Paul Broca (1824 – 1880), the founder of the Anthropological Society of Paris in 1859, who sought to measure the degree of intelligence through measuring the size of head and brain.

The objects of analysis in Gould’s study including craniology are scientific theories of measure that were later explicitly denounced as pseudo-sciences. Simon A. Cole, on the other hand, looks at the history of biometrics, namely, fingerprinting, that had acquired its scientificity by distancing from pseudo-scientific claims. In his 2001 book Suspect Identities, Cole (2001) looks at the historical developments of modern criminal identification, which he traces back to early developments since late nineteenth-century Europe. His study focuses on two of influential scientific identification technologies of that time: anthropometry and fingerprinting.

Anthropometry was a scientific technique of measuring a body, which is also known as ‘Bertillonage’ after the name of its inventor French police officer Alphonse Bertillon (1853 – 1914). As Cole (2001: 32-33) notes, anthropometry was one of the earliest modern criminal identification systems, which was introduced for the management of what is today known as ‘recidivism’ in France.15 Its method of identification include measuring various parts of a body such as facial features, head size, foot size, height and so forth. In the context of the rise in the number of recidivists in the second half of the nineteenth century, Bertillon saw the limit of the legal system – in particular, juridical power to control recidivism – and proposed that knowing individual identity is essential.

It is not enough to make a law against recidivists. … In order to condemn a recidivist to relégation [sic], the first requirement is the recognition of his identity. … Unless we find a solution, … make no mistake, the law against recidivists will be difficult and limited in application. (Cited in Cole 2001: 33)

15 _{Cole (2001: 54) notes that the term ‘recidivism’ in English in fact appeared only after the} introduction of Bertillonage in 1886.

The juridical power of ‘you must not’ was, as Bertillon saw, found ineffective for the management of recidivism.16 For an effective solution, instead, the knowledge of individuals became the focal point for the criminal management. Prisoners were consequently ‘Bertillonaged’ (Cole 2001: 34): each body was calculated and quantified in which one’s identity was established. “No longer a name or a position in society,” Cole observes, “the individual became biological, defined simply, crudely, as a unique body, distinguishable in the eyes of science, from all others” (Cole 2001: 53). Bertillonage, in short, “ensnared the body in a textual net made of its own naked corporeality. … [it] created a definition of the individual that the body could not escape” (Cole 2001: 53).

Anthropometry, however, did not remain a purely scientific technique of individualisation; it also became a technique of classifying bodies into different ‘types’ by penologists and criminologists.

Criminal anthropology … could only shuffle individuals into a bestiary of deviant ‘types’: idiots, imbeciles, morons, lunatics, epileptics, moral imbeciles, degenerates, defective delinquents, born criminals, criminaloids, prostitutes, and so one (Cole 2001: 56).

The demarcation of individuals into deviant types, moreover, was not just a racist application of Bertillonage, the latter being free of political categorisation of populations. In fact, the very individualisation in Bertillonage was also intimately linked to classification and hierarchisation of bodies. As Cole puts it:

[F]ar from undermining deterministic criminology, Bertillonage played into the same categories: for all practical purposes, Bertillon’s recidivist was the criminal anthropologists’ elusive ‘born criminal’, and the special penal

regimens designed for the born criminal were simply applied to the recidivist. (Cole 2001: 58)

In other words, individual identification of recidivists that was proved to be interlinked to the idea of ‘habitual criminality’ was already a political categorisation just like more overtly racial categorisations into types as in criminal anthropology were.

Bertillonage as criminal identification was, however, rather short-lived in part due to the fact that it required various kinds of equipment as well as training for measuring specific parts of a body. At the beginning of the twentieth century, it was gradually replaced by fingerprinting, which became a major technique for criminal identification across the world.

Fingerprinting as a modern identification technique, Cole (2001: 63-5) argues, emerged in Colonial India in the nineteenth century. Although it was initially introduced as a technique for civil identification rather than criminal identification, the deployment of fingerprinting by the coloniser over the colonised was also related to the ‘assumed inferiority’ of the latter: “the civil application was in a colonial context in which the assumed inferiority of the ruled and their attendant deceptions and frauds provoked the search for greater and more efficient social control and identification” (Cole 2001: 65). It was also coupled with the evolutionary ideas about race in which particular tribes such as lower-caste and nomadic peoples were deemed to be criminal suspect. At this point, Cole notes that the ‘habitual criminal’ also became the ‘hereditary criminal’: “Criminality became ethnic” (Cole 2001: 67).

The relation between fingerprints and heredity was perhaps most manifested in the work of Francis Galton (1822 – 1911). For Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin who famously coined the term ‘eugenics’, fingerprinting was an identification technique in

two senses. The first of these was fingerprinting as to identify criminals, that is to say, fingerprinting as an individualising technique. In the meantime, Galton was also, and more importantly for him, interested in fingerprinting as to identify heredity (Cole 2001: 99). In this sense, Cole argues that fingerprinting for Galton was seen as an equivalent to how DNA is seen today: “Galton saw fingerprint patterns much in the way we now see DNA: as both an identifier and a hereditary marker” (Cole 2001: 99). This second interest of Galton was, continues Cole, largely forgotten in the history of biometrics:

Although the attempts to use other identification techniques, such as anthropometry and photography, to trace heredity, delineate differences between the ‘races’, and predict criminality and disease propensity are fairly well known to historians of the nineteenth-century human sciences, the use of fingerprinting for the same purpose has largely forgotten. (Cole 2001: 100) Unlike earlier studies such as craniometry by Paul Broca and his followers discussed above, measuring fingerprint patterns may not be associated as a racial science, or more broadly a classificatory technique of populations. However, Galton’s second interest led to a series of morphological classificatory studies in the early twentieth century not only in Europe but also later in the United States under the name ‘dermatoglyphics’ that persistently sought to differentiate racial groups and potentially to ‘diagnose’ criminal or degenerate fingerprints (Cole 2001: 114).

While such ‘diagnostic’ fingerprinting research had hardly ceased completely, it was gradually discredited during the first half of the twentieth century. It was denounced, just like Broca’s craniometry, as a ‘pseudo-science’ as opposed to a ‘real- science’ of individualisation. As T.G. Cooke, head of the Institute for Applied Science, a fingerprint school in Chicago, stated in 1925:

It is not to the finger-print expert’s advantage … to be associated, in the minds of the public, with fortune tellers and palm-readers. The science of finger print identification is a real science and should not be dragged to the level of the pseudo sciences. (Cited in Cole 2001: 112-3)

Cole argues that it is this separation from a ‘diagnostic’ project, along with the ‘selective amnesia’ – fingerprinting once as a racial classification technology – that “played a crucial role in establishing the legitimacy of fingerprinting in criminal identification” (Cole 2001: 100).

By the end of World War II, the biological definition of race was officially denounced at the international arena, which was clearly manifested in the 1950 UNESCO statement on race (see Chapter Four). A few years later, the denouncement of scientific racial differentiation was also made in the 1963 United Nations Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, which claimed, “any doctrine of racial differentiation … is scientifically false, morally condemnable, socially unjust and dangerous” (cited in Rose 2007: 167). Fingerprinting was widely established and legitimised as a scientific technology of identification, while racial classificatory identification has now largely been conducted in the field of DNA typing (Cole 2001: epilogue; Rabinow 1993).17

17 _{It is argued that racial classificatory identification today is shifted to the molecular: “At the} turn of the new century, however, race is once again re-entering the domain of biological truth, viewed now through a molecular gaze” (Rabinow and Rose 2006: 206). As Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose (Rabinow and Rose 2006; Rose 2007: chapter 6) note, there has recently emerged a revival of nineteenth-century racial typology in the field of genomic thinking that is set to seek the relations between race and the probabilities of certain diseases. While it would be certainly misleading to equate such new racial differentiation with biological determinism in the tradition of nineteenth-century racial sciences as Rabinow and Rose emphasise here, genomic thinking, which is manifested in the Human Genome Project, nevertheless explicates race as a biological truth not at the ‘molar’ level – such as skin colour and fingerprints – but at the molecular level.