The research from this NSF award, co-funded by the Science, Technology & Society program and the Law & Social Science program, will engage a broad question of public concern: How have the sciences of identification shaped our sense of who we are? The project takes its title from John Locke, who coined the term, "the forensic self," to suggest how a person's identity--his or her inner sense of self--depends on an awareness of having to answer to others, and to the criminal courts in particular. Preliminary research by the investigator has suggested how the forensic techniques, long deployed to make individual citizens accountable to the law, have also defined our self-understanding as members of racial groups and descendants of genealogical lineages. The project investigates five forensic techniques in chronological sequence, each based on a particular feature of the body: Renaissance handwriting analysis (the hand), nineteenth-century anthropometry (bones), early twentieth-century fingerprinting (skin), twentieth-century serological testing (blood), and contemporary DNA-typing (genes).
The recent adoption of DNA-typing techniques has shown how the forensic sciences can be deployed not only to mark out individuals, but also to assess their character, kinship, and heritage. This project will suggest how the forensic sciences have long served these multiple roles. Unlike prior histories of the forensic sciences, which have focused on a single technique in a single nation or period, this project takes a comparative and synthetic approach. Using previously untapped archives in both the U.S. and France, it compares the distinct methods of validating expertise in the Anglo-American and French-Continental legal systems, and traverses the divide between the early modern and modern eras. This project seeks to understand how in measuring ourselves as individuals we fit ourselves to the social body, and to its histories.
