Thomas R. Miller

Seeing Eyes, Reading Bodies: Visuality, Race and Color Per-ception or a Threshold in the History of Human Sciences*

Franz Boas developed a distinctly ‘American’ school of Anthropology; nevertheless, his theories were strongly influenced by the German tradition in which he was trained. This influence is recognizable when we consider the visual perception of ethnic difference not only as an inter-subjective process of mutual definition and classification but also with respect to the classifying organ, the eye. Two steps were instrumental in these processes of racial classification: the rise of experimental psy-chophysics and the use of models such as the Augenfarbentafel. In delineating cross-cultural developments, the essay locates a threshold in the development of human sciences and suggests critical historical perspectives for further research.

The Seeing Object

Looking in and looking out, the eye sees and is seen. For centuries philoso-phers and scientists have debated whether the eye is a passive receptor of impressions or an active transmitter of rays. Directly connected to con-sciousness even as the optic nerve conjoins the brain, the eye indicates awareness and the link of perception to the intelligent mind. The glimmer of recognition between eye and mind refracts the visuality of the world-as-lived-experience.1 In an epoch of mechanical testing and extension of sen-sory apparatus, the primacy of vision emerges from the sensory regimes of the body to influence the theoretical construction of psychological aware-ness.

The use of color as a racial parameter, a significant practice in the Ger-man intellectual tradition around 1900, was transformed in North American anthropology by Franz Boas. The measurement and description of eye, hair and skin color was a component of the 19th-century ‘physical-type’ anthro-pology, which sought to build a scientific racial typology from observations

* I thank Birgit Tautz for the impetus of this project and for patiently awaiting my contribution. The Library staff of the American Philosophical Society provided valuable assistance during a resident fellowship in 2000. I am indebted to Barbara Mathé of the American Museum of Natural History for her keen insights and intel-lectual partnership. The artistic vision of Kris Waldherr is a constant source of in-spiration and illumination. 1 See Maurice Merleau-Ponty: The Primacy of Perception, and other essays on phe-nomenological psychology, the philosophy of art, history and politics. Evanston 1964.

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of individual characteristics. Allied with a corps of anthropometric body measurements, the description of eye color employed in field studies was a contributing factor in the visual and sensory regimes of anthropological practice, and influenced the context of scientific and popular discourse about race and the historical origins of human populations. The gradual aban-donment of 19th-century anthropometry after its failure to adequately define racial types yielded to a hierarchicalized, neo-Darwinian anthropology of human variation from lower to higher stages, paving the way for eugenics and socially applied theories of ‘race hygiene’. At the same time there was a new wave of romanticization of ‘natural man’ counterposed to the sup-posed physical degradation and moral decadence of industrialized popula-tions.

In the twentieth century, science and art deconstructed visuality in a sur-gical manner, like an organism to be dissected. Studies of color perception using color-shape assemblages like Edwin Land’s ‘Mondrians’ have focused on pattern recognition, demonstrating that color assignation by the brain is dependent on the holistic context of the complete image; color recognition in the dark is processed by comparison with the surrounding field. The body is observed as actor, the stimulus experimentally reconstituted as a screen; the subject is witnessed as a specimen and the organs of sight are simultane-ously spectators. The scientific history of the seeing organ as an object of visual examination has for the most part screened out the reciprocal gaze of the subject; yet it is reciprocity that is the essence of the gaze. Looking at the world, what I see is a picture of the world looking back or, in Jacques Lacan’s formulation:

That which is light looks at me, and by means of that light in the depths of my eye, something is painted–something that is not simply a constructed relation, the object on which the philosopher lingers–but something that is an impression, the shimmering of a surface that is not, in advance, situated for me in its distance.2

The seeing eye beholds the world-picture yet it is never in the picture. It is axiomatic that we can never see our own eyes. The position of the observer excludes a certain area from the field of vision, that which is closest to the source itself. Philosopher Drew Leder writes of the invisibility of the parts of one’s body surrounding the eyes:

2 Jacques Lacan: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. New York, London 1977. P. 96.

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The head is absent insofar as it immediately surrounds and underlies the eyes such that the eyes cannot achieve a perspective upon it.... My eyes themselves never appear within their visual field except indirectly via reflective surfaces.... As the origin of vision, the eyes are also its terminus.3

Yet precisely the two-way nature of sight and the capacity for self-recognition help to animate the senses, imbuing ocular perception with con-sciousness. “The enigma,” wrote Merleau-Ponty in “Eye and Mind”, “is that my body simultaneously sees and is seen. That which looks at all things can also look at itself and recognize, in what it sees, the ‘other side’ of its power of looking. It sees itself seeing...” 4

The nature of vision oscillates in contact and correspondence between phenomenon and perception. Paradoxically, objects and bodies retain pig-ment and hue yet the impression and register of coloration demonstrably takes place in the brain. The position of the observer is an irreducible factor influencing the perceptual result and its categorization by a viewer. In this sense what is true of color perception by individuals is also true of the study of perception itself by science. Reading bodies, anthropology places color and pattern under scrutiny according to its own design, applying measure-ments determined by classificatory requirements and prevailing theories of human biological variation to the exigencies of socially powerful racial ty-pologies.

Millenialism and vision are joined in the realm of the prophetic, and every fin-de-siècle is also a new beginning. Since the dawn of history, color has been construed as a sign of difference. Color symbolism gave turn-of-the-century phantasms of progress a chromatic hue in both the dazzling ‘White City’ of Chicago’s 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition (where Boas engaged in anthropometric measurements) and its successor, the ‘Rainbow city’ at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. The visual spectacularization of these artificial environments concocted a confectionary dream-image of classical proportion, constructed as a futuristic vision of trompe-l’oeil supermodernity. And while these colonial dreamscapes in-flected by tint and hue held out the chimeric promise of epochal shifts in production, their spatialization of mimesis reinforced racial segregation and imperialist hierarchies.

Problematizing turns-of-the-century as epistemic markers or key shifting points in time, there is, nevertheless, a self-fulfilling tendency for the tyr-anny of round numbers to infuse the collective consciousness. Synchronic-ities appear clustered with apparent regularity around calendrical milestones, yet they may be as coincidental and random as those of other eras. For the 3 Drew Leder: The Absent Body. Chicago 1990. P.12. 4 Merleau-Ponty: The Primacy of Perception. P. 62.

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elucidation of Herschel’s discovery of infrared light in 1800, followed a year later by the discovery of ultraviolet light, the dates on the calendar may well be irrelevant. Yet historical actors themselves have often vested these arbitrarily fixed turning points of measured time with a special significance, seeing in their contemporaneity the spark and spirit of a new century. Trac-ing these epistemic shifts in the zeitgeist, as it progresses through specific scientific, social and artistic concepts, this essay reveals the parallelism and convergence of the human sciences in Germany and North America as they visualized and scrutinized anatomical features and psychological percepts in a quest for the ‘scientistic’ classification of human subjects.

The color of time

“All vision,” asserted James Clerk Maxwell in 1871, “is colour vision, for it is only by observing differences of colour that we distinguish the forms of objects.”5 But since colors remain in the eye of the beholder, any potential or actual differences in color vision among individuals or groups could only be discovered through differences in terminology and classification. During the latter half of the 19th century, a significant portion of the efforts of the new experimental psychology, as exemplified by Wilhelm Wundt’s Leipzig laboratory, were directed toward refining scientific techniques in hopes of devising a system for measuring individual apperception. The speed of the connection between the eye as receptor and the mind as a filter and proces-sor was key to the reception of physical stimuli and their action on con-sciousness. On the other side of the equation, the perceived differences in skin and eye pigmentation were considered essential markers of differentia-tion among human groups.

The ways in which the eye itself, as a receptive organ, increasingly be-came a subject of the anthropological gaze unveil the central role visuality and perception played in shifting scientific understanding and method. Boas influenced his European colleagues, including Rudolf Martin’s student Dina Jochelson-Brodsky, through his emphasis on the amassing of anthropomet-ric statistics. Data from the American Museum of Natural History's 1897-1902 Jesup North Pacific Expedition, a sweeping mission led by Boas to reconstruct the history of ethnogenesis in northwest North America and Siberia, formed a primary body of evidence, yet the bulk of it went unpub-lished and unanalyzed.6 Eye-color measurements taken by scientists work- 5 James Clerk Maxwell: On Color Vision In: Nature 4(1871): 13. [reprinted in A Bedside ‘Nature’: Genius and Eccentricity in Science 1869-1953. ed. By Walter Gratzer. New York 1999. P.21.] 6 See Stephen Ousley and Richard Jantz: 500 Year Old Questions, 100 Year Old Data, Brand New Computers: Biological Data from the Jesup North Pacific Expedi-

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ing for Boas in the North Pacific, such as those recorded in northeastern Siberia by Jochelson-Brodsky, provided data gathered and classified in the context of the visual and anthropometric methods of the time. Ways in which coloration has been read as a mark of identity written in the body can be traced throughout the history of these practices to reveal researchers’ sometimes unwitting and sometimes deliberate construction and application of sociobiological categories and visual tropes in the perception and catego-rization of human bodies.

The philosophical and scientific roots of the modern perception and inter-pretation of eye color can be traced back to the early 19th century, when Georges Cuvier in Paris and other European anatomists were formulating the classical canons of natural history. The adaptation of, and eventual heu-ristic shift away from, the assumptions and conclusions of physical-type methodology are foreshadowed in the data collected and analyzed by Boas and several of his disciples. The development of new forms of visuality in museums and media within the context of a representational anthropology can also be seen to stem from this period. These developments coincide with the emergence of a distinctly North American school. Meanwhile, German scientists followed a different path toward a racial anthropology which would later mesh with the policies, rhetoric and imagery of the Nazi period.

Around 1700 it was a Briton, Sir Isaac Newton, who (in defense of the analytical rigors of his 1704 treatise Opticks) took up the standard for the science of physics against the phenomenological view of some philosophers. Newton reasoned that “Nature is ever conformable to herself, but an ex-perimental proof is desired.”7 Splitting light into rays with a prism, he de-clared that “the permanent colours of natural bodies... are due to selective reflection.”8 Color as a quality of matter resulted from patterns of pigmen-tation; yet its perception was paradoxically subtractive, produced by the par-tial and differential absorption and reflection of portions of the white-light spectrum. The optical effects of color vision seemed, equally paradoxically, to be constructed by eye and mind as receptors.

Helmholtz9, the paterfamilias of 19th-century German physics, noted the difference between visual and aural apperception. In a lecture given at Bonn during the winter of 1857 he distinguished the process of visual

tion. In: Gateways. Exploring the Legacy of the Jesup Pacific Expedition, 1897-1902. Eds. Igor Krupnik and William W. Fitzhugh. Washington 2001. Pp. 257-278. 7 Sir Isaac Newton: Opticks, or a Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections & Colours of Light. New York 1952 [1704/1730]. Prop. VI. Theor. V. 8 Newton: Opticks. Prop. X, Prob. V. 9 Hermann Helmholtz: Popular Lectures on Scientific Subjects. Translated by E. Atkinson, with an Introduction by Professor Tyndall. New York 1873; especially: Lecture III. On the Physiological Causes of Harmony in Music.

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(re)cognition in the mind’s eye from what is known today as auditory stream analysis10:

But the eye is unable to decompose compound systems of luminous waves, that is, to distinguish compound colours from one another. It experiences from them a single, unanalysable, simple sensation, that of a mixed colour. It is indifferent to the eye whether this mixed colour results from a union of fundamental colours with simple, or with non-simple ratios of periodic times. The eye has no sense of harmony in the same meaning as the ear. There is no music to the eye...11

The mental construction of attention and distraction, a central trope of early psychological experiments, also played a role in Goethe’s misguided at-tempt to overthrow Newtonian color theory, according to Helmholtz.12 He traced Goethe’s inability to accept Newton’s experimental proof when it contradicted the visual evidence of what he saw with his own eyes (“he sneers at spectra,” said the physicist dismissively of the poet-as-scientist) to the greatness of Goethe’s poetic imagination. “In his scientific studies,” writes David Park,

Goethe seeks the unanalyzable origins of things.[...] In light, the birth of color in cloudy media is the primitive phenomenon, the Urphänomen; [...] it explains eve-rything but is not itself explained.[... ]Dr. Thomas Young [...] had already noted and explained the cloudy Urphänomen, but Goethe, even if he had known about this, would have dismissed it as tinkering with the unknowable.13

Nevertheless, Goethe’s efforts to demonstrate the emotional associative power of color, rooted in a spiritual notion of God’s universe, had what he conceived of as a higher purpose. Goethe’s color theory, insofar as it incor-porated a careful working-out of color values on a strict emotional scale, prefigured later attempts to quantify with precision a mathematical color scale of spirituality and mood by Russian artists - Scriabin’s compositional experiments with synaesthesia, Kandinsky’s ranked and distributed spiritual qualities of color in art, or the suprematist and constructivist charts of color-scale gradations produced by Malevich’s Vitebsk workshop. In the Euro-pean intellectual milieu around 1900, new models of perception and apper-ception - from the psychological theories advanced by such leading German

10 Cf. Albert S.Bregman: Auditory Scene Analysis: The Perceptual Organization of Sound. Cambridge 1990. 11 Helmholtz: Popular Lectures. Lecture III. Pp.104-105. 12 Helmholtz: Popular Lectures. Lecture II: On Goethe’s Scientific Researches. Pp. 39-42. 13 David Park: The Fire in the Eye: A Historical Essay on the Nature and Meaning of Light. Princeton 1997. P. 242.

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scientists as Wundt and Helmholtz to the phenomenological mysticism of philosophical thinkers like Bergson and Ouspensky - influenced artists and scientists alike to construct detailed systems of color scale and perception. Yet in contrast to the artists’ essentially agnostic vision, which held in re-serve the ultimate judgement, the emergent scientific worldview of the later 19th century would have profound implications for the justification of hier-archical ranking and social dominance based, to a large extent, on the per-ceived color of human bodies.

Franz Boas and the German Anthropological Tradition

For Franz Boas, trained in the German intellectual traditions of Rätzel's hu-man geography and Bastian's voluminous collecting, the anthropological discipline began as a search for laws of human biology and behavior. After relocating to North America, Boas began amassing data, based on observa-tions and measurements of various groups, in an effort to delineate the inter-twined origins of human populations. Using rigorous inductive methods, Boas' findings ultimately led him to abandon the typological framework of 19th-century physical anthropology, which had postulated that biological relationships could be adduced by comparison of surface anatomical charac-teristics, in favor of the historical particularism which would become a hallmark of American anthropology. Strongly influenced by Virchow, Boas' work came at a time when the rediscovery of Mendelian genetics was revo-lutionizing the understanding of inheritance and selection. At the same time, the artistic experiments in synaesthesia by Kandinsky and others were revo-lutionizing attitudes toward perception and visuality. Not surprisingly, Boas' inductive techniques, which profoundly affected the branching off of an American school of anthropology from the German tradition, were rooted in visual thinking and a new understanding of perception.

From the time of his University of Kiel doctoral thesis, Boas tested the hypothesis that the position of the observer played a determining role in dif-ferentiation and classification. He paid attention to native linguistic catego-ries for color from an early stage in his ethnological career, for example in his work with the Nuxalk dancers from the village of Bella Coola who toured Europe with Captain Adrian Jacobsen in 1886: “The principal colors are red, yellow, and blue, the limit between the latter two being indefinite,” he reported. “Green is sometimes called yellow, sometimes blue.”14 In the seminal 1889 essay "On Alternating Sounds," Boas concluded that sensory information was necessarily filtered through the preconditioned mental hab-its of the observer. The broader implications of this thesis resonated in the

14 Franz Boas: The Language of the Bilhoola in British Columbia. In: Science VII(1886)161: 218.

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relativistic position subsequently taken up by anthropologists as observers of others. Applied to the study of human morphology, the arbitrariness and uncertainty of classificatory schemes resulting from observed characteristics of humankind meant that no fixed racial categories could be said to objec-tively exist. Yet measurements of just such differences form the basis of systematics in the natural sciences. The corpus of visual and anthropometric data collected by Boas' expeditionary teams, ostensibly gathered to ascertain the characteristics of discrete racial groupings, would eventually show that variability within any group, delineated on the basis of such observations, exceeded that found between groups. In other words, human physical varia-tion is a continuum whose internal divisions are imposed through the pre-conceptions of social and scientific thought.

The fundamental epistemological shift entailed in this view was key to the development of a humanistic anthropology as well as to the modern sci-entific conception of race. The working-out of this position had social im-plications which pointed the way to Boas’ unconscious model of culture as learned apperceptual habitus. Boas steadfastly refused to make a simple connection between biology and intelligence or behavior.15 Within the larger cultural framework, the scientific study of man took a turn toward the dis-crimination of biological markers as signs for the unique identification and tracking of individuals. 1900 was not only the year Mendelian genetics sud-denly achieved a major breakthrough to acceptance, but also that of Karl Landsteiner’s discovery of the system of blood types, and of the widespread replacement of Bertillon’s complicated anthropometric criminal identifica-tion method with Galton’s system of reading the unique fingerprints of the individual. It was the year the principal chair in anthropology in Berlin passed from Boas’ aged mentor Virchow to his friend and colleague Felix von Luschan.16

Again, the dialectic of racially tinged observation and measurement, al-

15 Filling out the record of his personal family history for a questionnaire by the American Eugenics office, Boas offered the facts and physical statistics of his kin while conspicuously leaving blank those lines which asked about each person’s preferences, manner or life history. This trajectory contrasted with that of the Ger-man anthropologists, led by Eugen Fischer, who followed the classical evolutionary models of 19th-century anatomists to very different conclusions. 16 As early as 1877, Virchow had shown that every nation contained such a wide array of ‘types’, revealing the idea of a unitary national type at the historical roots of the German polity as a pseudoscientific fantasy. (Benoit Massin: From Virchow to Fischer: Physical Anthropology and ‘Modern Race Theories’ in Wilhelmine Ger-many. In: Volksgeist as Method and Ethic: Essays on Boasian Ethnography and German Anthropological Tradition. Ed. George Stocking. Madison 1996. Pp. 79-154. Here especially p. 101.)

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ways suffused with an undercurrent of dominance and hierarchical classifi-cation, played out on the shifting epistemological ground of science, applied arts and social doctrine. “The aesthetics of reception,” writes Friedrich Kitt-ler in Discourse Networks 1800/1900, “had become quite different circa 1900: instead of communication and its myth of two souls or consciousness, there are numerical relations between the materiality of writing and the physiology of the senses [...] Since Nietzsche, ‘aesthetics is nothing but a kind of applied physiology.’”17 The mathematical nominalism of precisely describing features written on and in the individual body had immediate applications both for medical research and for the eventual social and behav-ioral control of “deviant” populations by the interests of the state. The grow-ing popularity of ideas of Nordic superiority, Aryanism, and racialized “an-throposociology” after 1900 was tied to changes in the structuring of scien-tific knowledge as well as to sociopolitical events. Over the coming decades, the institutions and practitioners of German anthropological science would become increasingly intertwined with “biological politics” and directly implicated in the ultimately tragic consequences of modern “race theory” in practice.18 Eye and skin color, as seen and demarcated by the cold scientific eye, was a crucial element in the justification of social discrimination by neo-evolutionary thinkers.

By the mid-1890s, the revitalization of Darwinism among German scien-tists was in full swing; it would displace the old physical-type anthropology in the new century.19 The newly ascendant biological approach was con-comitant with the resurgence of chauvinistic nationalism and German milita-rism, fueled by the demographic trends of a declining birth rate and an up-swing in immigration, especially from the east. For the increasingly imperi-alist Luschan, an influx of workers from Asia and Africa posed a “color threat” to colonialism and raised the specter of miscegenation.20 Fear of the other was frequently couched in spectral terms as if simple shading were equivalent to (mythical) phenotypical barriers to cross-fertilization, and bio-logically based fantasies tantamount to sacrosanct eugenic standards. The heady concoction of neo-Darwinist race theory and political xenophobia proved to be a potent factor in lending scientistic weight to the increasingly nativist climate of public opinion. The imprimatur of the laboratory gave a legitimacy to pseudoscientific race categorizations, to be taken full advan-tage of by race-baiting opinion mongers and opportunistic politicians. The origins of this science, however, were far different in intent and methodol-ogy from their later misapplications to the realm of social engineering. 17 Friedrich Kittler: Discourse Networks 1800/1900. Stanford 1990. P.225. 18 See Massin. From Virchow to Fischer. P.135. 19 See Massin: From Virchow to Fischer. P.121. 20 See Massin From Virchow to Fischer. Pp.102-104.

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The Rise of Experimental Psychophysics

Around 1900, hundreds of mechanical and electrical devices were sold to laboratories for the purpose of measuring and quantifying perceptual proc-esses such as reaction time to colored lights and other sensory stimuli. A major function of the Harvard laboratory’s exhibit at the 1893 World’s Co-lumbian Exposition in Chicago was the sale of measuring and testing appa-ratus, wax models, and anatomical specimens to other laboratories and uni-versities. At the second annual meeting of the American Psychological As-sociation, held at Columbia College in 1893, George Mead of the University of Michigan defined the technique of measurement in materialist terms:

Measurement is the breaking up of a quantum of energy into equal units.... rhythmical bilateral processes can be brought into consciousness in tension e.g., in estimating a distance. The number of the rhythmical processes required to at-tain the object constitutes its temporal character, the sum of them its spatial character...21

Yet the precise calibration of the individual ‘human equation’ meets its limit in the creeping errors of judgement which inevitably arise at the threshold of perceptibility:

To determine whether this error–the personal error–is a psychical or a physical one we must determine where the line is to be drawn between the physical and psychical in consciousness.... Our objects are teleological, i.e., means to possible ends.”22

In 1900 the Psychological Laboratory at the University of Toronto was out-fitted for the experimental study of color perception, with the Research Room given over to the investigation of color sensation and the Ethnologi-cal Museum temporarily devoted to research in color aesthetics. Instructor Albert H. Abbott succinctly summed up the gulf between objectively meas-urable data and subjective sensory impressions, which the science called experimental psychology endeavored to bridge:

[…] a physicist investigates the motions which occur where we experience, for example, a colour, but he does not investigate the seeing of colour, or the colour sensations which we experience, and which, after all, contain the fundamental possibility of this science (Optics). [...] Physics attempts to tell us what vibrations of ether take place where we see a certain colour; Physiology attempts to tell us what vibrations of ether take place

21 American Psychological Association: Proceedings III. Second Annual Meeting. New York 1894 P. 23. 22 Proceedings III. Second Annual Meeting P. 23.

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when we see a certain colour, but neither of these sciences investigates the colour as seen, which is of a certain quality of tone (red, orange, yellow, etc.)....23

The institution of the laboratory dates from the German scientific renais-sance of the early 19th century. After Justus von Liebig founded the first chemistry laboratory in 1824, the first German chemistry laboratories of the 1820s and 1830s established the model for the biology and physics laborato-ries which soon followed. Experimental psychophysics attained institutional status during the 1870s at Wilhelm Wundt’s Psychology Laboratory in Leipzig, where many German, American, Russian and other students con-verged. As embodied in vision experiments, the rising science of psycho-physics stood at the heart of the mid-19th century German efflorescence of university science. The new concept of sensory faculties and cognitive be-havior, construed as precisely measurable and exact quantifiable capacities, was both a premise and a product of the German and American experimen-tal laboratories that had grown out of the technological advances of the in-dustrial revolution.

The German influence on American psychology increased rapidly be-tween 1887 and 1892, when several other North American laboratories were set up and leading scientists including Hugo Münsterberg moved to the United States to join William James at Harvard. Boas was a crucial estab-lishing link in this chain of German and American intellectuals. When G. Stanley Hall, following the Leipzig model, founded the world’s second psy-chology laboratory in 1888 at the center of his new Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, Franz Boas was one of the first faculty members he recruited. Although the institution struggled, and many of the disap-pointed new recruits soon bolted, the Clark experience – Boas’ first profes-sional teaching job in America – profoundly influenced his psychophysical and ethnological thinking. This mental orientation was evident in the pages of Science during Boas’ stint as editor of the influential journal. The best-known work of Boas’ Clark period involved large immigrant populations, and he issued groundbreaking anthropometric studies as well as work on intelligence testing and mental retardation. These surveys were undertaken in conjunction with the laboratory-based work at Clark, where Boas was refining his definition of anthropology. During this period, he clearly stated his intention to privilege the “cosmographic” side of psychology and history over the physiological side of anatomy and anthropometry in his grand syn-thesis of race, language and culture.

In Leipzig, Wundt assigned American James McKeen Cattell the problem of determining the upper and lower limits to consciousness and attention in 23 Albert H. Abbott: Experimental Psychology and the Laboratory in Toronto. In: University of Toronto Monthly 1900/1: Pp.85-89; Pp. 106-112; all italics in original.

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the sensation of colors on the retina by measuring reaction-time and associa-tional memory. Cattell’s task was to study subjects’ reaction times to col-ored lights. This was an attempt to measure the Apperceptionszeit, the time lag between light reception in the eye and color recognition in the mind.24 Cattell was less than enthusiastic. At the time he was more interested in in-trospective methods of studying consciousness; like William James, he fol-lowed older tradition in favoring the phenomenological approach to con-sciousness of philosophy over the physical side of apperception and measur-able behavior. The pioneers of psychophysics acknowledged that the scien-tist himself could not stand outside the domain of human perception and cognition, and thus became by default a subset of the subject under investi-gation simultaneous to his role as investigator. Soon after arriving at Wundt’s Psychological Laboratory in Leipzig in the 1880s, Cattell framed the problem of investigating the phenomenon of consciousness as a meta-phorical mirror image of the self: “The study of consciousness is, as we all know, fraught with peculiar difficulties; it is not easy to be at once the ob-server and the observed; ‘the eye sees not itself,’ and the phenomena are both complex and transient.”25

The experimental methodology was originally intended to introduce pre-cise means of physical measurement into the body-mind problem. But as a result of his son-et-lumière experiments at Leipzig, Cattell abandoned the idea that apperception could be precisely measured. Unable to successfully complete the task, Cattell credited Wundt’s experimental program with teaching him the value of combining psychometric measurements with in-trospective methods. Wundt, who was not a laboratory worker himself, di-vided the work into four categories: (1) The Analysis and Measurement of Sensation; (2) The Duration of Mental Processes [or Psychometry]; (3) The Time-sense; (4) Attention, Memory and the Association of Ideas. Psycho-metric experiments, which consumed almost half the Leipzig researchers’ efforts, effectively revealed the parallelism between the physiological per-ception of physical movement and the psychological processes of con-sciousness. Oddly, however, they could find no difference in individual sub-jects’ reaction times to lights of different colors. Then Cattell tried exposing the retina to extremely short bursts of color, and discovered significant dif-ferences in the speed of recognition. Although he was “left in doubt as to how far the inertia is in the eye and how far in consciousness,” signs pointed away from physiological processes in the eye and toward the psychological factor of attention in the mind as the determining factor in the recognition

24 Wilhelm Wundt: Outlines of Psychology. Translated by C.H. Judd. Leipzig 1897. 25 James McKeen Cattell: The Psychological Laboratory in Leipsic In: Mind 1888/13. Pp. 37-51.

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time for different colors.26 His attempts at measuring reaction times to color ultimately failed, yet despite results suggesting the prominent role played by psychological awareness, Cattell shifted his own attention away from intro-spective psychology toward “measurable behaviors” in the body and the brain.27 Cattell reoriented his scientific methods away from the uncertainties of introspective philosophy in favor of imprecise but more controllable psy-chometric techniques. Under psychophysical scrutiny the body revealed the mechanics of its workings as a tuned receptor. Color wheels and other ex-perimental apparatus simulated natural effects under controlled conditions, provoking particular sensations through the manipulation of images which, refracted and absorbed by the phenomenological world, were processed and “seen” re-assembled in the brain. This was the orientation Cattell carried back to North America and Colum-bia University, where he would co-found the Department of Psychology, out of which Boas’ Department of Anthropology would emerge during the 1890s. But where Cattell turned away from inchoate consciousness and to-wards the observable and repeatable movements of the body, Boas’ disap-pointment with the imprecision of laboratory techniques led him to favor mental life as an explanation for human apperception, while at the same time pursuing more refined anatomical and psychophysical measurement tools. In much the same way as Cattell, when he was a young German stu-dent Boas had considered his assigned thesis topic in physics at Kiel - the problem of variations in the apperception of colored sea-water - to be an unworthy subject for his dissertation. He found the irregular differences to be unmeasurable without far more precise instruments than could be ob-tained in the laboratory.28

Boas was quite interested, however, in the problem of the observer’s bi-ased position in this attempted experimental re-creation of natural phenom-ena under artificially simulated conditions. In North America, he developed this interest through his approaches to racial typology and cultural relativ-ism. Race was a far more complex problem because of the many variables of genetic history; yet in real life the distribution of traits – so vast, intricate and slippery as to be perhaps incalculable – were nonetheless finite and his-

26 James McKeen Cattell: The Psychological Laboratory in Leipsic In: Mind 1888/13. Pp. 37-51. 27 James McKeen Cattell: Early Psychological Laboratories In: Science 1928/67. PP. 543-548. 28 See Barbara Mathé and Thomas R. Miller: Kwazi’nik’s Eyes: Vision and Symbol in Boasian Representation. In: Gateways. Pp.107-138. See also Thomas Ross Miller and Barbara Mathé: Drawing Shadows to Stone. In: Drawing Shadows to Stone: The Photography of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, 1897-1902. Eds. Laurel Kend-all, Barbara Mathé and Thomas Ross Miller. New York 1997. Pp. 19-102.

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torically particular, and thus hypothetically susceptible to the scientific grasp of measurement and analysis. The problem in the laboratory was to discover and compensate for imperfect techniques and the observer’s sub-jectivity; the task of reconstructing ethnogenetic history meant factoring in huge quantities of unknown but precise anatomical and cultural traits result-ing from migrations and intercourse among tribes. Boas’ anthropometric data, if analyzed, would have confirmed that human variability in popula-tions is a continuum.29 Skin color, eye color or any other fixed hereditary markers of bounded ethnicity are distinctive features of individuals consid-ered as the salient characteristics of racial groups, not biological walls divid-ing one group of individuals from another. As social categories these differ-ences, based on observation of biological difference, were irreducibly cul-tural and historical manifestations of individual and collective will, instru-ments of social selection rather than inherent barriers to the formation of group identity based on shared characteristics. A generation later, the ines-capable social component of racializing typology would recombine with hierarchical neo-evolutionary principles to pernicious and devastating effect as eugenic theory was pressed into service in different ways on both sides of the Atlantic.

Craniometry, though it had lost the centrality it once had in 19th-century anthropometric techniques, continued to be a functioning diagnostic tool in the arsenal of 20th-century science. There was a shift from physical meas-urement to visual methods of observation as calipers were replaced by light techniques including skull-boxes and shadow profiles. Eye and hair color measurements, as part of a battery of anthropometric readings, played a role in Germany as model for and prelude to a racialized anthropology, while for Boas this same data was a tool in the pursuit of a historically reconstructed theory of ethnogenesis.

The dualistic logic of race and biology rests in part on the binary dis-crimination of color as a race trope in the rhetoric of the body politic – the Manichean reductions of ‘black’ and ‘white’, ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘Self’ and ‘Other’. Social attitudes and prejudicial beliefs can either be exposed and debunked or supported and intensified by the manipulation of the imperfect experimental apparatus of human science with its imprimatur of authority. Science situated the connection between color as sign of racial difference and perceptual psychology explicitly within a continuum of practice. This was joined by biological and phenomenological laws and theories to behav-ioral, political and militaristic rationales in 20th-century Germany.

The color of eyes as a subject of study has focused on the iris as the part of the eye containing melanin granules or pigment. Perceived as difference

29 See Ousley and Jantz: 500 Years Old Questions. In: Gateways. Pp. 257-278.

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written in the body, the gradation of eye color suits Boas’ inductive methods stressing difference, whereas neo-evolutionary taxonomy and typology ad-hered to similarity as a deductive organizing principle. The color of skin and the color of the iris both depend on melanin synthesis, but their pathways are partly determined by independent sets of genes. The complexity of eye-color inheritance continues to defy full analysis and predictive modeling. Eye color is now believed to depend partly on granules of pigment in the iris and partly on optical effects. In fact, according to a standard optometrical interpretation all eyes are blue; irises with higher levels and denser patterns of the granular pigment appear brown, while those containing less melanin look blue. Inheritance may vary, with the possibility of blue-eyed parents producing dark-eyed children, but darker eyes are somewhat dominant over-all; northern Europe is the exception to the general pattern of distribution worldwide. The complexity of heredity and of inherited traits belies their status in science and society as keys to kinship and embodied history.

Based on a color ranking developed by Rudolf Martin at the University of Zurich, the Augenfarbentafel or eye-color table was sold at cost to scientists and researchers. It was first marketed in 1903 with claims of unprecedented scientific accuracy in typologizing eye color. A slotted aluminum board in a portable, locking black case held 16 glass eyes arranged in progressive shades from dark brown to light blue, set in place with the surrounding forms of simulated eyelids and soft tissue. Based on somatological studies of various racially defined population samples, a numbered color scale cor-responding to the gradations in hue and intensity of the artificial irises was provided for assignation to living human subjects. After much experimenta-tion, the designers settled on a neutral matte gray tone for the sheet metal background of the board itself, so that the table could be “used with all skin colours from the darkest brown to the rosiest white” (according to a promo-tional flyer). The subject was positioned in daylight, with the eye-color board held up against his or her left cheek; the scientist stood 50 to 70 cen-timeters away and made a visual judgement correlated to the numerical scale. The individual glass eyeballs, which were held in place by four metal tongues, could be removed for closer examination against the subject’s eye.

The flash of psychological transference with the other creates a momen-tary closed circuit, the return of the gaze. Glimpsing an animal eye flicker-ing in the night, the mind is suddenly conscious of the seeing eye being seen. When Luis Buñuel sliced a cow’s eye in surreal close-up in Un chien andalou, cinematic viewers were forced into voyeuristic complicity as wit-nesses to the violent assault of images on their own retinas. To the contem-porary eye, there is a shock of gaze reversal too when one first opens the attaché case designed by Rudolf Martin and is faced with rows of disem-bodied artificial eyeballs, arranged with mathematical precision according to

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color scale. One is suddenly being looked at by an array of eyes without a face, by an artificially human, insectoid anthropic form, a surreal apparition that visualizes the Uncanny in its Freudian sense of alien familiarity.30

The word for eye is cognate with the word for lake in Chumash as well as in ancient Hebrew. Like a mirror, the lake is a realm of reflective surfaces; like the eye, it conceals hidden depths. The shifting, blinking eye reveals the motion of consciousness. Merleau-Ponty encapsulates the reciprocity of bodily eye and “the labor of vision”:

The mirror’s ghost lies outside my body, and by the same token my own body’s ‘invisibility’ can invest the other bodies I see. Hence my body can assume seg-ments derived from the body of another, just as my substance passes into them; man is mirror for man. The mirror itself is the instrument of a universal magic that changes things into a spectacle, spectacles into things, myself into another, and another into myself.31

The glass eye, the eye that does not see, is a visual tool for the observation and measurement of difference by color. Martin’s kit provided a means to orient the observer in comparing a subject’s pigmentation with a hypotheti-cal model for the purposes of typological classification. In a sense, this method was an answer to a problem related to that which had vexed the young Boas while researching his doctoral thesis in physics on the percep-tion of the color of sea-water. The variable bias of the Kiel laboratory condi-tions and the position of the observer, Boas found, drastically affected his experimental results. Boas would later demonstrate the arbitrariness of racial and physical-type categories, for anthropological efforts to classify popula-tions, by analogy to the distribution of colored sticks. The historical com-plexity of human migration and mixture ruled out a simple theoretical model for the reconstruction of group origins. It was the failure of attempts at rig-orous classification of human types which led John Wesley Powell to de-clare, in a rejoinder to Boas’ insistence on historical-particularist methods of museum display, that “There is no science of ethnology.”32

Boasian anthropology represented both a link to and a break from the centrifugal diffusionism of Rätzel’s human geography and the comparativist universalism of Adolf Bastian’s psychic unity of humankind. Debate at the time was dominated by the cultural evolutionists, who held that so-called primitive peoples were on a lower rung of universal human development 30 Sigmund Freud: Das Unheimliche (1919). Cited after the English-Language edi-tion Sigmund Freud: Psychological Writings and Letters. Ed. Sander Gilman. New York 1995. Pp. 8-13. 31 Merleau-Ponty. The Primacy of Perception. P. 68. 32 John Wesley Powell: Museums of Ethnology and Their Classifications. In: Sci-ence 1887/9. Pp. 612-614.

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than northern Europeans, and the kulturkreis school of diffusionists, who attempted to trace innovations and inventions from centers of so-called high culture to the periphery where survivals could be expected to be found. Boas turned the prevailing notions on their heads, gradually moving toward a po-sition of historical particularism emphasizing the unique development of each culture. This turn in Boas’ thinking, which was to have profound ef-fects on the branching of an American school of anthropology away from the European models, was rooted in visual thinking, and particularly in a new understanding of perception and the role of the observer in classifica-tion and taxonomy.

The surface measurements of craniometry were replaced by a new kind of biological genealogy, a move that paralleled the rise of eugenics in the United States. At the same time, evolutionary models shifted scientific opin-ion away from the monogenism of Bastian’s psychic unity of mankind to-ward a system based on observed anatomical and presumed mental differ-ences. Boas’ rigorous adherence to inductive method provided an important counterweight to the biologically reductive association of inherited traits based on observed correlations. Canadian ethnologist Diamond Jenness wrote to Boas on March 23, 1920:

I am preparing a short, semi-technical, paper on the ‘blond’ Eskimos, as the sub-ject has aroused considerable interest. Dr. [Edward] Sapir has kindly read over the MSS., but as neither he nor I have any special knowledge of physical anthro-pology, he has suggested that I send it on to you, as the foremost authority on that and kindred subjects. I should esteem it a very great favour if you would read it over, and let me benefit by your criticisms and advice. Then if you would return the MSS., I should try to adopt your suggestions.

In Boas’ reply on April 5, 1920 he characteristically urged methodological caution, singling out one trait in particular as key:

... you say that there is no relation between eye color and eye shape. I do not think that we need to expect a correlation between these two elements which are not necessarily correlated.[...]

The Canadian was quick to concur:

... I am amending it in line with your criticisms – the major one, indeed, regard-ing eye colour and eye shape, I had already decided to change....”33

The filial relations between German and North American ethnological sci- 33 Jenness and Boas correspondance, April 9, 1920. In: Boas Papers, American Phi-losophical Society Library.

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ences continued even as they were being reformulated in different direc-tions. Boas himself formed a living link; trained in the older schools of Rätzel’s human geography, Bastian’s psychic unity of humankind and Ru-dolf Virchow’s monogenism and inductive method, Boas drew heavily on this 19th-century liberal humanist foundation in devising the cultural relativ-ism and historical particularism of the American anthropology he would develop. The older physical-type anthropology yielded, on the one hand, to the racialized German anthropology led by Eugen Fischer and, on the other, to a newly professionalized American anthropology, a scientific study of humankind emphasizing history and mental life over inherited physiological traits and anatomical characteristics. Color continued to play a vital role as a marker of racial identity and a component of typologies based on observa-tion of eye, hair, and skin, alternately serving as a basis for observation and measurement but always in the service of a classificatory end.

Throughout the 20th century color remained an ineluctible synecdoche for race.34 Racial type was an idealized concept which could not be statistically defined as a set of precise norms for large populations, and could not be firmly localized in any given individual. When attempts at classification by measurement yielded to a reductionist biological essentialism, race came to function with renewed vigor as a visual representation of difference in the social imaginary – in large part as a function of skin, eye and hair color.35 In the new German anthropology led by Eugen Fischer, such single inherited traits were interpreted and extrapolated into generalizations within the Men-delian framework as sufficient proof of “the genetic nature of most ‘racial’ traits”.36 Luschan, Fischer and their peers promoted the cause of “racial hygiene”, paving the way for the collaboration of German anthropologists with Nazi scientific theory and its deadly regime of human experimentation.

Franz Boas never published an analysis of the voluminous anthropomet-ric data he had compiled, reaching no conclusive results. Recent tabulations confirm that his samples show variations within ‘types’ greater than those between ‘types’. Surface measurements, such as comparisons of skull shape or gradations of pigmentation, were unable to provide answers to questions of origins and the human family. Boas’ data, which can be used to disprove the fixed objective existence of ‘race’ as a biological category, revealed the inherent bias of classification relying on a priori ideal categories, a system of typology rooted in Aristotelian natural history methods. Categories of racial identity, as the Jesup Expedition data would ultimately bear out, are 34 See, e.g. William S. Willis: Skeletons in the Anthropological Closet. In: Reinvent-ing Anthropology. Ed. Dell Hymes. New York 1969. Pp. 121-152. 35 See Thomas R. Miller: Exhibition and Book Review Essay. Hair in African Art and Culture. In: American Anthropologist 103 (2000) 1. Pp. 182-188. 36 Massin. From Virchow to Fischer. Pp. 124.

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defined by the observer; any parameter used as a reference point is distrib-uted on a continuum within a given population.

The marks of racial identity are socially constructed yet written in the body. As one of the most visible and distinguishable marks, eye-color came to play a widely recognized role in identifying individuals as belonging to racial and geographical categories. Reversing the gaze, science looked in at the organ of sight. In the 21st century the technology of identification is al-ready shifting toward the introduction of optical retinal scanner devices at bank machines and security checkpoints, an updated form of Bertillonage to replace fingerprints.37 German researchers have introduced glowing green eyes into mosquitoes and fruitflies to track genetic traits like sterility. As the next wave of biotechnology enters popular consciousness, the persis-tence of racial profiling and other biologized social categories recalls Boas’ 1887 cautionary reply to John Wesley Powell: “classification is not explana-tion.”38

37 See Michael Taussig: Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. New York 1993. 38 Boas: Museums of Ethnology and their Classifications. In: Science 1887/9. Pp. 587-589, 614.