ABSTRACT
Introduction: learning lessons from the spectacle of seduction Visitors to the Palazzo delle Belle Art, Rome in the autumn of 1885 became the witnesses of a most unusual spectacle. On display in one hall was a huge array of objects including well over 300 skulls and anatomical casts, probably several thousand portrait photographs and drawings of epileptics and delinquents, insane and born criminals, and maps, graphs and publications summing up the results of research in the new scientific discipline of criminal anthropology. The exhibition was displayed for only one week next to the assembly hall in which some 130 European criminologists, anthropologists, psychiatrists, jurists and physicians had convened for the First International Congress of Criminal Anthropology between 16 and 20 November. The sight of the place must have been dizzying. Forty-three exhibitors, most of them Italian, some French, German, Hungarian and Russian, showed their personal collections which characterised their individual achievements in the field. Laid out on tables and shelves were series of skulls, demonstrating the typical features of epileptics, street robbers, or suicidels, and individual specimens of special cases: megalocephalics, prostitutes, murderers; brains conserved in alcohol or, after a special method invented by Giacomini, in gelatine, which allowed the fine slicing of the brain for microscopic examination; plaster casts of heads, skulls, faces, ears, and no less than five completely conserved heads, two of nihilists, two of delinquents, and that of the infamous bandit Giona La Gala, which was there in the exhibition of the Genoa penitentiary, complete with his brain, tattoos, and gall bladder stones found during the autopsy. Maps, diagrams and other graphic displays hung on the walls, illustrating the geographical distribution of various sorts of crimes, the rapport of growing suicide and insanity rates with the rise of crime, or the influence of variations in temperature and grain prices on Italian criminality. Clay and wax figures made by prisoners and mental patients, examples of their writings and drawings, an album with copies of two thousand tattoos, all illustrating aspects of criminal or insane creativity. And in many of the individual collections, second only to skulls, were portraits of criminals, drawings as well as photographs. (Broeckmann 1995: 3)
Positivist criminology was born amidst a dazzling and seductive spectacle. What lessons can we take from this exhibition of material culture 120 years ago? Then, as now, processes operated to establish a discipline, to make visible the ‘criminal’ as a positive entity and render invisible the cultural suppositions and global reach of those processes as they crossed borders, captured exotic cultural practices and rendered them signifiers of a supposed ‘criminality’. This is a broad assertion and in this chapter I will use Lombroso to present certain basic propositions. Firstly, that at the heart of the positivist cannon is performance art – at odds with its official image of neutrally representing facts, positivist criminology is cultural production. Secondly, that ‘the late nineteenth-century birth of criminology’ was more than what Wetzell (2000: 26-31) describes as ‘a general western European phenomenon, taking place in Italy, France, Germany, and to a lesser extent Britain’. These were sites of visible production, but they were informed by flows of information from travellers and their reports of the world beyond Europe, a world that Europeans were shaping
in Europe’s images and cultural understandings, confidently expecting it to disappear and its forms to exist in the future only in museums of primitive mankind or barbaric practices. We need to reassess this legacy, for if today we seek to develop a ‘global criminology’, an understanding that criminology has always been structured by global processes is required. The holy grail for criminology has been the production of a secure body of social theory capable of providing a cloak of objectivity, yet the resultant theory is largely the product of the power of certain key nation-states and their defining abilities to render the world knowable to their citizens. Its hidden context was imperialist globalism, a reality that had to be submerged; else too many issues of cultural significance would be raised.
