Facializing the skull An ethnographic enquiry into the persistence of race in forensic anthropology

The discipline of biological anthropology, including its applied version of forensic anthropology, continues to be troubled by race. How is it possible that, despite the scientific rejection of a biological concept of race, race persists and continues to be (re-)biologized in practice in contemporary forensic anthropology? The dissertation sheds light on this question by studying the fields of forensic art and anthropology by means of methods and theories from (multimodal) anthropology, science and technology studies (STS) and history of science. A laboratory ethnography on the making of craniofacial depictions forms the starting point for a broader enquiry into forensic anthropological methods for ancestry estimation from the skull. The dissertation demonstrates that race endures through the material legacies of scientific practices, including data infrastructures and human skeletal collections. In the making of craniofacial depictions, race mediates translations between individual skulls and population-based reference data. Paying attention to how forensic artists navigate this relation, also brings to the fore different ways of articulating similarities and differences that do not necessarily reproduce race. As race in scientific practices often figures as a proxy, such as for place or shape, I argue that staying close to what it is that race comes to stand in for provides clues for imagining a forensics beyond race. Taken together, the chapters that make up this dissertation call for a sustained, interdisciplinary reconfiguration of methods and infrastructures to counter the subsuming power of race in forensic anthropology.