Book Talk with Pamela Geller, "Becoming Object: The Sociopolitics of the Samuel George Morton Cranial Collection"
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Free EventBecoming Object: The Sociopolitics of the Samuel George Morton Cranial Collection considers the vast collection of skulls amassed by Samuel Morton in the first half of the nineteenth century. Craniometric studies undertaken by this Philadelphia physician and natural historian, as previous writers have noted, advanced scientific racism. In Becoming Object, Pamela Geller shows that while the characterization is accurate, it is also oversimplified. Geller uses a biohistoric approach, which examines skeletal remains and archival sources, to take a close look at the times in which Morton lived, his work, and its complicated legacy.
During a pivotal moment in US history—an interlude between the nation’s cohesion and its civil unraveling—Morton and colleagues encouraged and developed biomedical interventions, public health initiatives, and scientific standards. Yet they also represented certain populations as biologically inferior; diseases were tied to non-white races, suffering was gendered female, and poverty was presumed inherited. Efforts by Morton and colleagues made it easier to rationalize the deaths of disenfranchised individuals, collect their skulls from almshouse hospitals and battlefields, and transform them into objects. Ultimately, these men’s studies of diseases and skulls contributed to an understanding of American citizenship that valued whiteness, Christianity, and heroic masculinity defined by violence.
Pamela L. Geller is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Miami. Over the years, she has conducted fieldwork in Hawaii, Belize, Honduras, Perú, and Haiti. Her intellectual interests include archaeology and bioarchaeology, feminist and queer studies, materiality of identity, the sociopolitics of the past, and bioethics. Based on her research, she has authored several books: The Bioarchaeology of Social-Sexual Lives (2017), Theorizing Bioarchaeology (2021), and Becoming Object: The Sociopolitics of the Samuel George Morton Cranial Collection (2024). Edited volumes include Feminist Anthropology: Past, Present, and Future (2006) and The Routledge Handbook of Feminist Anthropology (2025).
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