En finsk typ, en lapsk typ och en Bellman

Back on the blog again, better later then never I suppose. I thought it was time to summarise where my project landed. The scientific racism part took overhand over my other ideas and I have focused my work on that angel. 

Various Views of the Human Skull

The thing that mainly made me linger on this aspect was the absurdness of it. Looking at the old photographs of various people representing some particular racial characteristic, put together for racial studies I found it quite hard to tell them apart without the explaining text that told me that a person was a Finn, Sámi or whatever. This kind of science is obsolete today and most people would agree that it really doesn’t matter how wide ones skull is, but that does not take away the absurdness and stupidity of the scientific racism and the fact that these “scientists” more or less was trying to create the differences themselves. People in the twenties most have had as hard a time as me telling these people apart.

So I went back to original sources for these ides and spent two days at the library of “Forum för levande historia” in Gamla Stan, looking trough books from roughly from 1900 to1930 concerning this subject. The thing I was looking for was the formulas, the numbers, what they actually were measuring and how they came to the conclusion that a person was of a specific races. This was rather more difficult then I have imagined, most of these books only accounted for the results of the studies and there main content was picture of people whit particularly interesting noses or foreheads.

Eventually I found what I was looking for, Anders Retzius revolutionary formula for calculating the human skull and determine a person’s head index. The long and short of it is that if your head index is under 80 you are a långskalle (this means that you have good racial attributes in these raciologist opinion) if it is over 80 you are kortskalle (you are slightly inferior). Worth pointing out is that most of the world according to theses guys are kortskallar and only the Germanic people of northern Europe possesses the coveted långskalledness.

 

Anders in action

After my research I simply went back to my oranges and applied old Retzius formula on them, creating a head index or a fruit index I you so will, of my own. The numbers are a little lower then back in the days because oranges are smaller then human heads, but otherwise I am using exactly the same method. The only aspect I have taken note of concerning the fruit is the country they were cultivated in. I have not bother whit what kind variety of orange it is as long as it is an orange, my statistics and numbers will speak for themeselves just as they did for the raciologists. 

 

 

Hemmagjort skjutmått