Measuring Humans

In the 18th century, Spanish elites in colonial Mexico used paintings to classify people based on their racial background and appearance. This socially constructed system was called the ‘casta’ system. In this painting, the 16 rectangles in a grid represent an almost mathematical formula for the mixing of different racial “types,” moving from left to right: a+b=c, c+d=e, and so on. The final row includes such derogatory terms as “tente en el aire” (“hold yourself in the air”) and “no te entiendo” (“I don’t understand you”), showing how the project of rigid racial mathematics breaks down even on its own terms as people defied categorization.

Loba Garifuna (figure on the right) is a reimagining of the 18th century Casta paintings for a contemporary world where some Black and Brown bodies are still perceived as threats. Artist Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez traces the bodies of Latina women in the TSA search pose, using ink “to create a ‘stained’ aesthetic—a reference to colonial justifications of genocide” based on skin color. The animal mask speaks to the racist belief that miscegenation led to a degeneration of the human species. The peineta, a Spanish comb, alludes to the imperial origins of racial categories in Latin America.

Born in Colombia to an American father and Colombian mother, Friedemann-Sanchez straddled cultures and languages from her youth. Like thousands before her, Friedemann-Sánchez fled the violence caused by the rise of the Medellín drug cartel and settled in New York, before moving to the Midwest. Her art challenges us to imagine the exchange and clash of different worlds, and how people entering and leaving these words are viewed and surveyed.

 

Many measures of humans were made under pressure to promote ideas about racial difference and superiority. This empty frame represents the unshowable: the forced measurements of people that still exist in libraries, archives, and museums.

As well as measuring our bodies, an increasing concern for some in positions of power, especially from the nineteenth century onwards, was how to measure minds. Phrenology – the discredited ‘science’ associated with eugenics whose proponents believed that the shape of someone’s head determined their capabilities – was one early example. 

Intelligence tests were another means of measuring the potential of our minds. This example, from around 1918, was used as part of US army recruitment. Example questions include: “If your load of coal gets stuck in the mud, what should you do? A) Leave it there; B) Get more horses or men to pull it out; C) throw off the load.” And: “Why are criminals locked up?”A) to protect society; B) to get even with them; C) to make them work.”

Students have long had their mental abilities measured through assigning grades. One Harvard professor, in the 1970s, created this slide rule to measure his students’ performance, and thus judge their future potential.


 

Even imagined worlds must be made tangible through measurement. The next frontier for colonization is outer space. NASA has begun experiments to measure how traveling to Mars could affect human minds and bodies.






 

According to ancient Mesoamerican beliefs, the body was used to organize and measure the world, connecting different body parts to thoughts and forces. This image links body parts to the twenty-day ritual calendar.

Some measures reduced human beings to the appearance of their skin, creating numerical gradients of color to which individuals could be compared. These were tools of 20th century physical anthropology, often used alongside measurements of other body parts—including craniometry, the measurment of skulls—to create definitions of race.  What do charts like this one fail to show? What type of thinking do they enforce?

Medical devices created metrics to describe the body—including by encasing the body, as in this machine, a body plethysmograph from around 1960 used to measure lung capacity. A person would sit inside the box with their head in the glass dome on top and breathe into the tube at the front of the dome.
 

 What does a ‘normal’ person look like? In 1943, one obstetrician thought he had the answer. He created diagrams of “Norma” (and her male counterpart, “Normman”) based on the measurements of 15,000 white men and women. Linked to the eugenics movement, these diagrams showed the “average American woman” and were used as a standard to measure, profile, and judge other people.

How do you measure up to Norma?

General Audience Resources

• “​​Pride and Anxiety in New Spain: Francisco Clapera, Set of Sixteen Casta Paintings, c. 1775,” Smarthistory, January 9, 2018, https://youtu.be/Opdr_qnGPcw?si=9u39Ix_14iRtUNC5. 

• Rich, Nathaniel. “Can Humans Endure the Psychological Torment of Mars?” New York Times, February 25, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/25/magazine/mars-isolation-experiment.html. 

Academic Readings

• Carter, Julian B. The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in America, 1880–1940. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.

• Hogarth, Rana A. Medicalizing Blackness : Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780-1840. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017.

• Martínez, María Elena. Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008.

• Poskett, James. Materials of the Mind : Phrenology, Race, and the Global History of Science, 1815-1920. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019.

• ​​Rosenthal, Caitlin. Accounting for Slavery : Masters and Management. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2018.