Building Beauty: Physiognomy on the Gas-Lit Stage

From 1816 onwards, London theatres began to install gas-lighting systems to replace candles. In addition to allowing theatre managers to adjust the level of illumination, gas lights offered greater brightness and visibility for the audience. Actors had to adjust to this new level of exposure that threatened their ability to ‘look the part.’ Until this illuminating moment, there had been little need for makeup and actors to adhere to the principles of physiognomy – a system that correlated character traits to facial features. Under the new harsh glare of the gas lights, both the faces of the actors and the theatres themselves were found wantin

Through a Mediated Mirror: The Photographic Physiognomy of Dr. Hugh Welch Diamond

This article explores the photographic physiognomy of Victorian asylum superintendent Hugh Welch Diamond. Through close readings of Diamond’s photographs as well as commentary published by Diamond and Dr John Conolly, the author argues that Diamond expanded the meaning of the word physiognomy to include metonymic traits such as clothing and hairstyle. Diamond used physiognomy for both diagnostic and therapeutic purposes, and he staged his photographs to maximize their efficacy for both, creating a mediated mirror through which his patients viewed themselves. Through photographic physiognomy, Diamond tried to change the nature of asylum practice, using images of his patients to nurture them to health without physical restraints

Is There Dyslexia Without Reading?

Can there be dyslexia without reading? Is there face blindness without a variety of faces? Is super recognition identifiable without cameras? Without the mass production of colored textiles, does color blindness exist? If you never speak, can you have a stutter? These are thought experiments about situationally latent potentialities. We can't ever definitively answer these questions. But that doesn't mean that they don't matter. At the heart of this inquiry is a proposition that certain somatic or neurological conditions are fundamentally unidentifiable, unrecognizable, invisible, and thus cannot be made manifest in absence of some broader interactions with technology, media, and the built environment. In this essay, I bring together the history and sociology of medicine, media studies, and disability studies to argue that by studying these questions, we can open up new ways of understanding what the body once knew and now does not, and what it might one day know that it does not know now, thereby reframing what counts as illness or disability

Cronótopos de uma nação distópica: o nascimento da "dependência" no México porfiriano tardio

Este artigo desenvolve uma nova abordagem sobre a antropologia e a história de fronteiras nacionais. Ele propõe uma tipologia e uma caracterização fenomenológica de duas formas de se atravessar a fronteira que surgiram paralelamente a uma nova relação de dependência econômica e política entre o México e os Estados Unidos da América no final do século XIX. Tais novas modalidades de se atravessar a fronteira envolvem o desenvolvimento de novos "cronótopos", ou seja, novas e concorrentes matrizes espaços-temporais que foram utilizadas para enquadrar a relação entre o México e os EUA. Este artigo analisa a qualidade, a natureza e o preço destas formas alternativas de historicidade por intermédio de uma análise detalhada de dois textos jornalísticos cruciais: a entrevista do General Porfírio Diaz por James Creelman (1908) e a reportagem de Kenneth Turner sobre a escravidão mexicana (1910).<br>This paper develops a novel approach to anthropology and history of international borders. It proposes a typology and a phenomenological characterization of two kinds of border crossings that emerged alongside the new relationship of economic and political dependency that developed between México and the United States in the last quarter of the 19th century. The new border crossings involved the development of new 'chronotopes', in other words new and competing spatial-temporal matrices, used to frame the relationship between México and the United States. This paper analyzes the quality, nature and stakes of these alternative forms of historicity by way of a close case study of two pivotal journalistic texts: James Creelman's (1908) interview of General Porfírio Diaz, and John Kenneth Turner's (1910) reportage and exposé of Mexican slavery