Scholar's Award: The Forensic Self: Personal Identification from the Renaissance to the Genome

这项由科学、技术与社会学会项目和法律与社会科学项目共同资助的NSF奖项的研究将涉及一个公众关注的广泛问题：身份识别科学是如何塑造我们对自己的感觉的？这个项目的名字取自约翰·洛克，他创造了一个词--“法医自我”，意思是一个人的身份--他或她内心的自我意识--是如何依赖于一种必须对他人负责的意识，特别是对刑事法院的责任。调查人员的初步研究表明，长期以来，法医技术被用来让公民个人对法律负责，但它也如何定义了我们作为种族群体成员和血统后裔的自我理解。该项目按时间顺序调查了五种法医技术，每种技术都基于身体的特定特征：文艺复兴时期的笔迹分析(手)、19世纪的人体测量学(骨骼)、20世纪早期的指纹鉴定(皮肤)、20世纪的血清学检测(血液)和当代的DNA分型(基因)。最近采用的DNA分型技术表明，法医科学不仅可以用来识别个人，还可以用来评估他们的性格、亲属关系和遗产。这个项目将表明法医科学长期以来是如何发挥这些多重作用的。不同于以前的法医科学历史，法医科学专注于单一国家或时期的单一技术，该项目采取了比较和综合的方法。它利用美国和法国以前未被利用的档案，比较了英美和法国大陆法律体系中验证专业知识的不同方法，并跨越了早期现代和现代时代之间的鸿沟。这个项目试图了解在衡量自己作为个体时，我们是如何使自己适应社会机构及其历史的。

The research from this NSF award, co-funded by the Science, Technology & Society program and the Law & Social Science program, will engage a broad question of public concern: How have the sciences of identification shaped our sense of who we are? The project takes its title from John Locke, who coined the term, "the forensic self," to suggest how a person's identity--his or her inner sense of self--depends on an awareness of having to answer to others, and to the criminal courts in particular. Preliminary research by the investigator has suggested how the forensic techniques, long deployed to make individual citizens accountable to the law, have also defined our self-understanding as members of racial groups and descendants of genealogical lineages. The project investigates five forensic techniques in chronological sequence, each based on a particular feature of the body: Renaissance handwriting analysis (the hand), nineteenth-century anthropometry (bones), early twentieth-century fingerprinting (skin), twentieth-century serological testing (blood), and contemporary DNA-typing (genes). The recent adoption of DNA-typing techniques has shown how the forensic sciences can be deployed not only to mark out individuals, but also to assess their character, kinship, and heritage. This project will suggest how the forensic sciences have long served these multiple roles. Unlike prior histories of the forensic sciences, which have focused on a single technique in a single nation or period, this project takes a comparative and synthetic approach. Using previously untapped archives in both the U.S. and France, it compares the distinct methods of validating expertise in the Anglo-American and French-Continental legal systems, and traverses the divide between the early modern and modern eras. This project seeks to understand how in measuring ourselves as individuals we fit ourselves to the social body, and to its histories.