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

这项由科学、技术与社会项目和法律与社会科学项目共同资助的国家科学基金会奖的研究将涉及公众关注的一个广泛问题：身份科学是如何塑造我们对自己的认识的？这个项目的名字来源于约翰·洛克（John Locke），他创造了“法医自我”（forensic self）这个词，暗示一个人的身份——他或她内心的自我意识——是如何依赖于必须对他人，尤其是刑事法庭做出回应的意识。调查人员的初步研究表明，长期以来用于使公民个人对法律负责的法医技术，也定义了我们作为种族群体成员和家谱后裔的自我理解。该项目按时间顺序调查了五种法医技术，每一种技术都基于身体的一个特定特征：文艺复兴时期的笔迹分析（手）、19世纪的人体测量（骨骼）、20世纪早期的指纹分析（皮肤）、20世纪的血清学测试（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标记个人，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如何长期发挥这些多重作用。与之前的法医学历史不同，这些历史集中在一个国家或一个时期的单一技术上，这个项目采取了比较和综合的方法。利用美国和法国以前未开发的档案，它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，并穿越了早期现代和现代时代之间的鸿沟。这个项目试图理解如何衡量我们自己作为个体，我们适合自己的社会身体，它的历史。

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.