Steven

Lubar Brown University July 8, 2011

Life Casts of Types These busts were made by Caspar Mayer1, a sculptor at the American Museum of Natural History in the late 19th and early 20th century. They were displayed in various halls at the museum (including the Africa, Philippines, and Northwest Coast halls), and were exchanged with other museums.2 Busts like these have a long history in anthropology,3 and they were made at the AMNH starting around 1895. They were, according to Franz Boas, part of a systematic collections of plaster casts of various types of man.4 Plaster casts for these busts were made on Museum expeditions, including the Jesup North Pacific Expedition and the Hyde Expedition, as well as at the St. Louis Exposition in 1904 and perhaps at the 1903 Cummins Indian Congress at Coney Island.5 By 1906 there were over 500 molds at the museum. The greater part of the molds, according to a 1906 article, represent typical individuals of the North American tribes... There were also Aino, Chinese, Japanese and several Siberian tribes... [and] Philippine, African and South American native tribes who were at the St. Louis exposition.6 They were placed in exhibits intended to illustrate the physical characteristics of a people, as shown by their skulls and skeletons, and by plaster busts and casts of parts of the body, by photographs, by samples of hair, etc.. The museum was very proud of the accuracy and artistic value of these casts: the 1896 Annual Report, celebrating the opening of the Ethnological Hall the previous November, notes that a number of admirable full-length figures and busts, prepared by Mr. Caspar Mayer, have already been placed on exhibition.7

The best description of the purpose of the busts is from a 1906 Museum publication: It is the purpose of the Department of Ethnology to make a collection in which all the physical types of man shall be represented. For many years the value of a collection of skulls from the different races has been appreciated, but the experience of investigators is that skulls alone give inadequate data for the study of a race, since differences in the form and size of the skull are not correlated with variations in the size and form of the head. The ideal method of studying the facial characteristics of a race is by means of direct measurement of living subjects. Since, however, such subjects are not always available, and an opportunity for repeating measurements is not often offered, properly prepared molds of faces provide the ethnologist with a reliable record upon which to base his investigations.8 Mayer received a patent on his method for making these life casts. Patent 803,004 (October 31, 1905) describes his method, and its advantages: a more natural reproduction from life, lower price, and a shorter time required for the sitter. My method, he noted, is intended to be used principally for scientific purposes as for the exhibition in museums of natural history or the like, in which cases the modeler must put most weight on the likeness of his work with the original subject, and he must also be able to produce such busts in the shortest possible time. Mayer won a Silver medal in Anthropometry for his life casts at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in 1905.9 It seems as though other artists had similar techniques; Franz Boas, Mayers boss at AMNH, and Ale Hrdlika, at the Smithsonian, exchanged heated words about who invented this technique in the American Anthropologist in 190510 It is uncertain how long the busts were on exhibit at the ANMN. (A similar set of busts and life groups at the Field Museum of Chicago, created by sculptor Malvina Hoffman in the 1930s, was displayed through the 1960s.11) By the 1960s, they were an embarrassing reminder of anthropologys past, referring, as Mary Bouquet wrote, to past ideas about the family of man which are remote for contemporary anthropologists and which they would prefer to forget about.12 These examples, duplicates originally made for exchange to other museums, were distributed to university museums by the AMNH in the 1980s.13 Secondary literature: Thomas Ross Miller and Barbara Mathe, Drawing Shadows to Stone, in Drawing Shadows to Stone: The Photography of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, 1897- 1902, by Laurel Kendall, Stanley A. Freed, and Thomas Ross Miller (Author) Ira Jacknis, Franz Boas and Exhibits: On the Limitations of the Museum Method of Anthropology, in George W. Stocking, Objects and others: essays on museums and material culture (Univ of Wisconsin Press, 1988) 2

 Notes 1 b. Bavaria, Germany; 1871- d. New York 1931. Birth and death dates and locations from the archives catalog at AMNH: http://bit.ly/n4NYB0 2 The Series of Ethnographical Busts, The American Museum Journal, v. 6 (1906), NY: American Museum of Natural History, pp. 4-6. Email from Barbara Math, Museum Archivist and Head of Library Special Collections, American Museum of Natural History. The archive card (cited above) says they were used for study and for exhibition in the Museum and were exchanged with other institutions. 3 Charles Cordier received grants from the French government in the 1850s and 1860s to record the different human types that are on the verge of melting into a one and only people. http://bit.ly/qJfe0y 4 Anthropologic Miscellanea: Facial Casts, American Anthropologist, n.s. vol 7, no. 2 April June 1905, p. 169. 5 Email from Barbara Math 6 Ethnographical Busts, p. 4. 7 Annual Report of the American Museum of Natural History, 1896, p. 12 8 Ethnographical Busts, p. 4, 6. 9Anthropologic Miscellanea: Louisiana Purchase Exposition Awards, American Anthropologist, n.s. vol 7, no. 2 April June 1905, p. 162. 10 Anthropologic Miscellanea: Facial Casts 11 Marianne Beatrice Kinkel, "Circulating Race: Malvina Hoffman and the Field Museum's Races of Mankind Sculptures" (Ph.D. diss, University of Texas at Austin, 2001). See, more generally, Michelle Brattain, "Race, Racism, and Antiracism: UNESCO and the Politics of Presenting Science to the Postwar Public," The American Historical Review December 2007 <http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/112.5/brattain.html> (7 Jul. 2011). 12 Mary Bouquet (2000): Thinking and Doing Otherwise: Anthropological Theory in Exhibitionary Practice, Ethnos, 65:2, 217-236; see pp. 228-232. She notes that in recent years there has been an increased interest, and new exhibits, of this kind of artifact of the history of anthropology and the history of museums. 13 Email from Kristen Mable, July 8, 2011