Born to Crime: Cesare Lombroso and the Origins of Biological Criminology

[pynchonoid]

http://human-nature.com/nibbs/03/gibson.html

 Human Nature Review  2003 Volume 3: 1-11 ( 15
January )

Essay Review

The Holy Trinity and the Legacy of the Italian School
of Criminal Anthropology

By 

Anthony Walsh

Review of _Born to Crime: Cesare Lombroso and the
Origins of Biological Criminology_
By Mary Gibson
Praeger Press. Hardcover - 272 pages (2002)

" [...] The central idea of Lombroso's work came to
him as he autopsied the body of a notorious Italian
criminal named Giuseppe Villela. As he contemplated
Villela's skull, he noted that certain characteristics
of it (specifically, a depression on the occiput that
he named the median occipital fossa) reminded him of
the skulls of "inferior races" and "the lower types of
apes, rodents, and birds" (p.20). The term Lombroso
used to describe the appearance of organisms
resembling ancestral (prehuman) forms of life is
atavism. Born criminals were thus viewed by Lombroso
in his earliest writings as a form of human
sub-species (in his later writings he came to view
them less as evolutionary throwbacks and more in terms
of arrested development and degeneracy). Lombroso
believed that atavism could be identified by a number
of measurable physical stigmata, which included
protruding jaw, drooping eyes, large ears, twisted and
flattish nose, long arms relative to the lower limbs,
sloping shoulders, and a coccyx that resembled "the
stump of a tail." The concept of atavism was glaringly
wrong, but like so many others of his time, Lombroso
sought to understand behavioral phenomena with
reference to the principles of evolution as they were
understood at the time. If humankind was just at one
end of the continuum of animal life, it made sense to
many people that criminals—who acted "beastly" and who
lacked reasoned conscience—were biologically inferior
beings. [...] "


.... echoes of a certain discussion of the
ramifications of depicting other species/racies as
alien enemy Other in science fiction and fantasy? 
Nah, couldn't be.

The essay contains good historical background to
Lombroso's work, and places it in the context of
current trends. 

Also see: _Vineland, pp. 272-73, 276, 279 (according
to the very useful _Pynchon Notes_ No. 36-39, "The
Index Issue")

...enjoy!

-Doug






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