From Measuring Rods to DNA Sequencing

Ingrid Voléry is full professor of sociology at the Université de Lorraine and member of Laboratoire Lorrain de Sciences Sociales (2L2S). Marie-Pierre Julien is lecturer of sociology and anthropology at the Université de Lorraine and member of 2L2S.

• Chapter 1: Introduction: What measuring means.- Part I. The Measurements of the human body between the 19th and the 20th century: from the flesh to the subjectivity.- Chapter 2: Producing Otherness Through Resemblance. Bodily orifices and the measuring of the human (1800-1860).- Chapter 3: Talking Bones: age in 19th-century forensic handbooks (1813-1906).- Chapter 4: Thinking “quality of life”: from measures to categorizations of the human beings.- Part II. Between objectivization and subjectivization: How forensic identification, genomic correction and life support technologies reshape the frontiers between things, human person and social subject.- Chapter 5: Being born in the era of genomics.- Chapter 6: From “technicized” bodies to body technologies: the human in resuscitative care, between objectivization and subjectivization.- Part III. Measurement and the Rise of New Hierarchies between human beings.- Chapter 7: Bone Geopolitics. Bone Age and the Racialization of Growth in UK and US Pediatrics (1940-1980).- Chapter 8: Models of corporeality and controversies around puberty.- Chapter 9: Everyone for himself and all together? Thinking “race” between social science, epidemiology, and medicine.- Chapter 10: Conclusion: Measurement as an ontological scalpel.