7 - Criminal Anthropology: Its Reception in the United States and the Nature of Its Appeal

Summary

Why do some ideas immediately grab people's attention and elicit assent whereas others, equally worthy, fail to attract notice? This is in part an issue of receptivity; I raise it here in the course of mapping the routes through which, starting circa 1890, criminal anthropology entered American thinking. I identify four situational factors that predisposed Americans to criminal anthropology: the socioeconomic context, the intellectual context, the criminal justice context, and the unsettled state of the professions and disciplines related to criminal anthropology. After assessing receptivity, I identify the authors who introduced U.S. audiences to criminal anthropology and compare their work to that of Cesare Lombroso, the Italian founder of the field, noting areas in which the Americans simply parroted the born criminal doctrine and others in which they modified it. In the final section of this chapter I discuss sources of the doctrine's appeal, arguing that the visual codes of criminal anthropology conveyed criminological information more efficiently, powerfully, and pleasurably than other modes of explaining crime.

audience receptivity

Like some people, some theories are lucky, appearing at the right place at the right time. This was certainly true of criminal anthropology, which was introduced to the United States in the 1890s, a time when Americans concerned with social control were primed for exactly this sort of doctrine.