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SUMMARY:Reading modern hands: identity and human types from palmistry to g
 enetics - Alison Bashford (University of New South Wales)
DTSTART:20230518T143000Z
DTEND:20230518T160000Z
UID:TALK199990@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Jacob Stegenga
DESCRIPTION:This paper tracks a twentieth-century trajectory of hand-readi
 ng in modern diagnostics: of disease and syndrome\, of personality and sin
 gular identity\, and of human types and 'race'. Not only for fortune-telli
 ng palmists was identity laid bare in the hand\, but for all kinds of othe
 r experts in bodies and minds as well. The paper analyses twentieth-centur
 y knowers-of-hands across an unlikely range of disciplines that have stron
 ger and stranger crossovers than we might expect\, connecting palmistry wi
 th a range of emerging 'psy' disciplines\, with comparative anatomy\, evol
 utionary biology\, primatology\, and with human and medical genetics. Over
  the twentieth century\, the human hand proved to be enduringly 'eloquent'
 \, as anatomist and natural theologian Charles Bell had put it long before
  in his canonical 1833 treatise\, _The Hand_. The paper argues for a plain
  disenchantment of chiromancy\, qualifying historians' common commitment t
 o theses of re-enchantment. One strand of palm-reading's recent past turns
  out to be part of the history of scientific naturalism\, not super-natura
 lism at all.\n\nAlison Bashford FBA is Scientia Professor of History\, Uni
 versity of New South Wales. Previously she was Vere Harmsworth Professor o
 f Imperial and Naval History at the University of Cambridge. Her most rece
 nt monograph is _An Intimate History of Evolution: The Story of the Huxley
  Family_ (Random House\, 2022). Her most recent co-edited book is _New Ear
 th Histories: Geo-cosmologies and the Making of the Modern World_ (Univers
 ity of Chicago Press\, 2023)\, with Emily Kern and Adam Bobbette. She is c
 urrently writing _The Strange History of the Hand_ (University of Chicago 
 Press\, forthcoming).
LOCATION:Seminar Room 2\, Department of History and Philosophy of Science
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