“Side bangs tutorial.” I scrolled through the search results, looking for a video that wouldn’t be too difficult to follow. I was determined to do something with my dull, straight hair. Like my friends who had been trying new makeup and buying new clothes, my seventh-grade self desperately wished to change up my look and, by extension, my identity. With a new haircut, I’d be more interesting, perhaps. Or maybe more people at school would want to be friends with me.
I came across a thumbnail of a girl with effortless side-swept bangs. I want to look like you, I thought to myself. I clicked on the video, reached for the scissors, and began snipping away at my long, dark hair.
We construct our identities to express a version of ourselves we wish to show the world. As we attempt to form novel, original characterizations of ourselves, how do we wrestle with power structures or prior beliefs that seem to dictate a fixed identity? Are identities ever free from external impositions, or are they always formed in response to another gaze?
In 1845, Cally Coomar Das, a Bengali phrenologist, created the Calcutta Phrenological Society [1]. He believed that the sciences, particularly the sciences of the mind, had the power to reform colonial society. The group, composed primarily of Bengali medical students, issued The Pamphleteer, a monthly periodical that connected phrenology to issues of social and religious reform. To protest British colonial rule, they wrote that the East India Company was stifling their mental development. Once the Company abolished its monopolies, Bengalis would be able to exercise their intelligence to the fullest potential.
Phrenology was a knowledge system that perpetuated racial ideologies and supported the superiority of white colonizers [2]. The theories of phrenology constructed nationalized and ethnicized identities by promoting the idea that mental qualities could be physically mapped and somehow materialized through the size of a skull [3]. Unsurprisingly, phrenology rose in popularity in early 19th-century Europe as imperial nations searched for empirical justifications for their rule.
Yet, phrenology was also used as a powerful tool by the people it attempted to subjugate, as demonstrated by the nationalist goals of Das and the Bengali phrenologists [3]. The Calcutta Phrenological Society built phrenological understandings of racial character, proposing that the Bengali brain was characterized by perseverance, industry, and artistic skill and was not inferior to European minds. They essentially turned phrenology on its head, using the very language of their colonizers to advocate for a distinct Bengali identity.
Is the Bengali character, then, forever interpreted as a refutation of the European gaze? Must marginalized populations always operate within the empirical framework of imperial powers?
In 1926, a group of Chinese scientists excavated the 500,000-year-old remains of a human near Beijing. Chinese intellectuals, who had been searching for evidence of a native Chinese identity, were ecstatic at the discovery. The remains appeared to justify the longevity of Chinese civilization and evolved into a symbol of Chinese nationalism [5].
Early 20th-century Chinese scholars turned to “western” sciences to inform their endeavors to reform the weak Chinese state. They latched onto human evolutionary theory as a way to forge a novel national identity. However, the idea that evolution could produce a new Chinese character, especially a distinct human character, directly opposed traditional texts that considered the boundary between human and animal to be porous. Classic Chinese tales were abounded with vivid narratives of creatures who were part-human and part-animal and species who could change into a full human state—and back again. It didn’t make sense that humans could diverge from animals.
Social Darwinism answered this tension. Yan Fu, the scholar credited for introducing Darwinian thought to China in his 1898 book On Evolution, drew selectively from social Darwinist theory to cater to Chinese reformers. Yes, humans are like animals, he said. In fact, we’ve evolved from them. However, human development is linear, so humans cannot go back to the animal stage.
The remains discovered near Beijing became known as the Peking Man and evidence of this forward momentum of Chinese society. Chinese socialists would later deem labor as the primary marker of forward development and advocate for a state that emphasized the preeminence of labor to its citizens. The reconciliation of new knowledge with traditional thought thus contributed to the construction of a native, national identity founded on the progression and improvement of society.
As these intellectuals tried to conceive an original Chinese state, they needed to reckon with tensions caused by knowledge that was thousands of years old. How innovative are constructions distinct identities, if they are forged from reconciliations with the past? How ironic, to pursue a native identity by using external knowledge from foreign powers who debilitated their nation.
I stared at myself in the mirror, cringing at the choppiness of my haircut. My dull shears and wobbly hands were failing me. I stopped watching the tutorial and desperately tried to salvage my hair, trimming here and there to even out the ends.
With each identity construction, we attempt to start afresh, with new haircuts and all, dreaming of new futures. But perhaps we are unable to form self-concepts without refuting or reacting to another force. The omniscient external gaze creeps in, searching for identities to diminish.
References
[1] James Poskett, Materials of the Mind: Phrenology, Race, and the Global History of Science, 1815-1920 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2019), 178-190.
[2] Andrew Banks, “Of ‘Native Skulls’ and ‘Noble Caucasians’: Phrenology in Colonial South Africa.” Journal of Southern African Studies 22, no. 3 (1996): 388. Banks discusses the examination of African skulls to form phrenological theories about race by colonial administrators in South Africa.
[3] The core principles of phrenology dictated that the brain was divided into distinct functions, each localized to specific regions called “organs.” The “strength” of these organs was thought to be reflected in their physical sizes, making one’s mental capabilities and characters measurable through the shape of the skull. See more about the origins of phrenology in John Van Wyhe’s “The Authority of Human Nature: The “Schädellehre” of Franz Joseph Gall” from The British Journal for the History of Science 35, no. 1 (2002).
[4] Poskett argues that the ability of phrenology to transcend imperial boundaries depended on the transmission of material culture in the 19th century. Phrenology, a science that attempted to find material underpinnings for one’s character, depended closely on the circulation of objects. The sources used to create phrenological knowledge and educate audiences were physical in nature. African and Bengali skulls that were transported to British phrenological societies for the study of inferior structures and photographs of heads around the world were sent to phrenologists in New York and served as mediums for phrenological readings. Local, subjugated populations had access to phrenological knowledge through the transmission of such objects.
[5] Sigrid Schmalzer. The People’s Peking Man: Popular Science and Human Identity in Twentieth Century China (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008), 11-27.
Schmalzer discusses the role of human evolutionary theory and Social Darwinism in promoting a cohesive Chinese identity in the early 20th century. When the Communist Party rose in power, they combined socialist theory with phrenological and human developmental theories to promote their vision of a centralized state. The “Peking Man” discovery appeared to support an evolutionary basis for Chinese national identity.