The Art of Identification: Forensics, Surveillance, Identity ed. by Rex Ferguson, Melissa M. Littlefield, and James Purdon (review)

Reviewed by: The Art of Identification: Forensics, Surveillance, Identity ed. by Rex Ferguson, Melissa M. Littlefield, and James Purdon Sara Collins (bio) The Art of Identification: Forensics, Surveillance, Identity Rex Ferguson, Melissa M. Littlefield, and James Purdon, editors The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2021, viii + 262 pp. ISBN 9780271090573, $119.95 hardcover. AnthropoScene: The SLSA Book Series. The Art of Identification is a seemingly eclectic collection of essays tied together by their analyses of the individual within a society that defines and identifies the person by slotting them into a specific category. Ranging from social history, science fiction, and crime fiction to forensic anthropology, criminology, and passport identification standards, the contributors present facets of the historic relationship between the person and the state. For pragmatic reasons, the essays center on the development of personal identification technologies in modern Europe and North America from the mid-Victorian era to the present. The essays in each of the book's three sections are grouped by loosely connected themes. The essays in the "Genres of Identification" section explore the links between elements of popular culture and the development of scientific and governmental methods of personal identification. Matt Houlbrook ("Charming Faces and the Problem of Identification") describes self-improvement and social identification schemes of the early twentieth century in which one is "matched" to a personality type using facial features. Although the examples seem to be frivolous—having strangers who see your portrait in a newspaper assign your image to one of six types of beauty—the contexts arise from nineteenth-century forensic work that correlated a person's physiognomy to personality, criminality, and character. James Purdon ("Identity Noir") looks at the rise of the noir crime genre in the first half of the twentieth century and the contemporaneous governmental efforts to expand and codify personal identification by using photography and anthropometry to create verifiable records of people, such as driver's licenses and social security numbers. Andrew Mangham ("Murder and Interpretation in Dickens") uses Charles Dickens's classic The Mystery of Edwin Drood to outline the public's understanding of how forensic science worked to identify the dead. Adapting the details of a real murder case, Dickens identifies the victim and pepetrator in his fictional crime through forensic pathology and photography, as they were practiced at the time. Victoria Stewart ("A Puzzle of Character") discusses the novels of Anthony Cox, published under the pseudonym Francis Iles, which were written between the [End Page 465] World Wars. In them, different facets of the characters' identities, particularly those of the criminals, drive the narrative. The physical body and its representations are a unifying element in the essays in "The Body Captured." The contribution from bioarchaeologist Rebecca Gowland and forensic archaeologist Tim Thompson ("The Art of Identification") provides an important foundation for the rest of the volume. Gowland and Thompson discuss human remains identification with regard to science and social identity, and they summarize skeletal identification methodologies in bioarchaeology and forensic archaeology. They also emphasize the shift in these fields from an "objective" scientific approach to one that recognizes the importance of situating the decedent within their sociocultural milieu, in life and death. Increasingly, accurate recognition of a person's gender identity in life improves postmortem identification. Patricia Chu ("Becoming More Biological") uses Ruth Ozeki's ethnoracial novel My Year of Meats to examine changing concepts of identity, particularly in the "postgenomic" age. Ozeki's protagonist is defined by both her Japanese American heritage and the emerging biological structures that affect her life, from personal genetics to corporate control and manipulation of genetic materials. Jonathan Finn ("Identification Made Visible") parses the role of images in criminology and society at large by analyzing the conviction of Canadian murderer Russell Williams, who created a large annotated archive of photographs and videos documenting his own crimes. The resulting police investigation produced a similarly extensive collection of photographic evidence. Finn's visual culture analysis of Williams's case and its effect on reporting as well as public perception highlights the increasingly important role of images in criminology. The essays in "Surveillant Technologies" explore surveillant technology in both real life and fictional settings, from international standards for biometric identification to film...

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