If you are not quite certain what “phrenology” is, you are not alone. Many of us are vaguely familiar with the word — something to do with bumps on the skull? — but might struggle to explain its defining principles. In historical memory it sits hazily alongside mesmerism as an arcane oddity: one of those fields of study beloved by the Victorians for their promise to render the mysteries of life legible and manageable. The belief that human character and capability could be determined by “reading” the external landscape of the head has long since been discredited, as has the idea that a magnetic fluid exists between and connects us all. The “science” of these fields has been largely forgotten, though traces of their vocabulary linger still.
Alexandra Roginski’s appointed task in Science and Power in the Nineteenth-Century Tasman World: Popular Phrenology in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand is not to recuperate the forgotten field of phrenology, nor to restore its place in an intellectual history of science. Indeed, she devotes remarkably little space to explaining phrenology’s foundational principles or rehashing its chief lines of fracture or debate. Instead, she weaves a narrative that offers a counterpoint to that of the professionalisation of science and its establishment as an academic discipline. While “science sprouted tendrils across the settler colonies,” and took root in universities, museums, exhibitions, observatories, scientific societies and other institutions, phrenology was weeded out from such establishment bodies only to flourish in the terrain of local communities and popular culture.
The setting for Roginski’s exploration is the “Tasman World”: an intercultural setting brought into existence by the flow of people and products to and between Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand from the late eighteenth century onward. During the decades of phrenology’s most vigorous public life, from the 1840s to the early 1900s, this was “a region and period seared by European settler-colonialism… a region of immense displacement, mobility and remaking.” It was a place in which a popular practice like phrenology could “shore up momentary power.”
In these mobile worlds, a “cadre of self-appointed professors” took science to the public by offering private consultations, public lectures and popular performances. Some were sincere, dedicated and knowledgeable exponents of phrenology; they offered extensive expositions of its theory and made it their life’s work. But many seized on the potential it offered for commercial or professional exploitation, adapting its vocabulary and gestures to purposes of their own.
Those who bore the “capacious title of phrenologist” might double as “gold miners, fortune tellers, vagrants, petty criminals, ministers, physicians, actors, elocutionists, barbers and journalists.” Some “plucked just one or two things from practical phrenology’s toolbox” to wield in a losing battle for security, income, or reputation. Others borrowed from its platform oratory to spice up their earnest articulation of radical, unionist, racialist or spiritualist views.
These Tasman phrenologists remain, for the most part, shadowy figures. “Their grasp on power was not the expansive sovereignty of the great figures of history,” so it isn’t surprising that their traces on the archival record should be blurred and incomplete. That they come into view at all is to the credit of Roginski’s painstaking searches through digital and paper archives, her drawing together of seemingly inconsequential fragments to create suggestive, although always partial, histories.
Roginski seeks out these eccentric and elusive practitioners, not to give them solid and certain form but rather to hold them to the light, finding historical meaning in what they reflect and refract. She finds them, in abstract terms, wielding “a transnational science in charged negotiations already overlaid by structures of colonisation, class, race and gender.” Yet she finds also — and takes seriously — “the joy, earnestness, theatre, wit, ambition, desperation and sometime tragedy of magnificently crumpled lives.”
The result is a lively, anecdote-rich, grounded, complex, wide-ranging, eclectic and downright fascinating account of the promise, practice and performance of this popular science and its shady practitioners. Roginski’s command of her subject is assured, and her crisp, clear writing is both perceptive and witty. Rival phrenologists in a rural town clash over which of them has correctly identified the “angle of murder”; a Russian-born fortune teller strives to place limits on “the stories that could be stretched to fit around her larger-than-life persona”; Bernard O’Dowd is memorably described as “one of Australia’s most prolific nationalists and omnivorous snufflers in New Thought.” Yet Roginski resists the temptation to poke fun at her subjects or to trivialise the aspiration or desperation that drove their human dramas.
Wherever possible, Roginski highlights the instructive complexity of individual experience and performance. Take, for example, the “Wonderful Woman” whose studio photograph — dressed in an exotic, harem-style costume and apparently pointing to significant bumps on the head of her seated, suited, bearded subject — features on the front cover of the book. Madame Sibly (born Marie Eliments) toured southeastern Australia during the 1870s and 1880s as a phrenologist and mesmeric lecturer, reading the heads of subjects ranging from babies to eminent citizens. Hers was a popular performance, young men proving particularly eager to experience the “frisson” of a public head reading at her hands.
Behind the scenes, Sibly’s relationships ran less smoothly. The victim of a violent assault by her lover, she subsequently launched a string of attacks against various men who sought payment for bills or labour or who harassed her on or off stage. Her favoured weapon was a good horsewhip, but on one memorable occasion she caused a group of mesmerised subjects to rush an aggressive audience member “like a pack of hounds.”
Despite such ruptures, Madame Sibly won the affection and loyalty of audiences during her stays in different rural towns. The phrenological performance was shot through with such interplays of gender and power, reputation and respectability, public and private personas.
Or take the “Professor of Phrenology” Lio Medo, who brought his new identity into existence in Dunedin on the South Island of Aotearoa New Zealand in 1880, imperfectly stamping out a former life as Benjamin Strachan: hairdresser, perfumer, caterer, thespian, amateur elocutionist, bankrupt, petty criminal and alleged sex offender. Strachan was of African descent and had claimed to be “American by birth”; in his new life as a phrenologist, Medo traded on the public thirst for exoticism, eventually presenting himself as a “West Indian scientist.”
While Medo “navigated the exoticist shorthand of Black stage identities” with some skill, he also bore the burden of “the reality of life as a body on display.” His turn to performance coincided with the surging popularity of blackface minstrelsy in the Australasian colonies. On stage he “bristled against minstrel stereotypes” but increasingly found himself the object of racial jeering. Roginski presents his life as one of continual renegotiation of racial tropes and a “deft, sometimes frustrating game of self-representation,” but argues that he turned “the burden of double consciousness into a game of shifting identities that tantalised audiences.”
These are just two of the many practitioners who populate the pages of this book: drifters and dreamers, preachers and physicians, idealists and charlatans. Roginski doesn’t confine her interest to self-defined phrenologists, but turns her attention also to the negotiated performances of those who appeared on stage beside them — for example as allegedly mesmerised subjects who would perform appropriate actions when pressed on different parts of the head. For Indigenous participants, she suggests, these performances could be the site of “fleeting moments of empowerment” — albeit within an oppressive colonial framework.
She is equally interested in audiences, whose participation was essential to the success of popular science. One thoughtful chapter probes the responses of a particular audience, Aboriginal residents of the Maloga Mission on the Murray River, to successive visits by phrenologists in 1884 and 1892. Accustomed to being made the object of the flawed and contradictory conclusions of “racial science,” to which phrenology was often allied, they might have chosen to regard its practitioners with anything from resentment to indifference. But Roginski’s careful analysis uncovers uncertain moments of “nuanced interaction,” in which the phrenologists’ visits could become the locus of humour and play, and even vehicles for sharing culture for “people facing the unravelling of their worlds.”
This is a history of “science from below” that brings a cultural and even ethnographic lens to bear upon a strikingly popular phenomenon. The result is a gloriously illuminating study of the way ideas take off and percolate through a society, the different purposes to which they can be put, and how they endure long after they have been discredited: put to work as entertainment, as vocational identity, in the service of commercial rivalry, or as a mask.
Along the way, Roginski reveals “the contested nature of science and who could claim its authority.” Phrenology shared with more respectable branches of science many of its theatres of practice and performance, its capacity to function as entertainment as much as authoritative explication. But as science’s less respectable “other,” it also serves as a mirror to the discipline. Popular phrenology proves indeed, as she claims, an “ideal artefact” through which to study science’s multiple functions and purposes.
Roginski ends her history on a cautionary note. If her study of phrenology sheds light on a nineteenth-century world, it may also help to illuminate our own. The favoured rhetoric of its lecturers, who in the face of waning credibility asserted their authority as guardians of “suppressed knowledge,” finds its echoes still today. Phrenology may have few adherents, but its “promise of certainty and self-advancement still beguiles.”
A review of this length can’t offer much more than a sampler of the content of this expansive, intricate book. Each chapter pursues a different facet of the topic; each is rich in character, anecdote and careful, shaded argument. The diverse experience of colonists, the complexities of class and gender, the diversity of Māori and Aboriginal negotiations of phrenology’s power and promise — all are deftly handled through close attention to the particularity of experience.
If there is a narrative history of phrenology in the Tasman world to be found here, it emerges subtly and elusively from the whole. It is not a triumphalist history, but tells of diffusion and transformation rather than decline. But while the book may defy summary, it invites and rewards attentive, immersive reading. •
Science and Power in the Nineteenth-Century Tasman World: Popular Phrenology in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand
By Alexandra Roginski | Cambridge University Press | $160.95 | 300 pages
