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This fascinating book traces the evolution of the \"criminal body\" by focusing on the work of Cesare Lombroso, an Italian physician and anthropologist, who is widely held to be the father of modern criminology. Building on Lombroso's concept of the \"born criminal\" and the idea that bodies could be used as evidence in criminal investigations, The Criminal Body offers an intriguing window into the origins of today's criminological science.

Using as his example post-World War I Italy and the government's interest in the size, growth rate, and \"vitality\" of its national population, David Horn suggests a genealogy for our present understanding of procreation as a site for technological intervention and political contestation.Social Bodieslooks at how population and reproductive bodies came to be the objects of new sciences, technologies, and government policies during this period. It examines the linked scientific constructions of Italian society as a body threatened by the \"disease\" of infertility, and of women and men associalbodies--located neither in nature nor in the private sphere, but in that modern domain of knowledge and intervention carved out by statistics, sociology, social hygiene, and social work. Situated at the intersection of anthropology, cultural studies, and feminist studies of science, the book explores the interrelated factors that produced the practices of reason we call social science and social planning. David Horn draws on many sources to analyze the discourses and practices of \"social experts,\" the resistance these encountered, and the often unintended effects of the new objectification of bodies and populations. He shows how science, while affirming that maternity was part of woman's \"nature,\" also worked to remove reproduction from the domain of the natural, making it an object of technological intervention. This reconstitution of bodies through the sciences and technologies of the social, Horn argues, continues to have material consequences for women and men throughout the West.

This article explores the construction of the Italian city and the urban population as objects of social scientific knowledge and technical intervention. In the context of a pronatalist campaign launched by the fascist regime in the 1920s and 1930s, the city was identified as a locus of sterility, and urban populations were made the targets of new forms of government aimed at transforming reproductive practices. The links between knowledge and power revealed by this \"problematization\" of the city are, I suggest, of some importance for genealogies of the social sciences, including urban anthropology. [cities, urbanism, social science, reproduction, Italy, fascism]

Horn reviews The Pinocchio Effect: On Making Italians (1860-1920) by Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg.

In the nineteenth century, European social scientists & jurists constructed poverty, unemployment, disease, & work accidents (among others) as social problems, no longer reducible to the conduct of individuals, or to the vagaries of nature. This new problematization, & the construction of a social domain coextensive with neither the public nor the private, have had decisive effects in the West, transforming practices of knowledge & power. The identification & the solution of social problems, two projects that assumed a new urgency in the years following WWI, made necessary the collection of detailed, scientific information about society & the biological population, & extensive governmental intervention in the patterns of everyday life. In post-WWI Italy, as elsewhere in the West, the concern with the well-being of the population was linked to the elaboration of particular kinds of knowledge, including sociology & demography, & to the refinement & spread of techniques of government developed before the war, including social work & compulsory insurance. These managerial techniques, in turn, articulated new conceptions of the relations between the individual & the social, the moral & the juridical, responsibility & risk, & rights & duties. 29 References. AA

It is argued that urban anthropology, largely as a result of internal tensions & a diversity of research interests, perspectives, & strategies, has failed to adequately explore many important dimensions of urban social practices, particularly the dynamics of culture & power. Various critiques of contemporary urban anthropology are reviewed, & it is shown that an understanding of power & culture is frequently overshadowed by either ideological or functional explanations. A new conception of power & culture is recommended that does not consider the individual & the state as analytical poles requiring a discourse of planning on the one hand & alienation on the other; rather, they must be viewed as related & mutually constituted phenomena. The city must be understood as requiring or making possible new relations between culture & power, & as itself partially constituted by these new relations. In such an urban anthropology, themes articulated by the Chicago school may persist, but be radically transformed. K. Hyatt

In the late twentieth century, the status of the “social” as an object of scientific knowledge (including anthropological knowledge) and of technical interventions is so familiar as to risk being taken for granted. We speak unproblematically of social problems, of social sciences, and of agents of social intervention: social workers, social assistants, social engineers. And yet, we have learned to be suspicious of all that passes for common sense: the objects of social sciences and technologies are not to be found “in society” any more than the objects of the natural sciences are to be found “in nature” (Knorr-Cetina 1983;

The construction of the social as a domain of scientific knowledge and technical intervention marked a revolution in the history of bodies in the West. The spaces of the social came, over time, to be crowded with the dangerous, injured, needy, diseased, and infertile bodies of women and men—bodies at times identified as “at risk,” and at others as “posing risks” to a more encompassing collectivity. Crime, work accidents, poverty, disease, and infertility—each of which had previously been constructed as extraordinary, irregular, and capricious—came to be understood not only as problems of society but as statistically regular

In Italy, as we have seen, the problem of the sterile city entered official political discourse in 1927. In his Ascension Day address, Mussolini identified the Italian city as a demographic problem (Mussolini 1927a:378). Particularly the urban industrial centers of the north, he argued, were largely responsible for an “alarming” national decline in rates of marriage and fertility. Of course, in Italy as elsewhere, the city and the population had each been problematic before: epistemologically, practically, and politically. The city had been an ambivalent object of architectural, medical, and ethical reflection and intervention since Roman antiquity. And the size and