Osobní stránka

Osobní stránka na adrese: loz987987.firemni-stranka.cz

nová-stránka-317991:Osobní stránka na adrese: loz987987.firemni-stranka.cz

nová-stránka-317991

This was an identity that many individuals and officials believed made a document such as the passport redundant.The faith in the reading of the body was not limited to experts.Outside the police station and the university, a preexisting, everyday amateur reading of appearance provided what many considered a satisfactory way to identify people.By the turn of the twentieth century people in the United States increasingly saw bodies as the surface reflections of interior characteristics.22 The development of this belief can be traced to the popularization of physiognomy and phrenology.23 Physiognomy sought to establish a person’s character through external appearance, particularly the face and profile.The emergence of the rogues’ gallery in the second half of the nineteenth century provided another forum in which people were encouraged to think of looking at the body as an important form of detection.In this case individuals did not read the body to determine character or individual identity but to verify race and ethnicity.When race in particular was in dispute, prior to the Fifteenth Amendment guaranteeing African Americans the right to vote, concerned parties sought evidence from the body of the voter.This generally occurred when a voter had what were seen as ambiguous features.At this time voter eligibility was established by a process involving community members assigned by parties to challenge people as they voted, with a final decision made by an election judge, often under the influence of the assembled community.Telltale signs of African American identity could be seen in kinky hair, flat noses, protruding lips and a dark complexion.A list such as this was developed to try to bring rational order to the potential problem of verifying racial identity.This form of voter identification was used more frequently in urban areas where the size of the precincts produced an anonymity that prevented the assembled public from appealing to communal knowledge to establish an individual’s genealogy.In cities, in the absence of documents, ethnicity was somewhat similarly verified.In the case of Americans like Aldrich, the encoding of class and whiteness as status and privilege was so naturalized as to be practically invisible.Within the world of the Aldriches a demand for the verification of identity beyond the obvious constituted an affront.In one sense it took away from individuals the control of their identity.While, in the words of the Punch parody, the normal complexion of whiteness was important, beyond race the reading of people’s appearance also privileged their social distinction through the way the body was clothed, the way it moved, and the voice that came out of the body.Further within the complex articulation of public and private that constituted decency and deportment, for those with privilege the body itself was off limits, in contrast to the others whose bodies revealed their lack of privilege.The paragraph allotted to the physical description on early passports included two lines to describe any distinguishing physical marks or features.32 In the reformatting of the passport at the beginning of the 1820s, the State Department increased the number of physical features listed, but did not provide any space for distinguishing physical marks or features.There is no record of the rationale for this decision.It could be that officials presumed that distinctive markings such as tattoos and scars appeared so infrequently on the body of Americans that it was unnecessary to allocate space on every passport for the occasional noticeably blemished body.Thus the lack of space to describe physical markings could perhaps be more fully located in the belief that efficiency and standardization were necessary for more useful and reliable identification.In contrast to the presentation of the physical description in paragraph form, the move to vertically listing specific features implied a conscious effort to produce a document that would be more effectively and efficiently filled in and read.Two blank lines also provided empty space that could be filled at the discretion of the official or the bearer.Such discretion ran counter to the ideal of objectivity to which modern identification was increasingly being held.Objectivity in the form of standardization was in large part used to control the creation of identity by limiting the opportunity for an official’s discretion to influence the creation of a document.However, the complexity of the emergence of the passport as a modern identification technology is evident in the return of a designated space for distinguishing marks in