THE CONTRIBUTION TO CRIMINOLOGY OF ANTHROPOLOGY

In its broadest sense, criminology is the entire body of knowledge regarding crimes, criminal
and the effort of society to prevent and repress them. In a narrower sense, criminology is the
scientific study of crimes and criminals.
According to Edwin Sutherland - Criminology is a body of knowledge regarding crime as a
social phenomenon. It includes within its scope the processes of making laws, of breaking of
laws, and of reaction toward the breaking of laws.
Anthropology is the systematic study of humanity, with the goal of understanding our
evolutionary origins, our distinctiveness as a species, and the great diversity in our forms of
social existence across the world and through time. The focus of Anthropology is on
understanding both our shared humanity and diversity and engaging with diverse ways of being
in the world.
Anthropological criminology (sometimes referred to as criminal anthropology, literally a
combination of the study of the human species and the study of criminals) is a field of offender
profiling, based on perceived links between the nature of a crime and the personality or physical
appearance of the offender.
Who is the founder of criminal anthropology?
Cesare Lombroso is the founder of criminal anthropology. He believed that certain physical traits
of an individual were indicative of criminal behavior.
What are the theories of Cesare Lombroso that relevant to anthropology?

THE CRIMINAL MAN

In “The Criminal Man”, first

published in 1876, Lombroso
developed his theory of criminal
anthropology to explain why people
commit crime. His theory suggests
that there are basic differences
between offenders and non-offenders.
More specifically, according to
Lombroso, born criminals have certain
physical characteristics or
abnormalities that make them
different.

Cesare Lombroso called these

abnormalities atavistic characteristics.
Atavistic comes from the word
“avatus”, which means ancestor in
Latin. According to him, the physical
abnormalities that offenders have
occurred because offenders were the
products of an earlier stage of human
evolution, a stage where more
primitive humans and apes existed.
Thus, offenders are basically
throwbacks to earlier phases of human
history.

Connected to the idea of atavistic characteristics is the idea of degeneration. According to

Lombroso, offenders have certain physical and mental characteristics of primitive
humans, and they commit crime because of these biological abnormalities.

Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images

images@wellcome.ac.uk http://wellcomeimages.org Six figures illustrating types of criminals Printed text
L’Homme Criminel Lombroso, Cesar Published: 1888
MEASURING CRIME: THE BORN CRIMINAL

Lombroso’s ideas were based on his own research. One of the things that he is known for
is that he conducted very detailed studies of people, and particularly studies of people’s
bodies. Different from many others who had gone before him, Lombroso started to
directly study offenders and measure and document the characteristics of their bodies.

Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images

images@wellcome.ac.uk http://wellcomeimages.org Algometer Printed text Criminal Man Lombroso,
Cesare Published: 1911

Over the course of his life, he and his students studied thousands of people. They studied
different types of people, namely offenders, non-offenders, and also mentally ill people.
And they not only studied people who were alive, but they also did autopsies on deceased
people, for example to study their skulls and their brains.

Examples of things Lombroso measured were people’s height, weight, the span of their
arms, the average height of their body while seated, the sizes of their hands, necks,
thighs, legs, and feet, their eye color and so on.
Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images
images@wellcome.ac.uk http://wellcomeimages.org Campimeter of landolt Printed text Criminal Man
Lombroso, Cesare Published: 1911

Credit: Fondo Antiguo de la Biblioteca de la Universidad de Sevilla from Sevilla, España

https://www.flickr.com/photos/fdctsevilla/4173331899/

ATAVISM
According to Lombroso, the offender was a special type of human being; an offender was not so
much a non-normal human, but really a different type of human. This different type of human
had a variety of physical characteristics that made him or her different from “regular” people. A
couple of examples of these physical characteristics were an asymmetric face, a large jaw,
excessively long arms, and epilepsy. People who had these characteristics were atavistic and thus
were criminal in nature. Lombroso even thought that one could recognize different types of
offenders, with thieves having different physical characteristics than violent offenders.

In the first edition of his book, Lombroso very much leaned on these physical
characteristics and measurements to distinguish born offenders from non-offenders, and
he used his atavistic theory to explain why some people were born offenders. But as he
kept updating his book and published new editions of it, he added things to it. For
example, he also took other factors that may be linked to criminal behavior into
consideration, such as poverty, alcohol, and gangs. There were also more psychological
characteristics that Lombroso associated with being an offender, such as a lack of
feelings of remorse, or being cynical or impulsive. But these factors are not often
connected to Lombroso, because he devoted a lot of his work to biology and physical
abnormalities.

Credit: Fondo Antiguo de la Biblioteca de la Universidad de Sevilla from Sevilla, España

https://www.flickr.com/photos/fdctsevilla/4174086442/

Cesare Lombroso is sometimes called “the father of modern criminology”, and he’s often
seen as the founder of the positivist school. The positivist school used measurements as a
way to find evidence for the causes of criminal behavior. In Lombroso’s case, that was
done with his measurements of people’s physical characteristics.
He was a well-known scholar in his time, and many people both from Italy and abroad
visited him to discuss ideas and research with him. Lombroso was certainly not the only
one who thought that physical characteristics were linked to criminal behavior. He had a
lot of influence on other Italian criminologists (like Ferri and Garofalo) and together,
these scholars are often called the Italian School of Criminology.

Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images

images@wellcome.ac.uk http://wellcomeimages.org Six figures illustrating types of criminals L’Homme
Criminel Lombroso, Cesar Published: 1888
Cesare Lombroso did not agree at all with the idea of free will, so with the idea that
people make decisions freely. The philosophy of free will was important in Italy at the
time, but, unlike philosophers like Beccaria and Bentham , Lombroso was much more
interested in factors outside of a person’s free will that influence behavior, and he was
not the only one.

This was a time in world history when Darwin’s evolutionary theory was gaining
popularity, and sociology was coming up where it was thought that every society and
every individual was affected by outside forces such as war and famine, and that wealth
and class affected the way in which we live our lives. This, of course, challenged the idea
that humans have free will. In other words, Lombroso wasn’t an outlier; he fit right in
with his time. In fact, he had significant influence on these ideas.
Credit: Fondo Antiguo de la Biblioteca de la Universidad de Sevilla from Sevilla, España
https://www.flickr.com/photos/fdctsevilla/4157827328/
What is the importance of criminal anthropology?
The study of criminal anthropology is important because of the implication of external factors on
an individual. An individual can have free will and can make decisions as they choose. However,
many of those decisions may be influenced by external factors, which have an impact on
decisions. Studying these factors can lead to more understanding.
Is anthropology related to criminology?
Anthropology is considered to be the study of humanity and the study of external influences on
an individual. This is applied to criminology by questioning what influences criminal activity.

CONCLUSION
Lombroso's approach to anthropology in connection to crime has been heavily criticized. Some
of the more serious critiques were that he did not appropriately interpret his findings and did not
critically evaluate them. It is now generally accepted that his findings were inaccurate.
As a result, Lombroso is one of the more controversial personalities in criminology history.
However, other notions rooted in his work, such as the idea that physical traits might contribute
to criminal behavior, are still very much alive in criminology today. Despite being criticized,
Lombroso's work is nevertheless regarded as an ESSENTIAL CONTRIBUTION TO
CRIMINOLOGY because it was the first attempt to apply scientific methods to the study of
crime.

References:
https://anthropology.ucdavis.edu/undergraduate/what-is-anthropology
https://www.mattartz.me/vocabulary/anthropological-theory/
https://www.slideshare.net/rsgrfn/adj-20163-criminology-lesson-1
https://www.studocu.com/ph/document/sti-college/accountancy/dot/11620091
https://study.com/learn/lesson/criminal-anthropology.html
https://criminologyweb.com/cesare-lombroso-theory-of-crime-criminal-man-and-atavism/