L’homme moyen and American Anthropometry

Chapter 1 has two goals: to offer a genealogy of the wanted poster as organized by the average man, and to argue that this is a secular, racial knowledge formation whose religious roots, as we will see in later chapters, continue to nourish it. It argues that the statistical invention of the average man is defined by race as the overvaluing of one way of being human. After an overview of the average man, the chapter shows how late nineteenth-century French police clerk Alphonse Bertillon adopts Quetelet’s average man decades later to organize French police records at home, in the colonies, and in major cities across the world. Lastly, it traces the FBI’s uptake of Bertillon’s methods and episteme of scientific rationality for identification, leading to the creation of the identification order, a precursor to the FBI wanted poster, and ultimately an entire FBI program dedicated to the distribution of wanted posters.