Hooton, Earnest A.: The American Criminal

Saran Ghatak

Earnest A. Hooton was an American anthropologist best known for his anthropometric studies in criminology in the 1930s in the tradition established by Cesare Lombroso and the so-called Positivist School in criminology in Italy in the 1870s. Hooton was originally trained to be a scholar of classics. He received a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, writing a dissertation on Roman art. His career as an anthropologist began while he attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, eventually earning a Diploma in Anthropology in 1913. He joined Harvard University soon afterwards and remained there till his death in 1954. Lombroso's theory of evolutionary atavism and innate, hereditary criminal traits was published in 1876 as a monograph titled L'uomo delinquente ( The Criminal Man ). This formed the core of the Positivist School of criminology based on the emergent sciences of anthropometry, anthropology, and biology. Lombroso's protégés Enrico Ferri and Raffaele ...

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