Our Environment in Miniature: Dust and the Early Twentieth-Century Forensic Imagination

Ian Burney
2013 Representations  
This article explores the articulation of the crime scene as a distinct space of theory and practice in the early twentieth century. In particular it focuses on the evidentiary hopes invested in what would at first seem an unpromising forensic object: dust. Ubiquitous and, to the uninitiated, characterless, dust nevertheless featured as an exemplary object of cutting-edge forensic analysis in two contemporary domains: writings of criminologists and works of detective fiction. The article
more » ... rs how in these texts dust came to mark the furthest reach of a new forensic capacity they were promoting, one that drew freely upon the imagination to invest crime scene traces with meaning. We are, allegedly, living in a new era of forensic investigation. Since the introduction of DNA profiling in the mid-1980s, the forensic terrain has been reshaped, with new iconography (spectral images of white-suited, anonymous crime scene investigators); new challenges (the prevention of material contamination and degradation); and a new set of spaces, especially the highly disciplined crime scene and its promised harvest of bio-trace evidence. These developments have not gone unnoticed. They feature in a burgeoning scholarly literature, which, in exploring debates ranging from population genetics and abstruse probability theory to the negotiation of protocols for retrieving, storing, analyzing, and presenting trace matter as evidence, has drawn attention to the complexities of securing DNA profiling as a viable forensic technology. 1 Forensics in this self-consciously novel cast has also entrenched itself in the public imagination and has been showcased on highly rated television shows such as CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and its legion of spinoffs, in bestselling crime novels, and in our daily newspapers. 2 Yet attention to our forensic present has not been matched by historical analysis, particularly for the twentieth century, and this neglect comes at a cost: in the shadow of the recent, undeniably spectacular advances in forensic techniques, prior practices are often assumed to be relics of a bygone age, discontinuous from-and thus uninteresting to-the world we now inhabit. 3 Indeed, the current embrace of "cold case review" operates on and reinforces a marginalized view of earlier regimes of forensic theory and practice, which, if entertained at all, tend to be dismissed as grounded in "untested assumptions and semi-informed guesswork." 4 This article's aim is to open up a space in which to think historically about our understanding, and imagining, of contemporary forensic investigation. It does so by taking one of the best-recognized features of today's forensic landscape-the crime scene-and exploring its articulation at the turn of the last century, both in an emergent criminalistic literature and in the flourishing contemporary genre of detective fiction. It was in these texts Of course, all crimes take place in a definite space and time, and consequently criminal investigations past and present are rooted in a specific site. But it was only at the turn of the last century that the "crime scene" as a distinct analytical space, bounded conceptually and operationally by explicit rules of practice, and recognized as such by forensic investigators and the broader public alike, became the object of sustained consideration. In the English context, there were few if any systematic manuals on criminal investigation for police practitioners produced in the nineteenth century. 8 It was not in police guides but in the well-established medico-legal literature that the investigation of criminal acts received its most complete treatment, but this too was of a limited nature, in no small part due to its BURNEY
doi:10.1525/rep.2013.121.1.31 pmid:23766552 pmcid:PMC3678505 fatcat:vu5pednlkrhnxia77rx5d6ruqm