Facehood

           For much of human history, people did not think of their face very often. This was because people did not constantly see detailed images or reflections of themselves. You could go through your whole day without seeing a glimpse of your own face. Portraits were only available to the wealthy. Having a painting of yourself meant establishing your status and legacy. An exact likeness was not something everyone could easily create and share every day. 

As mirrors became cheaper and more widely available, this all changed rapidly. Suddenly, people could study their own faces much more closely and much more often. The face became something you could examine, judge, and think about as part of your identity. In The Face: A Cultural History, Fay Bound-Alberti connects this shift to what she calls “facehood,” the idea that one unique face belongs to one individual person and can represent who that person is.

Photography pushed facehood even further. A painted portrait took time and money. A photograph could be produced cheaply, copied, and shared. Your face could now exist in places where you were not physically present. It could identify you, preserve you, and be seen by people you had never met. Bound-Alberti describes photography as helping to “democratize” facehood because ordinary people could now create lasting images of themselves too.

The face started carrying information far beyond simple recognition. It could affect how attractive, respectable, trustworthy, or even memorable someone seemed. That way of thinking still shapes modern life. Cameras, social media, facial recognition, and filters all depend on the widely accepted belief that the face is something worth capturing, studying, and interpreting.

Fish Fossils

During my time at Yale, I visited the Peabody Museum and a certain fossil exhibit caught my eye. The fossil was a large palm frond surrounded by fish, all preserved together in a massive slab of stone from Wyoming. The leaves stretched across the rock while the fish appeared to swim around them. It was fascinating that so many fish died so close to the plant. It made me wonder what had happened that caused the fish to die and whether the palm frond was part of the fish’s habitat or home. What surprised me most was how close the fossil had been found to the site I had visited. 

On a family vacation to Yellowstone, I had the chance to travel back in time through fossil digging at the Green River Formation near Kemmerer, Wyoming. I was so excited, imagining that I would crack open rocks and find fish skeletons everywhere. Instead, I learned that I was not old enough to dig at the main fossil site. While my brother happily started digging with my dad at the quarry, I searched through a peripheral area that had already been excavated. The most promising slabs had been broken apart, leaving behind small piles of loose rock. I picked through them anyway, turning over pieces and smashing them with a little hammer. At the time, I still had delusions of success and piles of fish fossils.

After all that searching, the only fossils I found were small pieces of fossilized fish poop, also known as coprolites. They were not exactly the discoveries I had pictured. My brother across the canyon was swimming in fish fossils while I was swimming in their poo. It was no surprise that the fossils we wrapped up and took home were his. The fish now sit framed in my family’s house.

Seeing the museum fossil changed the way I remembered my trip. At the time, I thought I had been unlucky because I had not found a complete fish. Now I know that scientists have used feces to discover amazing things about prehistoric animals. Their poo contains details about their diet and their environment, facts that just a skeleton would not be able to provide. Seeing the dozens of fish frozen in time at the Peabody Museum was a reminder that fossil hunting is not only about finding the most beautiful object. It is about collecting small pieces of evidence, even something as unimpressive as fossilized poop, and using them to imagine a world that no longer exists.