LDUAC-UCL1330
Ceramic head, “Caricature female head, tinted pink, with red lips”, Institute of Archaeology Collections, date of manufacture unknown, collected early 20th Century.
Francis Galton coined the term ‘eugenics’ in 1883; it is derived from the Greek words εὐ, meaning good, and γενής, meaning to come into existence or to grow. Galton believed that selective human reproduction was the best way to improve society for the future, and suggested encouraging the members of a family, who were deemed most successful by the society, to get married and have children early (Galton, 1883). He also believed that marrying later in life was bad for human development. According to Angus McLaren's summary (1990) eugenics is defined as a method of societal control, which manipulates the breeding habits of people, in order to positively affect the mental or physical attributes of future generations. Eugenics was intended to serve the classist, elitist and racialist prejudices of those who espoused it. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, many countries adopted radical eugenics policies, for instance, the prohibition of marriages between individuals with physical or mental disabilities. In addition, eugenics was responsible for mass, forced sterilization during the Holocaust in 1941. As well as forced sterilization, the actions taken in the name of eugenics include restrictive immigration and the institutionalisation of transgressive men, women and children. The aforementioned female ceramic head will be examined within the context of eugenics, as it has been briefly outlined above, as well as within the context of sexism.
The Hellenistic ceramic head (accession number: LDUAC-UCL1330) collected by Robert Grenville Gayer-Anderson in the early 20th century is part of the collections of the UCL Institute of Archaeology (IoA). Based on the braided hairstyle, facial wrinkles and other embellishments, this object has been interpreted and labelled as representing the head of an elderly woman. Her nose is prominent and her mouth, with its corners tilting upwards, appears to be smiling. The face has been painted in pink, while a red pigment was used for the hair and mouth.
Right profile of ancient Greek. Lavater. 1791. Drawing by Johann Caspar. Wellcome Collection Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
The object is interpreted as a part of a broader "race collection", which aimed to classify different human groups and separate "races" according to their physical features, justifying contemporary interpretations of racial difference by showing how these categories were also present in the past. The head was considered the most important part of a human for the purposes of classification, as well as for measuring cranial capacity, because of specific features, such as facial prognathism. It is likely that Gayer-Anderson was intending to collect objects which were typically representative of specific races (Hartford et al. 2019). Jeremy Tanner (2010) and Gail Lynette (2007) both state that that the classical Greeks had racial prejudices and that both racialism and nationalism were an intrinsic element in Hellenistic, daily life. Furthermore, Durocher (2018) believes that eugenics, as an exclusionary tactic, would have been considered an appropriate pathway to Hellenistic citizenship.
The place of women, within a eugenics-based worldview, also makes for a controversial topic. Women's rights became subservient to scientific necessity. Galton, for instance, believed that women's capacities were lesser than those of men. Women were seen by eugenicists as breeders: they were the "supreme organ of the future." Historically, eugenics has been the motivation for a wide range of practices, related to the treatment of women, from prenatal care for mothers who are genetically eligible to the forced sterilization and murder of would-be mothers who are deemed unsuitable.
The ceramic female head is a typical example of a kind of caricaturistic art, which was especially prevalent during the Hellenistic period (Tanner, 2019). These kinds of figurines, with their exaggerated facial features, were catalogued by Gayer-Anderson as "grotesques." There were several kinds of "grotesque": one category was "pathological grotesques," which was a representation of somebody with a physical illness or deformity. A figurine such as this one was likely designed to be viewed by the general populace; possibly it was a representation of one of the “dwarves” who performed for the Hellenistic elites, as an expression of the latter's wealth (Mitchell, 2013, p. 284). Otherwise, the figurine might reflect the tradition of Hellenistic court life–it was common to humiliate people, who suffered from a physical illness, as this was supposed to protect them from the so-called "evil eye." From Alexandre Mitchell's perspective (2013, p. 283), the figurine might perhaps better be viewed, more generally, as a representation of the Graeco-Roman “morbid curiosity for the unnatural and the grotesque.” Stevenson (1975, p. 1) also puts forward that ancient societies were obsessed with this kind of malformation, as is evident from their art. Due to its "grotesques" features, the object, in this context, might be seen as "degenerate": a representation of the kind of human specimen who would make a good candidate for forced sterilization, according to eugenicists.
By Qian Luo
Works cited
Durocher, Guillaume. 2018. Biopolitics, Racialism, and Nationalism in Ancient Greece: A Summary View. Occidental Observer. 11 August. Available at: Biopolitics, Racialism, and Nationalism in Ancient Greece: A Summary View – The Occidental Observer (archive.org)
Galton, Francis. 1883. Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development. London: Macmillan.
Hartford, Alexis., Philips, Rhian M., Sharrard, Olivia., Waterfield, Jodi. 2019. Ceramic Caricature Figurines. UCL Internal Report [Unpublished].
McLaren, Angus. 1990. Our Own Master Race: Eugenics in Canada 1885-1945. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart.
Mitchell, Alexandre. 2013. Disparate Bodies in Ancient Artefacts: The Function of Caricature and Pathological Grotesques among Roman Terracotta Figurines, in Laes, Christian., Goodey, Chris F., and Rose, M Lynn. (eds.) Disabilities in Roman Antiquity: Disparate Bodies A Capite ad Calcem. Boston: Brill. 275-297.
Mitchell, Lynette. 2007. Panhellenism and the Barbarian in Archaic and Classical Greece. Swansea: Classical Press of Wales.
Stevenson, William E. 1975. The Pathological Grotesque Representation in Greek and Roman Art. Unpublished PhD Thesis. University of Pennsylvania.
Tanner, Jeremy. 2010. Introduction to the New Edition: Race and Representation in Ancient Art: Black Athena and After, in Bindman, David. and Gates Jr, Henry Louis. (eds.) The Image of the Black in Western Art: From the Pharaohs to the Fall of the Roman Empire Volume 1. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
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