LDUAC-UCL1592

At first glance, the ceramic figurine originating from Egypt during the Hellenistic period seems to hold little relevance to the eugenicist movement of the 19th and 20th century (Hartford et al. 2018, p.14).  

The original function of the item is contested, with scholars defining it as a possible religious or cultic figure, a souvenir or a "pathological grotesque" used for medical purposes (Hartford et al. 2018, p.4) However, of importance here is the motivation behind its collection in the early 20th century, which reveals the impact that UCL’s eugenicists had on wider collecting practices and discourse surrounding disability. The collector Robert Grenville Gayer-Anderson gathered items that fit (or did not fit) his concepts of beauty, and in labelling the item as a “grotesque figure of nude distorted dwarf,”  he subscribed to the idea of the normal body put forth by Galton and the eugenicists (Hartford et al. 2018, p.14).   

Galton’s statistical work was critical in constructing the concept of the normal body, allowing him to order and categorise people.  Using normal distribution, Galton plotted data gathered from his anthropometric laboratories such as height and weight forming bell curves, with most of the sample population falling in the middle – which was categorized as normal - whilst outliers were deemed either undesirable or superior traits (Davis, 2013, p.5). Karl Pearson (1912, p.23) wrote in Darwinism, Medical Progress and Eugenics that it was the prevalence of these negative hereditary traits such as dwarfism, insanity, and alcoholism which meant that “numberless members [were] failing to reach normality.” Thus, the disabled body was constructed as the antithesis to the ‘norm’ - as a deformity, and it is within this language of difference that the figurine is described as “grotesque” and “distorted” (Hartford et al. 2018, p.14). 

Galton’s ideas of normalcy and superior traits were dangerous especially as they did not remain confined to academic circles but attracted international attention. For example, Eugen Sandow dubbed the “strongman of eugenics” captured public imagination by touring the world with his strength show (Daley, 2002, p.236), and was so popular that the British Museum took a cast of his body to represent the perfect body type (Davis, 2020). Whilst Sandow differed from Galton in arguing that exercise and nutrition could overcome genetics, Sandow represented those positive traits of height, strength, and whiteness that Galton deemed superior (Daley, 2002, p.236).  

Eugenicists also virulently targeted individuals with cognitive disabilities, which physical disabilities were considered to be exterior markers of.  For example, the American eugenicists Martin Barr and Earle Maloney (1920, p.3) stated in Types of Mental Defectives  that “the idiot, commonly dwarfed and under-sized, exhibits those signs of physical weakness which at once betray mental degeneration.” Much like Galton, Barr and Maloney were eager to visualize difference, and created an extensive catalogue of photographs to help identify and categorize individuals deemed to be idiots, idio-imbeciles, and imbeciles through physical characteristics such as posture, vacant expression, and paralysis (Barr and Maloney, 1920, p.3).    

Physical and cognitive disability were not understood in isolation but intersected with racism and classism, as “dark skin” was a  "physical" marker used to determine cognitive disability (Barr and Maloney, 1920, p.19). The figurine represents this intersection of race and disability as it was collected during a mission to Africa and Gayer-Anderson actively participated in "race collecting" ascribing racial epithets to other figurines in his collection (Hartford et al. 2018, p.28). Social status also played a key role in the aesthetics of disability as Barr and Maloney photographed those deemed on the low end of the scale in plain clothing, whilst professional studio shots showed those on the higher end of the scale in nicer clothing and jewellery (Hans et al. 2017, p.413). This process of othering that stemmed from Galton’s presumption of what was normal manifested into very real discrimination that conflated notions of race, disability, and class. This was evident at Ellis Island, where immigration agents actively sought physical signs as evidence of cognitive disability, before marking the person with chalk and removing them, actively separating the ‘abnormal’ from the "normal" (Dolmage, 2018, p.19).