Making faces: Decolonizing “Mongolian Idiocy”

• In Event: Decolonial Knowledge(s)

Abstract

As medical superintendent to the Victorian Earlswood Asylum, Dr. John Langdon Down photographed a series of patients in his care, a laborious technical feat in 1862. A subset of these patients would become the very first exemplars of a new human kind: the Mongolian imbecile. As a member of the Anthropological Society of London, Down was a minor player in colonial knowledge contests about human origins, races and speciation. Although Down’s asylum patients were born to “Caucasian” (mostly British) parents, he saw in them representatives of each of Blumenbach’s five races of man. In particular, a distinct group of “Mongolian” [Asian] appearing patients caught his eye and Down surmised that their development was arrested in utero and they had reverted to a degenerate racial type. Down’s anthropological theory was not adopted but his medical classification was: mongolism became a new human kind, and the name would last for a century, replaced by the eponymous “Down Syndrome”. This oft-told tale typically centres on the intellectual history of Down’s clumsy attempt to merge the “idiot” and “savage” – a colonial feat in which he was far from alone. Less attention has been given to Down’s method, which is typically lauded as astute observation of a self-evident resemblance. In practice, Down used colonial tools of objectification (photography, measurement, case description, physiognomy and exhibition) to craft a classification – to fashion a face - that took hold not in spite of its imbrication with racial hierarchies but because of it. However, faint archival traces of the actual people in Down’s first cohort provide a clue to decolonizing the category: in their specificity, each photograph, each admission note, each person on display belies the foundational fictions of Down’s category.

Author

• Aryn Martin, York University