stereotype & society

International Journal of Communication

From International Journal of Communication 1 (2007), pp 86-88.

Elizabeth Ewen & Stuart Ewen, Typecasting: On the Arts & Sciences of Human Inequality, New York: Seven Stories Press, 2006, 555 pp., $34.95 (hardcover).

Book Review by
Stephen Duncombe
New York University

    In my undergraduate course on the politics of media there comes a time, each semester, when we turn our attention toward stereotypes. It’s not a good time. Despite my best intentions and strident interventions, even my most sophisticated students slip into simplistic analysis. It goes something like this: Stereotypes are bad, their use by “the media” oppress people, and if “they” would stop using stereotypes then people wouldn’t be so oppressed. A veritable stereotype of stereotyping.  Next  semester will be different: I’ll be armed with Elizabeth and Stuart Ewen’s Typecasting.

     Typecasting, as far as I know, is the most comprehensive historical work on the subject, with its hefty 555 pages focusing primarily on European and American development of stereotyping from the Enlightenment to today. But it’s heft is not what makes it so useful – instead it is the context in which the Ewens cast stereotyping. To define their topic they begin with Walter Lippmann’s classic explanation. Stereotyping is a response to living in a multicultural and mass society. In a world where we are bombarded with new and foreign stimulus every day, we group and categorize, creating stable, simplified models -- “pictures in our heads” -- with which to sort our new experiences, including our experiences with new people. Lippmann was not ignorant of the politics of stereotyping, indeed his 1922 book Public Opinion was largely concerned with this issue, but his understanding was constrained by his belief that stereotyping is a more-or-less natural, and certainly inevitable, process that is merely exploited by those with political interests: the manufacturers of consent. In other words, for Lippmann politics is something that happens to stereotypes.

    The Ewens reverse this equation, arguing that stereotypes are the products of a political process by historicizing the impetus to categorize human “types.” I don’t think it is an accident that the authors called their book Typecasting, not Stereotyping, for they see the practice of stereotyping as the surface manifestation of a much larger phenomenon: classifying and controlling the social forces unleashed by the rise of democratic sentiment (and spread of globalization) from the 18th century onward.  As the Ewens argue:

The Declaration of Independence was a time bomb. In the decades and centuries following 1776, these democratic faiths would be employed, again and again, in the name of those who remained socially, politically, and economically disenfranchised…. In the late 18th century, however, democratic principles were part and parcel of a world in which the new systems of inequality, functioning on a global level, were becoming increasingly virulent. To a large extent, the rise of modern stereotyping, the detailed elaboration of ostensibly scientific taxonomies of human difference, was a direct response to the inherent contradictions of a democratic age (p. 22).

    Nowhere are these “inherent contradictions” more clearly revealed than in the writings of the author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson. The same mind that conceived that “all Men are created equal” would also write that blacks are “inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind” and use the analogy of proper husbandry of domestic animals to argue for racial purity (p. 21). Jefferson is not held up as a hypocrite -- a slave owner who penned one of the most famous documents of human liberty, an advocate of pure race that had five mixed-race children with a slave named Sally Hennings, herself the half-sister of Jefferson’s late wife – instead he is an exemplar of tensions within our democracy. How do you reconcile the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity with the patent realities of inequality and division? You convince yourself, and others, that people are naturally separate and unequal and thus there is a natural limit to political and social equality.

    Over the next five hundred plus pages the Ewens chronicle the ways in which disparity has been reasoned and displayed, that is: “the arts and sciences of human inequality.” The authors include sections on the idealized aesthetic of Western art; the odd curiosity cabinets of European collectors; freak shows and world’s fairs, the profiling of criminals; the rise and fall of popular eugenics; a wonderfully quirky aside on Roget’s Thesaurus; and finally, the use and abuse of stereotypes in popular culture from minstrel shows to the silver screen, from war propaganda to contemporary advertising. Although these parts work in sequence, they can also be read on their own, making both reading and assigning this weighty tome a bit easier.

    My favorite section is the extensive one (really a mini-book in itself) on physiognomy and phrenology. These related “sciences,” the former which purported to read a person’s character from their facial appearance, the latter which systemized the approach into a study of the bumps and lumps and shapes of the human skull, were accepted ways of making sense of the proclivities and possibilities of people throughout the 19th century.  What I found so fascinating was the widespread legitimacy of what we would now consider pseudo-science. Scholarly studies were published in the American Phrenological Journal, and important figures like Ulysses S. Grant lined up to have their heads read. Walt Whitman asked his fellow countrymen to learn the “phrenology… of the land” in his epic Leaves of Grass (published, curiously, by Fowler and Wells, the leading practitioners and promoters of phrenology in the U.S.). After a particularly heinous railway accident, newspaper editor and moralist Horace Greeley suggested subjecting engineers to phrenological examinations. And Horace Mann, the great educator, praised phrenology for its ability to “save the race from destruction” (p. 131).

    As implied in Mann’s remarks, the study of lumps and bumps and shapes of the skull was not exactly value neutral. Predictably, criminals, drunkards, the mentally ill, and other undesirables had tellingly imperfect skulls. As did people that originated anyplace other than Northern Europe.  The head of “the typical negro,” wrote the leading phrenologist Samuel Wells, demonstrates that “he is slow and indolent. But persistent and capable of great endurance … a child in mental development” (p. 143).  The study of the skulls of American Indians led Wells’s partner, O.S. Fowler, to conclude that all tribes shared a “disposition common to the race” that was “cruel, blood-thirsty and revengeful” (p. 143). These “scientific” readings of the races were quite convenient for a nation struggling with the issue of slavery in the South and fighting Indian wars out West.

    Today physiognomy and phrenology are a joke, a sort of cultural embarrassment. Like minstrel shows they are things that we, a reasoning people who believe firmly in equality, would like to forget. But the inherent contradiction within our democracy remains. We believe in equality, yet nowhere is it readily found. In the past, the Ewens argue, we temporarily resolved this tension by assigning scientific and aesthetic difference, then value to that difference, to different races, classes and genders. We naturalized categories that were shaped by political interests, and then we displayed these stereotypes, thereby perpetuating them. 

    Stereotypes are, of course, still with us. The media portrayals of African-Americans like the eye-rolling, slow talking Steppin Fetchit may be verboten in our more enlightened, politically correct times, but other stereotypes have taken its place. Now there is the fanatical Muslim, the science-challenged woman, or, in a paradoxical twist, the red-state-living, stereotype-believing, bigoted white man.  The recent success of Sacha Baron Cohen’s film Borat might seem to suggest that we’re moving past stereotypes: by recognizing them, then laughing at them, we mitigate their power. What the Ewens’ book does, and does well, is warn us that the stereotypes we see – whether presented as possible fact by a Harvard president or parodied by a comedian on a movie screen -- are only the surface image of a much larger political and intellectual  project which arises out of an enduring  contradiction at the core of our society. As such, it’s not likely that stereotypes are going to disappear any time soon.

In His Own Words

"I don't actually read other peoples' books. If I want to read a book, I write one myself."

Terry Eagleton, responding to the question "Have you read anything good lately?" New York Times Magazine, April 22, 2007.

Eagleton reviewed Ewen & Ewen's Typecasting in The London Review of Books last fall. When his review came out—in spite of a number of very favorable comments he made about the book—a number of readers we heard from wondered if the once trendy academician had actually read the book. Most of Eagelton's rant was consumed by a wandering vindication of stereotyping, drawing on his personal takes on the various tribes of Britain.  The only substantive discussion of the book, where he enumerated its strengths, can be found on this site. Whether the "review" was based on a full read (something he claims never to do), or an obligatory skim, remains unclear.  His recent admission, however, suggests that it may have been drafted by the seat of his pants.

Midwest Book Review

Co-written by recognized consumer culture historian Stuart Ewen, Typecasting: On the Arts and Sciences of Human Inequality is a plain-terms, no-holds-barred look at the long-running practice of science warped to serve prejudice. Though the word "typecasting" refers to a common practice in cinema and mass-media to pick certain types of actors for certain roles, Typecasting covers discrimination in all aspects of human society. From Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, King George's court physician who subdivided humanity into five unequal categories during the Declaration of Independence era, to early twentieth-century birth control advocate Margaret Sanger's view of birth control as a means to curb the procreation of "socially degenerate" populations "unfit" for democracy, to the 2005 president of Harvard University's claim that "issues of intrinsic aptitude" explain the under representation of women in the sciences and mathematics, Typecasting leaves no stone unturned from ancient taxonomies of human difference to modern-day battlegrounds of ideas. Of particular interest is the elucidation of how religion is often dragged into prejudice, with inequality or second-class citizenship depicted as God's will in past centuries and the current century. An absolute "must-have" for sociology shelves, enthusiastically recommended for public and college libraries alike.

Skin DEEP

Review of Ewen & Ewen's Typecasting, Utne Reader, March-April, 2007

"African American soldiers before World War I 'showed an average mental age of ten' based on an 'intelligence' test requiring knowledge of card games, Becky Sharpe, ensilage, advertising jingles, and the most prominent industry of Gloucester. And the New York Sun once required job applicants to undergo personality assessments based on the shapes of their noggins, a practice Oliver Wendell Holmes called 'an attempt to estimate the money in the safe by the nobs on the outside.

"Typecasting isn't just a history of such stereotyping. The 555-page tome also is a disturbing collective biography of people who measured heads with calipers to determine the best and brightest, exhibited dark-skinned men in zoos with apes, cut open the skulls of criminals, organized state fair competitions awarding the "fittest families," and carried out compulsory sterilization. People, in othe words, bent on preventing 'the spread and multiplication of worthless members of society.'

"In capable prose, media historians Elizabeth and Stuart Ewen describe the way minstrel shows, films, thesaurus-making, criminal anthropology, and the Adam and Eve story developed or prolonged 'the notion that society was divided between those whose fertility should be encouraged and those whose hereditary lineage called for curtailment.'

"The authors make it clear that the 'eugenic' policies of Nazi Germany were inspired by practices started in the United States. Less explicitly, but no less significantly, they describe the historical roots of contemporary social control and practices such as racial and ethnic profiling, mug shots, fingerprinting, identity cards, and databases."

--Chris Dodge

New York Times Selects Bill O'Reilly Clone to Review Typecasting

In a review that comes to the sorely-needed defense of rich white men, world capitalism, the founder of eugenics, and former Harvard president Lawrence Summers (who questioned women's innate aptitude for science), David Berreby excoriates the widely celebrated Typecasting in this past Sunday's Book Review.

 

Our favorite quotes from the review.

"The Ewens are good…at one thing: conveying what the reader ought to think. Sly and various are their methods."

"[T]he Ewens offer up a long parade of the usual suspects—rich white men with credentials—doing Bad Things to everybody else, usually abetted by (surprise!) capitalism."

Hard to imagine that two informed and distinguished scholars, after ten years of research, would argue that wealthy white men had anything to with the oppression of others, or that capitalism (in spite of the facts that it established and grew rich from the international slave trade, colonized much of the world, and continues to thrive on social and economic inequality) has had anything to do with Bad Things happening.

After reading Berreby's thoughtful review, one Ewen responded, "Mea culpa, mea culpa. Our bad!"

 

Mark Dery's Shovelware

THE EYES HAVE IT: Stuart and Elizabeth Ewen on the "Science of First Impressions"

(In its December 2006 issue, ID magazine ran my interview with Stuart and Elizabeth Ewen, two of our most incisive thinkers about the politics of images and the social history of consumer culture. But that wasn't the half of it. ID didn't have room for my intro, and had to truncate the interview for reasons of space. Here's the director's cut, with all of the insights that ended up on the cutting-room floor restored.)

Amid the cultural crossfire over illegal immigration, at a moment when 60 percent of the respondents to a Quinnipiac poll applauded the racial profiling of people who look "Middle Eastern," the visual-culture critics and social historians Stuart and Elizabeth Ewen are pulling our stereotypes up by the roots.

Their new book, Typecasting: On the Arts and Sciences of Human Inequality (Seven Stories Press), is a history of stereotyping in racist science and popular culture.…

Revealing the origins of the pictures in our heads—the powerful images that shape our attitudes toward "enemy aliens," the lower class, or anyone in a different skin—the Ewens make sense of our most pernicious myths by restoring their lost historical context: the eugenics of Francis Galton, the criminal anthropology of Cesare Lombroso, and other systems of scientific racism that molded the visual imagination of the modern age.

If that sounds like 497 pages of sternly self-flagellating political correctness, it isn't. Profusely illustrated with period images, the book is an intellectual thrill ride, rollercoastering from the sad tale of the Hottentot Venus to hidden agendas in Roget's Thesaurus; from the cannibal stereotype in King Kong to the deeper meanings of the minstrel show. In Typecasting, the Ewens open our minds by opening our eyes.

Mark Dery

FULL INTERVIEW ON MARK DERY'S SHOVELWARE

 

Eye: The International Review of Graphic Design

Issue 62
Review
Winter 2006

                  

Typecasting: On The Arts and Sciences of Human Inequality
By Elizabeth and Stuart Ewen. Seven Stories Press, USD 34.95

Reviewed by Steven Heller


Stereotyping was the name given by the French printer Fermin Didot in 1794 to his novel printing process by which papier maché moulds were made from pages of handset type and used to produce duplicate plates, cast in metal. That stereotyping – the all-too-common act of classifying human beings – began as a graphic arts process is sobering. As Elizabeth and Stuart Ewen note in their important new book, Typecasting, ‘Within recent history, the media’s capacity to spawn mass impressions instantaneously, has been a pivotal factor in the dissemination of stereotypes.’ By more than mere implication graphic designers and illustrators have been in large part responsible for the mistruths.

In this encyclopedic collection of brief but intense essays, the Ewens trace the origins and manifestations of ‘typecasting’ or stereotyping and the myths largely perpetrated for the purpose of maintaining power and establishing hierarchies of race, ethnicity, gender, and class. They show how the exploitation of difference has been used as a political, social, and religious weapon in the propagation of hierarchical systems.

The stereotype became a more significant social tool – a means to shape what Walter Lippmann called ‘public mind’ – during what the Ewens label the ‘Age of Spectatorship’ of the early twentieth century. But the reliance on stereotyping as a social determinant begins earlier during the Middle Ages when nascent capitalism emerges.

A world engaged in exploration and mercantile trade obliterated many of the boundaries that separated peoples and cultures. Population shifts from rural to urban owing to ‘enclosure movements,’ whereby once open farm and grazing lands were now circumscribed by strict boundaries, forced migration to cities. The new inhabitants needed to be taught their respective places, and thus fit into proscribed types . . . 

In Typecasting, The Ewens' exploration brings together science, myth, religion and art in ways that few graphic design books have ever done. In chronicling taxonomies of numerous official types, the Ewens have provided an invaluable textbook on the way in which our visual perceptions and misperceptions have been perpetuated in ways both benign and evil...

Their study shows that even in the realm of stereotyping everything is contextual. Certain fears  of difference seem to have made sense at various times in history, even if the results—exploitation, persecution, extermination—are senseless by our standards today. Eugenics, the pseudo-science developed by the Englishman, Francis Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin, had many adherents, including such liberals as George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells. Little could they predict that the Nazis would take Eugenics to its next radically criminal extreme—but the roots were there.

The  Ewens have provided a valuable history, but Typecasting also sheds needed light on the processes of persuasion and misinformation today. In many advertising agencies, publicity firms and design companies, typecasting is carried out as a matter of course. It has become such a part of our communications business routine that it is easy to ignore. The Ewens show that too many of world's persistent ills derive from the populace's happy ignorance.

Steven Heller


© eye magazine, quantum publishing

For the full text of this review by Steven Heller, see Eye No. 63

London Review of Books

Ewen and Ewen

Typecasting: On the Arts and Sciences of Human Inequality

Terry Eagleton writes:

Typecasting is an encyclopedic browse through the annals of stereotyping, with a particular focus on the United States. The book contains some surreally potted history, whisking us from feudalism to Jefferson in three pages; it also feels the need to explain what ‘homo sapiens’ and ‘xenophobia’ mean, though not ‘genealogies’ or ‘taxonomy’. Even so, it is crammed with intriguing data. We learn that it was the journalist Walter Lippmann who introduced the term ‘stereotype’ into American culture; that Marx always judged the mental qualities of a stranger from the shape of his head, which may be carrying materialism a bit too far; and that so-called nigger minstrels in the United States were quite often blacked-up Jews and Irishmen who may have hoped to ingratiate themselves in this way with white society. Noses are of supreme importance. According to one phrenologist, ‘the nose alone . . . tells the story of its wearer’s rank and condition.’ In the view of one O.S. Fowler, acquisitiveness ‘is on each side of the middle portion of the nose . . . causing breadth of nose in proportion to the money-grasping instinct as in Jews’. For Johann Kaspar Lavater, the nose is ‘the foundation, or abutment, of the brain’. 19th-century phrenologists taught that nations with smaller heads were more easily conquered than those with large ones, while an inability to blush was thought to be characteristic of criminal types. Franz Joseph Gall, who invented phrenology, believed that the moral and religious faculties were located at the top of the brain, since this was the area of the skull closest to God.
Roosevelt, Coolidge and Churchill all expressed their enthusiasm for eugenics, and Rockefeller money funded eugenic research in Nazi Germany. The Kellogg cereal business supported the Race Betterment Foundation in the US, which awarded medals in a Fitter Families for Future Firesides contest with the inscription ‘Yea, I have a goodly heritage.’ Unexpectedly, however, William Jennings Bryan, who prosecuted John Thomas Scopes for promoting evolutionary theory in the 1920s, turns out to have been less of a villain than he is usually painted. Scopes may have famously defended evolution, but he was also a keen advocate of eugenics, a creed which the anti-Darwinist Bryan rejected on grounds of social justice.
There are some eminently readable accounts here of the great scientific stereotypers, from Lavater’s new science of physiognomy to Linnaeus’s animal taxonomies, from Francis Galton’s physical measurements of ‘deviants’ to Lombroso’s infamous inquiries into the typical criminal cranium. (Today’s standard line on criminals is the reverse of this sham science, though just as suspect: the latest cliché is that criminals look just like you and me, always have a polite word for their neighbours, but keep themselves to themselves.) Galton, who coined the term ‘eugenics’ and whose racist arguments had some influence with his cousin Charles Darwin, frequented the slave markets of Constantinople; he noted how delighted young African women seemed to be at the prospect of their impending enslavement. ‘They seemed as merry as possible at the prospect of being sold,’ he enthuses, ‘and of soon finding, each of them, a master and a home.’ He also ranked women he passed in the street in terms of their beauty, though this is a practice hardly confined to eugenicists.
Typecasting does an excellent job of reminding us just how fearful of racial degeneration some of our recent ancestors were. Around the turn of the 20th century, mass immigration into the United States, in the wake of the emancipation of African-Americans, provoked a positive orgy of eugenicist anxiety. The American lawyer Madison Grant, whose book The Passing of the Great Race became Hitler’s bible, waxed lyrical about the distinction between ‘the Piccadilly gentleman of Nordic race and the cockney costermonger of the old Neolithic type’. The moral significance of nostrils and ear-lobes became something of a national obsession. Before that, the scientific inspection of supposed ethnic types had often enough merged with spectacle and entertainment, as with the exhibiting of the so-called Hottentot Venus in 19th-century London. Spectators could feel her protruding buttocks for an extra fee. When she died at the age of 26, the naturalist Georges Cuvier removed her genitals and presented them with a flourish to a gathering of the Academy of Science. There were public parades of ‘Bushmen’, wild men of Borneo and ‘Man-Eating Feegees’. Many of those exhibited did not survive their public exposure.

Excerpted from LRB, November 30, 2006. An earlier excerpt was taken from the web site of the London Review of Books Bookstore, and was quoted verbatim from there. Now that we have a full copy of the review, we have reposted the pertinent section of the review, including wording not seen on the Bookstore site. The above contains Eagleton's only substantive discussion of the book and its contents. 

Notable Comments

"Gratitude to Ewen & Ewen for typecasting the arrogance of the lords of this poor world. Stephen Jay Gould could not imagine a better homage."
Eduardo Galeano

"Typecasting is merely the most lucid and instructive history book to be published in the new millennium." Kurt Vonnegut

"In Typecasting, two ace historians offer a profound and sweeping study of the most everyday, often unconscious, forms of prejudice. [It's] bound to make you think—and think again." Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Bait and Switch

"With exceptional and profound research on visual culture, Ewen & Ewen have captured a wide-angle view of the impact of racial imaging. Using the history of art as well as popular imagery, they demonstrate the complexity found in mapping and reading this legacy." Deborah Willis, author of Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers: 1840 to the Present 

"With great wit and dark irony, the Ewens remind us that modern culture has been a sinkhole of pseudo-scientific stereotype and racial hallucination.  Few books so properly deserve the title of required reading." Mike Davis, author of Planet of Slums

Baltimore City Paper

Two Professors Tackle The Pseudoscience Of Making An Ass Out Of You And Me

Typecasting: On the Arts and Sciences of Human Inequality
By Ewen and Ewen
Seven Stories Press
Edition: Hardcover

by Zak M. Salih

A giant, rampaging ape adorns the front cover of Typecasting: On the Arts and Sciences of Human Inequality, and he's carrying a white woman in distress. Bug-eyed and gaping-mouthed, the beast stares directly at you while his victim shields her face and writhes in his grasp. Where he's taking her and what he plans to do with her is anyone's guess, but in looking at the cover image two things are certain: that white woman's time is up, and that ape is one ugly motherfucker.

All this focus on the book's cover isn't superfluous. Judging outward appearances is what this massive sociological study is all about. The aforementioned image, with its odd King Kong theme, is in actuality a U.S. Army propaganda poster from WWI urging Americans to enlist and save their white women from the "mad brute" of foreign military might--and it's only the tip of the frightening iceberg that professors Elizabeth and Stuart Ewen, writing here under their nom de plume of Ewen and Ewen, unearth.

"The complexity of modern existence, and the global reach of contemporary society, made it impossible for people to make sense of the world on the basis of firsthand knowledge," they explain. So what better way to document said complexity than through the elaborate pseudoscience that evolves throughout the course of the book, the kind of theory libertarian ABC News correspondent John Stossel would no doubt call "junk science?"

The first half of Ewen and Ewen's book is a veritable roll call of the founding fathers of physiognomy. Prominent among these is Johann Caspar Lavater, whose experiments focused on the incline of a forehead and the hook of a nose to weed out perverts, misers, and morons. Orson Squire Fowler's pioneering work in phrenology--on which Typecasting spends too much time--probed the shape and feel of the human head to discern intelligence and morality. Both scientists, and their ilk, contributed to a mode of superficial thought rooted in facial features and body shapes--ideas that reached their apex in the unsettlingly popular eugenics movement of the early 20th century, which championed the forced sterilization and extermination of races and classes deemed unfit for healthy society.

Most interesting about Ewen and Ewen's study is how intertwined the business of typecasting is with the business of entertainment and, by extension, the business of making an easy buck. From the early days of the curiosity cabinet, in which rare specimens of human oddity were organized like displays, up through the heyday of P.T. Barnum's freak shows, minstrelsy performances, and popular movies, stereotypes entertained the masses for just the right price. In innocent victims of spectacle like Saartjie Baartman (known as "The Hottentot Venus") and Ota Benga, a captured Congolese pygmy thrown into the Bronx Zoo for a month, we see the impact these vast sociological viewpoints have on the individual human being. As with most works of this nature, the personal stories, not the grand historical movements, are what keep you emotionally attached to such a strange cultural era.

... Ewen and Ewen treat their topic with open minds; they never point fingers at a particular invention or cast blame upon an individual sideshow baron. Then again, they don't have to--the 21st-century reader does all that for them. Hindsight being what it is, no one can read Typecasting and not mull over the sheer idiocy of the human race and the relative ease with which all these disastrous ideas became so commonplace for so long--and in many ways still are, according to the authors.

... Typecasting remains a frightening exploration of how dominant cultures (read: old white European men) have turned stereotyping into a potent art form and racism into a practical science. Ultimately, the gaggle of phrenologists, psychoanalysts, sideshow barons, curators, and filmmakers are the real freaks on display here, their xenophobic modes of thought more of a human aberration than sunken eyes, small heads, and short statures.

(abridged)