2.12. The “wrong” face
2.12.3. The criminal face
Criminals, like the mentally ill, were in the 19th century treated as brutish
animals that were incapable of participating in social life. As such they became subjects of academic research. A new discipline was even established, called criminal anthropology. Its creator, Cesare Lombroso (1835—1909), an Italian physician, claimed that people who committed crimes are evolutionary throwbacks. Their atavism is both physical and mental. In his works, and especially in Criminal Man (1887/2006), Lombroso saw in features characteristic of criminals many resemblances to animals, “negroes” and “Peruvian Indians.” He tried to prove that heads and faces of criminals had many apish features: greater skull thickness, simplicity of cranial sutures, large jaw, the dominance of the face compared to the cranium, precocious wrinkles, low and narrow forehead, large ears, dark skin, greater visual acuity, inability to blush, and absence of baldness (Cohen, 2006). Lombroso discussed analogies between savages and delinquents, among which were the oblique eyes, the small skull, the developed jaw, “the forehead retreating obliquely from the eyes,” the
large ears, and “a greater extension of all new characteristics added to the necroscopic characteristics which assimilate the European criminal to the Mongolian and Australian type” (Lombroso, 1895/2004: 38). All “these characteristics pointed to one conclusion, the atavistic origin of the criminal, who reproduces physical, psychic, and functional qualities of remote ancestors” (Lombroso Ferrero, 1911: 7—8).
Fifty years later Ernest A. Hooton (1887—1954), who investigated the relationship between the criminal life and physical features, came to similar conclusions, though stripped of the atavistic connotations. He claimed that “within the human species it is reasonable to suppose that hereditary, racial, or other physical differences may be associated with mental and behaviouristic variations” (1939: 252). According to Hooton, crimes arise from deteriorated organisms, so the primary cause of crime is their biological inferiority. Criminals are both socially and physically inferior individuals. Analysing their appearance, Hooton came to the following conclusions:
Marked deficiencies in gross dimensions and in head and face diameters are unequivocal assertions of undergrowth and poor physical development (1939: 305—306). Deficiencies of dark brown eyes and of blue eyes suggest that these criminals include fewer of the relatively pure racial types and more of the mixed types than occur among civilians. Noses broader relative to their height that are characteristic of the civil check sample are an evidence of infantilism or of primitiveness. Poor development of other facial dimensions favours the former interpretation. Low foreheads, high pinched nasal roots, nasal bridges and tips varying to both extremes of breadth and narrowness, excesses of nasal deflections, compressed faces and narrow jaw, fit well into the picture of general constitutional inferiority. The very small ears with submedium role of helix, prominent antihelix, and frequent presence of Darwin point, hint at degeneracy (Hooton, 1939: 306).
Lombroso and Hooton were not the only ones to pursue the physiognomic route in studies of the nature of criminals. In the 1940s, a new interdisciplinary specialty called criminology developed. Within the range of its research was the criminal face. In 1939, Thornton showed photographs of 20 criminals convicted for various offences to 175 University of Nebraska students and asked them to identify the crime each man had committed. “The students discriminated accurately at a level significantly better than chance” (Wilson and Herrnstein, 1986: 80). E. Kozeny (1962) divided 720 physiognomies of criminals into 16 offence categories and found significant differences in facial features across at least some categories (Wilson and Herrnstein, 1986). The results of these studies were, however, strongly undermined by the results of research carried out by Bull and Green (1980), who showed 10 photographs of men to a group of civilians and police officers and asked them to say which of eleven listed 120 The face as a part of the body
crimes each photographed man had committed. Both civilians and officers made similar choices, but what makes this study particularly interesting is that none of the photographed men had ever committed any crime (Wilson and Herrnstein, 1986). Thus, the face is a source of information about its owner, but the information it provides does not always have to be true. The face can mislead those who perceive others in terms of stereotypes.
Similar situations occur quite frequently — persons whose faces match the stereotypical facial traits of criminals often are evaluated on the basis of their appearance. The power of stereotype is great. People “agree to some extent about the faces that go with certain crimes” (Wilson and Herrstein, 1986: 81). Due to their unfortunate “criminal” face some persons are more often than others evaluated as morally unreliable and suspected of committing various offences or crimes. As argued above, the criminal face is not the only face which is perceived as “wrong.” The “wrong” face may be defined as a face whose features evoke some negative connotations in a group of people, for example:
•
a face displaying some symptoms of mental disorder,•
a face of different colour and/or having features other than specific for the members of the group,•
a face evoking the feelings of fear and uneasiness, and as such treated as a sign of the person’s capability to do something wrong, e.g., to commit crimes.The stereotype of the “wrong” face often has a strong negative impact on the interpersonal relations, and social life in general, of the people having facial traits characterized as typical of the mentally ill, members of other races, or criminals.
Chapter 3
The concept of self
3.1. Introduction
As mentioned above, the concept of face is inseparably related to the social aspect of human life. And it is not only because of the character of the face, a part of the body, which functions as “a source of social signalling and communication.” It is also because face is an image of self created by individuals during social interaction. As such it can be classified as a social construct which needs other people in order to be created.
To adequately describe the concept of face, understood as an image of self, I have decided to start from its “source.” An individual’s face is said to reflect his or her self; it is the self’s image. Thus, to truly understand face, one should start from the self. To understand the complexity of face, one has to take into account the problem of self-conceptualizations and identities (Tracy, 1990; Scollon and Scollon, 1994). The topic of the self differs from other academic topics in that it is shared by many disciplines. It is of great interest to psychology, anthropology, sociology and philosophy. Other concepts which are related to the concept of self, and sometimes confused with it, are identity, soul and person.
Like the concept of self, identity can be characterized as a complex construct of transdisciplinary nature. It is defined as “the sense of self, of personhood, of what kind of person one is” (Abercrombie et al., 2000: 171). Self and personhood develop through communication. Identity is “biologically based but ultimately symbolically transformed by culture” (Fitzgerald, 1993: 26). Fitzgerald (1993: 3) treats identity as “the academic metaphor for self-in-context.” In spite of the undeniable relation between the two concepts, self and identity do not have the same meaning, as there are forms of identity which are not based on self, e.g., such forms of group identity as national
identities, which require a commonality of interests and group solidarity. The creation of the self is more subjective (Elliot, 2007).
The soul, which has interested both ordinary people and thinkers from the beginnings of civilization, was thought to be “the distinguishing mark of living things, as something that is the subject of emotional states and that is responsible for planning and practical thinking, and also as the bearer of such virtues as courage and justice” (Lorenz, 2003). In ancient times the soul was supposed to be responsible for mental or psychological functions like thought, perception and desire, and to be the bearer of moral qualities (Lorenz, 2003).
A third concept related to the self is person. The word derives from classical Latin perso–na, meaning “mask used by a player, character in a play, dramatic
role, the part played by a person in life, character, role, position, individual personality, juridical person, important person, personage, human being in general” (OED). Later on the meaning of the word person evolved. Over the centuries, the person gradually acquired “individuality that existed apart from the mask, or role” (Fitzgerald, 1993: 42). The Western concept of person has a Christian origin, and it is endowed with moral character, independence, free will, responsibility and consciousness, “thereby establishing the locus of rationality and individual unity in the concept of the self” (Fajans, 1985: 370). For John Locke (1632—1704) (1978) and Immanuel Kant (1724—1802) (1785/1964), who understood the concept in a similar way, persons are intelligent subjects capable of imposing law upon themselves. Kant maintains that because of this capacity they deserve respect.