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Each original is also photographed in one exposure and is included in reduced form at the back ofthe book. Photographs included in the original manuscript have been reproduced xerographically in this copy. Higher quality 6" x 9" black and white photographic prints are available for any photographs or illustrations appearing in this copy for an additional charge. Contact UMI directly to order. UMI A Bell & Howell Information Company 300 North Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor MI 48106-1346 USA 3131761-4700 800/521-0600 BLUE SPOTS, IDIOTS, BARBARIANS, AND m'FIN IN THE DEEP DARK HEART OF ASIA: MONGOLS IN WESTERN CONSCIOUSNESS A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DIVISION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HA.WAll IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PIDLOSOPHY IN AMERICAN STUDIES MAY 1996 By Kevin Stuart Dissertation Committee: David Bertelson, Chairperson Paul Hooper James McCutcheon Fred Blake Bruce Koppe! UMI Number: 9629858 UMI Microform 9629858 Copyright 1996, by UMI Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. UMI 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, MI 48103 ABSTRACT This study of images of Mongols in Western, principally American, consciousness embraces the influence of medieval conceptions of the Mongols as monsters that grew in their reproduction over the centuries, how these impressions affected the creation of a "Mongol" racial category for mankind, the manufacture of a "Mongol body" (Mongol eyes, the Mongolian blue spot), the "discovery" of a form of mental retardation known today as trisomy 21 ("Mongoloids," "Mongolian idiots"), what travelers observed and reported while in Mongol domains, Mongols in fiction and film, and the field of Mongolian Studies. Although the negative tone of the discourse about these various images has become somewhat muted over the years, Western images of the Mongol retain much negativity and lack appreciation of modern Mongols as primarily sedentary agriculturalists and urban residents. Periodic comparisons between Mongols and Tibetans indicate that the images they generate differ and have powerful social and political consequences. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract. ................................. .. iii Chapter 1: Introduction. .......................... 1 Who Are the Mongols? . 8 Mongols and Tibetans . .. 10 Economies 13 Nomads and Barbarians . .. 17 Monsters . 25 Monsters Today 28 Chapter 2: Race 32 Westerners Further Describe and Classify Mongols 36 The Kalmyks ......................... 44 Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840) 51 Other Mongol Accounts 53 Mongols in the Twentieth Century 57 Immigration and Exclusion. ..................... .. 62 Conclusion 66 Chapter 3: Mongols as Mental Defectives 67 People With Trisomy 21 and the United States 70 Language 72 "Mongoloids" in Literature . 76 iv Dr. John Langdon Haydon Down (1828-1896) . 97 "Kalmuck Idiocy" 100 Can Degenerates Degenerate? ................... .. 109 Conclusion 111 Chapter 4: The Mongol Body . .. 114 Blue Spots . .. 116 The Mongolian Eye . .. 126 Chapter 5: Travelers in the Deep Dark Heart of Asia. ... .. 136 Roy Chapman Andrews. ...................... .. 144 Owen Lattimore (1900-1989) 152 Two Eighteenth Century Travelers in Mongol Areas 173 "You Can't Do That Anymore" . .. 178 A. Doak Barnett . .. 184 Other Westerners React to Mongol Areas and Mongols. ... .. 187 Conclusion 201 Chapter 6: A Fixation on the Past: Fiction, Films, and Mongolists 203 Fiction . .. 204 Films . .. 222 Mongolian Studies . .. 229 Chapter 7: Conclusion . .. 238 Bibliography .............................. .. 240 v CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION As for the Mongol peoples themselves, they were rather filthy. They never washed and those few who wore any underwear at all rarely changed it. They were lazy but also very honest (Poppe 1983: 89). Barbarians, racial degenerates, mental defectives, generally repulsive physical attributes, ghastly history, grassland wanderers. Amidst the fervor of extensive deconstruction of concepts and representations in the social sciences it is curious that scant attention has been paid to the Mongols in terms of the images they have generated. Furthermore, most Americans and Europeans, including a number of "serious" scholars of Mongolia who have written about the Mongols, do so one-dimensionally while gazing through the optical filters of Western folklore. Though this is intriguing at times, it only ferries us through the myths once again. There is also a certain fashionableness about the Mongols and Mongolia, to the extent that fashionableness is a short-lived preoccupation with novelty that displays the superiority of the class so distracted. The most recent example of this has been with the nation known variously as the Mongolian People's Republic, the Republic of Mongolia, Mongolia, and Outer Mongolia. After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Mongolia opened its doors to the West. For a time, in the late 1980s and early 19908, Mongolia was one of a handful of places long closed but now open to 1 Westerners and, by virtue of this fact alone, was deemed worthy of adding to a palette of "places I've visited" by collectors! of visits to exotic locales. It proved a simple endeavor for Americans and Europeans to forge images of Mongolia in imitation of what had existed for a very long time. Alterations in international political relationships, these negative images, in refurbished, but still recognizable, forms, were trotted out again.' Mongolia had weathered the decades of no real contact with Westerners as an enduringly vague and somewhat mysterious place. Its definition now required reaffirmation. What resulted reinvoked time-honored, frivolous stereotypes which were of such a trivial nature that interest in Mongolia had markedly faded by the mid-1990s. The 1994 winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, Kenzaburo Oe (b. 1935), has said that the West is familiar with certain aspects of Japan--economic power, "quaint tea ceremonies," and technological might. These, Oe remarks, are comparable to masks, revealing little of consequence about the Japanese, whom the West has little want to understand as people (Remnick 1995: 38-44). A similar, more extreme case can be made for Mongols, with the masks being the images Mongols are most often associated with. This is compelling evidence, not for the static condition of Mongols and Mongolia, but for a stagnant and phlegmatic disposition of social scientists and the society they epitomize fundamentally to reevaluate portions of humanity. I Ideas used in this study about collecting have been influenced by Werner Muensterberger's (1994) analysis of this topic. 2 I am indebted to Diane Johnson's (1995) insightful review of fashions in clothing. 2 It is hard to avoid the conclusion that an important part of the unchanging, largely medieval Western perception of the Mongols is driven by a need to find a group of people extraneous enough to Western interests to allow this image to linger. The details of the image depend upon our desire not to trouble our own consciences, for, in striving to deal critically with an abiding representation of Mongols as borderline humanity, it becomes obligatory to highlight images entombed deep in our history and in our minds as Westerners, and then to question and probe them. It is a much easier and abundantly less distressing proposition to invoke time-honored prosaic and, at least superficially, romantic images. This study, then, is an exploration of the history of how Americans, and to a lesser degree Europeans, have perceived a particular group of people, the dimensions of that perception, and certain of its consequences. More specifically this study will examine the influence of medieval conceptions of the Mongols as monsters that grew in their reproduction over the centuries, how these impressions affected the creation of a "Mongol" racial category for mankind, a "Mongol body" (Mongol eyes, the Mongolian blue spot), a form of mental retardation known today as trisomy 21 ("Mongoloids," "Mongolian idiots"), what travelers observed and reported while in Mongol domains, the realm of fiction and film, and the field of Mongolian Studies. As the discourse concerning these various fields is examined, I will show that its negative tone, though somewhat muted, still retains much of its harshness. I am not suggesting that Westerners have a single coherent concept of the Mongols. Nevertheless, if the entire corpus of 3 Mongol-related references--scholarly to popular--is spread out on the table and viewed as pieces of a