The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny in AustraliaIn this lucid and original book, Warwick Anderson offers the first comprehensive history of Australian medical and scientific ideas about race and place. In nineteenth-century Australia, the main commentators on race and biological differences were doctors. The medical profession entertained serious anxieties about 'racial degeneration' of the white population in the new land. They feared non-white races as reservoirs of disease, and they held firm beliefs on the baneful influence of the tropics on the health of Europeans. Gradually these matters became the province of public health and biological science. In the 1930s anthropologists claimed 'race' as their special interest, until eventually the edifice of racial classification collapsed under its own proliferating contradictions. The Cultivation of Whiteness examines the notion of 'whiteness' as a flexible category in scientific and public debates. This is the first time such an analytic framework has been used anywhere in the history of medicine or of science. Anderson also provides the first full account of experimentation in the 1920s and 1930s on Aboriginal people in the central deserts. This very readable book draws on European and American work on the development of racial thought and on thehistory of representations of the body. As the first extensive (and entertaining) historical survey of ideas about the peopling of Australia, it will help to reshape debate on race, ethnicity, citizenship and environment. |
From inside the book
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Page 11
... circumstances , appeared gradually to diverge from the ancestral type . New fevers and fluxes were challenging the ... circumstance . Some , such as Dr George Wakefield , called this unavoidable process ' acclimatisation ' , or ...
... circumstances , appeared gradually to diverge from the ancestral type . New fevers and fluxes were challenging the ... circumstance . Some , such as Dr George Wakefield , called this unavoidable process ' acclimatisation ' , or ...
Page 14
... circumstances of Britain , might thus destabilise in the antipodes . Colonial physicians watched vigi- lantly for any signs of imbalance in the bodily systems of themselves and their alien charges . They described modifications of white ...
... circumstances of Britain , might thus destabilise in the antipodes . Colonial physicians watched vigi- lantly for any signs of imbalance in the bodily systems of themselves and their alien charges . They described modifications of white ...
Page 63
... circumstances , and far more likely to be eroded from within , or rather , to be consuming itself from within . In part , this rising sense of separation , or alienation , of the body from its physical environment reflects changes in ...
... circumstances , and far more likely to be eroded from within , or rather , to be consuming itself from within . In part , this rising sense of separation , or alienation , of the body from its physical environment reflects changes in ...
Contents
Antipodean Britons | 11 |
A Cultivated Society | 41 |
The Northern Tropics | 51 |
Copyright | |
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The Cultivation Of Whiteness: Science, Health, And Racial Destiny In Australia Warwick Anderson No preview available - 2003 |
Common terms and phrases
A. P. Elkin Aboriginal Australians acclimatisation Adelaide American anthropology Australian Aborigines Australian Institute Australian Medical Australian tropics become biological Birdsell blood Brisbane British Cambridge Caucasian central Australia civilisation Cleland climate colleagues colonial coloured culture Cumpston Darwin degeneration diphtheria doctors Elkington environment environmental Eugenics European experience fever full-bloods geographical germs Griffith Taylor half-caste Harvey Sutton heredity History hookworm Hooton hot winds human hybrids hygiene Ibid immigrant influence Institute of Tropical investigation James John labour land later London medical scientists Melbourne University Press mental modern native natural neurasthenia North Queensland northern Australia Northern Territory phthisis physical physiological population Porteus problem public health quarantine racial Raphael Cilento Science scientific seemed settlers social Society South Australian South Wales Sydney temperate theories Thomson Tindale Townsville Townsville Institute Tropical Australia tropical disease Tropical Medicine typhoid University of Melbourne Victoria white Australia policy white race Wood Jones wrote