The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health, and Racial Destiny in AustraliaThe Cultivation of Whiteness is an award-winning history of scientific ideas about race and place in Australia from the time of the first European settlement through World War II. Chronicling the extensive use of biological theories and practices in the construction and "protection" of whiteness, Warwick Anderson describes how a displaced "Britishness" (or whiteness) was defined by scientists and doctors in relation to a harsh, strange environment and in opposition to other races. He also provides the first account of extensive scientific experimentation in the 1920s and 1930s on poor whites in tropical Australia and on Aboriginal people in the central deserts. "[Anderson] writes with passion, wit, and panache, and the principal virtues of The Cultivation of Whiteness are the old-fashioned ones of thoroughness, accuracy, and impeccable documentation. . . . [His] sensitive study is a model of how contentious historical issues can be confronted."--W. F. Bynum, Times Literary Supplement "One of the virtues of The Cultivation of Whiteness is that it brings together aspects of Australian life and history that are now more often separated--race and environment, blood and soil, medicine and geography, tropical science and urban health, biological thought and national policy, Aboriginality and immigration, the body and the mind. The result is a rich and subtle history of ideas that is both intellectual and organic, and that vividly evokes past states of mind and their lingering, haunting power."--Tom Griffiths, Sydney Morning Herald |
From inside the book
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... environment . Therefore , I am suggesting that the clinic and the laboratory should be added to those sites where the nation — any nation — may be imagined.4 Until the middle of the twentieth century , medical scientists and public ...
... environment , as well as on local scientific training , clinical observation , political interests , and their own experiences of well - being and peril . Their understanding of hu- man difference was thus a situated knowledge ( the ...
... environmental difference in their own communities , institutions , and career structures . What did it mean to investi ... environment jostled to- gether in this civic vision . In Australia , most doctors assumed that only whites would ...
... environment , alien races , Abo- riginal Australians — not on the sovereign , yet often invisible , category whose boundary these contrapositions mark in such an excitingly assailable manner . But the medical construction of white ...
... environment , later in terms of urban social pathologies , and then , in the early twentieth century , it was more often figured in opposition to supposedly disease - dealing non- white races . By the 1930s a medically informed ...
Contents
Antipodean Britons | 11 |
A Cultivated Society | 41 |
No Place for a White Man | 73 |
The Making of the Tropical White Man | 95 |
White Triumph in the Tropics? | 139 |
Whitening the Nation | 165 |
From Deserts the Prophets Come | 191 |
Other editions - View all
The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia Warwick Anderson No preview available - 2005 |