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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... Health , and History of Science , University of Wisconsin , Madison . He is the author of Colonial Pathologies ... Public health - Australia - History . 4. Race relations - Government policy — Aus- tralia - History . 5. Science ...
... public health more generally . But now I looked again at my Austra- lian research notes and decided to make something more of them , this time focusing on race and medical science in the emerging nation . I am grateful to Rod Home ...
... public health made their discomforted " whiteness " seem normal — necessary even— in their new world . How did science and medicine more generally give expres- sion to concerns about racial displacement and territorial possession ? In ...
... public health officials in Australia regarded the white body as their principal research interest . They were fascinated by whiteness ; the term itself crops up every- where in biomedical science and public health . But this scientific ...
... public health came to provide a rich vocabulary for social citizenship in an anxious nation . Scientists and doctors counseled politicians and the public on how to implant and culti- vate a working white race across the continent ...
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 |