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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... scientists and 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 ...
... scientists and doctors do refer to allegedly " key " figures and concepts in racial thought ; mostly they do not . Accordingly , I have tried not to use terms like " mono- genism , " " polygenism , " " social Darwinism , " or " eugenics ...
... scientists and doctors who sought to explain human and environmental difference in their own communities , institutions , and career structures . What did it mean to investi- gate and write about race in the disparate academic and ...
... scientists who sought to justify it ? What makes a cri- tique of eugenics in Australia so difficult to synchronize with the history of Aboriginal anthropology ? Historians generally have focused separately on the presumed antitheses of ...
... scientists had etched more deeply the demarcation between whites and the land , and between whites and other races , but recognition of persistent Aboriginality , especially in the 1920s and 1930s , caused them instead to attempt to ...
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 |