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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... thought in Australia . Jill Kleiner , Charlie Hol- mes , Ed Newbigin , and Rosemary Robins guided me through central Australia and shared their knowledge of the region . The last two chapters were revised at Krongart , near Penola ...
... thought style ; a virility or femininity ; a head circumference and brain capacity ; a predisposition or resistance to certain diseases ; a blood group ; a lamentable inability to sweat off tropical moisture — and so on . Whites were ...
... thought . I do not want to provide another analysis of the development , largely in Europe and North America , of flawed yet occasionally sophisticated scientific and social theories of human difference.7 Rather , I have chosen to study ...
... thought and to illustrate more generally how local circumstances can prompt and shape intellectual work . It is important to realize that medicine , until the early twentieth century , was as much a discourse of settlement as it was a ...
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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 |