Mixed Race Studies

Foreign Bodies: Oceania and the Science of Race 1750–1940

Australian National University Press
October 2008
372 pages
Paperback ISBN-10: 1921313994; ISBN-13: 978-1921313998
Online ISBN: 9781921536007

Edited by:

Bronwen Douglas, Senior Fellow in Pacific and Asian History
The Australian National University

Chris Ballard, Fellow in Pacific and Asian History
The Australian National University

From the 18th century, Oceania became the principal laboratory of raciology for scholars, voyagers, and colonisers alike. By juxtaposing encounters and theory, this magisterial book explores the semantics of human difference in all its emotional, intellectual, religious, and practical dimensions. The argument developed is subtle, engrossing, and gives the paradigm of ‘race’ its full use value. Foreign Bodies is a model of analysis and erudition from which historians of science and everyone interested in intercultural relations will greatly profit.

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Contents

• 1. Introduction: Foreign Bodies in Oceania Bronwen Douglas
• Part One — Emergence: Thinking the Science of Race, 1750–1880
  • 2. Climate to Crania: science and the racialization of human difference Bronwen Douglas
• Part Two — Experience: the Science of Race and Oceania, 1750–1869
  • 3. ‘Novus Orbis Australis’: Oceania in the science of race, 1750–1850 Bronwen Douglas
  • 4. ‘Oceanic Negroes’: British anthropology of Papuans, 1820–1869 Chris Ballard
• Part Three — Consolidation: the Science of Race and Aboriginal Australians, 1860–1885
  • 5. British Anthropological Thought in Colonial Practice: the appropriation of Indigenous Australian bodies, 1860–1880 Paul Turnbull
  • 6. ‘Three Living Australians’ and the Société d’Anthropologie de Paris, 1885 Stephanie Anderson
• Part Four — Complicity and Challenge: the Science of Race and Evangelical Humanism, 1800–1930
  • 7. The ‘Faculty of Faith’: Evangelical missionaries, social anthropologists, and the claim for human unity in the 19th century Helen Gardner
  • 8. ‘White Man’s Burden’, ‘White Man’s Privilege’: Christian humanism and racial determinism in Oceania, 1890–1930 Christine Weir
• Part Five — Zenith: Colonial Contradictions and the Chimera of Racial Purity, 1920–1940
  • 9. The Half-Caste in Australia, New Zealand, and Western Samoa between the Wars: different problem, different places? Vicki Luker
• Epilogue
  • The Cultivation of Difference in Oceania Chris Ballard
  • Index