The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health, and Racial Destiny in Australia - Softcover

Anderson, Warwick

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822338408 ISBN 13: 9780822338406

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2006

Inhaltsangabe

The 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

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Warwick Anderson teaches at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he is Chair of the Department of Medical History and Bioethics; Robert Turell Professor of Medical History and Population Health; and Professor of the History of Science, Science and Technology Studies, and Southeast Asian Studies. He is the author of Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines, also published by Duke University Press.

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""The Cultivation of Whiteness" is an unusual and well-crafted history, a model of method for historical and anthropological studies of medicine and public health."--Judith Farquhar, author of "Appetites: Food and Sex in Post-Socialist China"

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THE CULTIVATION OF WHITENESS

Science, Health, and Racial Destiny in AustraliaBy WARWICK ANDERSON

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2003 Warwick Anderson
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-3840-6

Contents

Acknowledgments............................................viiIntroduction...............................................11 Antipodean Britons.......................................112 A Cultivated Society.....................................413 No Place for a White Man.................................734 The Making of the Tropical White Man.....................955 White Triumph in the Tropics?............................1396 Whitening the Nation.....................................1657 From Deserts the Prophets Come...........................1918 The Reproductive Frontier................................225Conclusion: Biology and Nation.............................253Abbreviations..............................................259Notes......................................................261Bibliography of Works Cited................................329Index......................................................381

Chapter One

Antipodean Britons

THE EARLY AUSTRALIAN COLONISTS found themselves drawn deep into the cross-currents of their new environment. They felt their bodies move along with the strange elasticity of the air; their spirits shifted with the direction of the winds; at certain times of day the clear light irritated their eyes; thought, muscle power, vital energy-all could become unreliable and fickle in circumstances so unlike those of home. Many immigrant Europeans seemed out of balance with the new climate, while some of those whites born locally, developing in ill-matched circumstances, appeared gradually to diverge from the ancestral type. New fevers and fluxes were challenging the basic economy of alien bodies, overstimulating and then depleting racial reserves of energy. The climate was foreign, social life appeared disordered, the diseases varied, and it sometimes seemed that a new biological type might emerge from the colonial turmoil.

Whether as convict, officer, or free settler, coming to Australia was no simple transposition. Those who first stepped ashore at Port Jackson (later Sydney) in 1788 had entered a new territory, unsure of the character of the seasons, the prevailing winds, the fertility of the soil, the quality of the water. As later colonists moved inland from Sydney or established other outposts along the coast, they too were assaying the land and climate as they went, using their own bodily sensations, their feelings of comfort or unease, to judge whether the land they coveted was a properly British territory. Until late in the nineteenth century, newcomers would attempt to match their personal sense of bodily terrain with their novel environment, adjusting their diet, clothing, housing, and physical activity in order to establish a harmony of individuality and circumstance. Some, such as Dr. George Wakefield, called this unavoidable process "acclimatisation" or "seasoning." From his tent at Emerald Hill, near Melbourne, in 1853, the young doctor wrote home to let his father know that "this certainly is the most extraordinary place ever beheld, everything being reversed to what it is in England." For many years his body was not in harmony with this environment, and he suffered terribly, like most of his patients, from rheumatism, dysentery, and intermittent fever. But his constitution eventually seemed to adjust, and in 1861 he wrote that "I am afraid that I should not be able to stand the cold after having become acclimatised to the heat of this country ... besides there is a certain charm to colonial life, a kind of independence." Wakefield, like so many other Britons in the southeast of the continent, had become inured to the hot summer winds, the damp winters, the sudden variations in weather, the droughts, the floods, the poor soils, multitudes of insects, and monotonous eucalyptus forests. He found that he was drinking and eating more, smoking more, and washing more often, his clothes were looser and more casual, he wore a wide-brimmed hat, and he went out riding as often as possible. He still felt British-very much a white man-and he increasingly yearned for "home" as he aged, but his body and habits had changed perceptibly in the foreign environment. Like most-but perhaps not all-of his fellow colonists, he had acclimatized.

In seeking to explain the excessively high death rate of white children in the new country, Dr. J. William McKenna observed in 1858 that "nature presents herself under aspects most remarkably distinct from what she does in our native land." Without physical and behavioral adjustment, without acclimatization, white families were in peril. It had to be recognized that immigrants, "being placed under new conditions of life ... have also a new class of knowledge to acquire." If they failed to do so, then the harsh Australian summer would remain a season of "grief, mourning and desolation" for the poorly adapted transplanted Britons.

McKenna, like many local physicians, put his faith in cold baths and ice water, but the medical experts who had stayed behind in Britain could afford to show more detachment, and thus be less optimistic, when pronouncing on the fate of the race in foreign climes. Frequently they warned of racial limits to acclimatization. In his influential survey of medical climatology, R. E. Scoresby-Jackson, an Edinburgh physician, treated Australia as a vast experiment in racial transplantation, just one part of "the inquiry which is at this moment being carried on in every quarter of the globe relative to the effects of migration from one portion of the earth's surface to another upon every variety of organised creatures." Evidently, the death of a few infant organized creatures in Melbourne would cause him little grief: They must simply have "abrogated the laws of climate." Scoresby-Jackson believed that it was highly probable that

all who leave their native soil to reside in foreign climates would ultimately die out were this not prevented by the return of their offspring to spend a portion of their lives in the mother country, or through the transfusion of new blood into the veins of their descendants by intermarriage with immigrants fresh from the parent stock.

The individual Briton might visit the antipodes with impunity, but it was quite likely that an isolated white race permanently resident there would eventually degenerate and die out. A medical responsibility thus supervened on British colonialism: How might doctors transform Britons from sojourners into settlers, how might they make them feel at home in such a strange place-how, indeed, would they ever acclimatize such alien whites?

Looking into the past from an age of mundane global traffic, it may be difficult to comprehend the nineteenth-century medical vision of British settlement in Australia: It is perhaps hard today to imagine that bodies once appeared so vulnerable, so sensitive to circumstance, that tragedy might await those who had merely wandered from their ancestral environment. But if location seems to us medically trivial, it was not so for most of the nineteenth century. To explain the basis of health, and the causes and expressions of disease, medical doctors and lay people alike drew on a language of place and circumstance. An individual's constitution, the sum of heredity and education, was always responding dynamically to fluctuations in local conditions-to...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2006
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822338408
• ISBN 13: 9780822338406
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 400
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland