Ambiguities of Race

Ambiguities of Race: Science on the Reproductive Frontier of Australia and the Pacific between the Wars

By Warwick Anderson, University of Sydney

The attitudes of Australian biologists, anthropologists, and historians toward race mixing in the early-twentieth century should be viewed in relation to the investigations of Indigenous depopulation and miscegenation taking place in the Pacific, in Hawai`i especially. Those Australian scientists committed to national or continental white racial ideals--Cecil Cook and Norman B. Tindale among them--remained resistant to the lessons of the Pacific, favoring "half-caste" absorption and disappearance. Other scholars such as Stephen Roberts and A. P. Elkin took the Oceanic approach, coming to value and harness racial hybridity. This talk shows how much of Australian racial thought drifted in from the Pacific.

Warwick H. Anderson holds an appointment as Professorial Research Fellow in the Department of History and the Center for Values, Ethics, and the Law in Medicine at the University of Sydney. Before moving to Sydney, Dr. Anderson was Robert Turell Professor of Medical History and Population Health, Professor of the History of Science, and Chair of the Department of Medical History and Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His latest book is The Collectors of Lost Souls: Kuru, Moral Peril, and the Creation of Value in Science (Johns Hopkins, 2008). He also authored two award-winning books: Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines (Duke; 2006) and The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia (Melbourne,2002).

Ticket Information
Free and open to the public.

Event Sponsor
History Forum and Center for Pacific Islands Studies, Manoa Campus

More Information
Vina Lanzona, 956-6769, vlanzona@hawaii.edu

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