Overview

In Haunting Biology Emma Kowal recounts the troubled history of Western biological studies of Indigenous Australians and asks how we now might see contemporary genomics, especially that conducted by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander scientists. Kowal illustrates how the material persistence of samples over decades and centuries folds together the fates of different scientific methodologies. Blood, bones, hair, comparative anatomy, human biology, physiology, and anthropological genetics all haunt each other across time and space, together with the many racial theories they produced and sustained. The stories Kowal tells feature a variety of ghostly presences: a dead anatomist, a fetishized piece of hair hidden away in a war trunk, and an elusive white Indigenous person. By linking this history to contemporary genomics and twenty-first-century Indigeneity, Kowal outlines the fraught complexities, perils, and potentials of studying Indigenous biological difference in the twenty-first century.

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9781478025375

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Reviews

“Resistances and refusals by bodies and spirits of Indigenous peoples continue to haunt and disrupt white settler bio-logics. Haunting Biology reveals settler colonial science as the white fellas’ desiring apparatus: generating meticulous inscriptions of blood, bone, hair, genomics, and metabolisms to try to make beguiling differences but repeatedly failing to capture lived Indigeneity. How, Emma Kowal asks, can all the ancestral ghosts troubling the white scientific machine be engaged with respectfully, not exorcised, in future biologies?” -- Warwick Anderson, author of * The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health, and Racial Destiny in Australia * “Examining exemplary cases in the history of biological, physical anthropological, and medical research, Emma Kowal uniquely argues that all biological knowledge contains the possibility of being affected and facilitated by a problematic practice from distant places and times. She shows that the messy history of biological differences is not a history left behind, but one that lingers and haunts our current-day shiny laboratory science. It is this realization that prompts a much-needed evaluation of the history of anthropology.” -- Amade M’charek, author of * The Human Genome Diversity Project: An Ethnography of Scientific Practice *

“Resistances and refusals by bodies and spirits of Indigenous peoples continue to haunt and disrupt white settler bio-logics. Haunting Biology reveals settler colonial science as the white fellas’ desiring apparatus: generating meticulous inscriptions of blood, bone, hair, genomics, and metabolisms to try to make beguiling differences but repeatedly failing to capture lived Indigeneity. How, Emma Kowal asks, can all the ancestral ghosts troubling the white scientific machine be engaged with respectfully, not exorcised, in future biologies?” -- Warwick Anderson, author of * The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health, and Racial Destiny in Australia * “Examining exemplary cases in the history of biological, physical anthropological, and medical research, Emma Kowal uniquely argues that all biological knowledge contains the possibility of being affected and facilitated by a problematic practice from distant places and times. She shows that the messy history of biological differences is not a history left behind, but one that lingers and haunts our current-day shiny laboratory science. It is this realization that prompts a much-needed evaluation of the history of anthropology.” -- Amade M’charek, author of * The Human Genome Diversity Project: An Ethnography of Scientific Practice * “The quality of Kowal’s storytelling and prose are remarkable. A scholarly history of race science, influenced by postmodern theory, could easily become monotonously grim and plodding, but Kowal’s writing sustains a brisk readability. . . . Kowal has written a courageous, sophisticated and surprisingly engaging book. But what makes Haunting Biology important is that core message: the repressed always return."" -- Simon Farley * British Journal for the History of Science *

Resistances and refusals by bodies and spirits of Indigenous peoples continue to haunt and disrupt white settler bio-logics. Haunting Biology reveals settler colonial science as the white fellas' desiring apparatus: generating meticulous inscriptions of blood, bone, hair, genomics, and metabolisms to try to make beguiling differences, but repeatedly failing to capture lived Indigeneity. How, Emma Kowal asks, can all the ancestral ghosts troubling the white scientific machine be engaged with respectfully, not exorcised, in future biologies? -- Warwick Anderson, author of * The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health, and Racial Destiny in Australia *

Author Information

Emma Kowal is Alfred Deakin Professor of Anthropology at Deakin University, author of Trapped in the Gap: Doing Good in Indigenous Australia, and coeditor of Cryopolitics: Frozen Life in a Melting World.

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