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Haunting biology : science and indigeneity in Australia / Emma Kowal.

By: Material type: TextTextSeries: Experimental futuresPublisher: Durham : Duke University Press, 2023Description: xv, 248 pages : illustrations ; 23 cmISBN:
  • 9781478025375
  • 9781478020592
Subject(s): DDC classification:
  • 305.899/150072 23/eng/20230518
Other classification:
  • SOC002010 | SOC062000
Contents:
Living with ghosts -- Blood, bones, and the ghosts of the ancestors -- A century in the life of an Aboriginal hair sample -- Race and nation : Aboriginal whiteness and settler belonging -- Indigenous physiology : metabolism, cold tolerance, and the possibility of human hibernation -- Spencer's double : the decolonial afterlife of a postcolonial museum prop.
Summary: "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"--
Holdings
Item type Current library Collection Call number Status Date due Barcode
Book State Botanical Collection RBG 305.899150072 HAU (Browse shelf(Opens below)) Issued 26/04/2024 RBG00026244

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Living with ghosts -- Blood, bones, and the ghosts of the ancestors -- A century in the life of an Aboriginal hair sample -- Race and nation : Aboriginal whiteness and settler belonging -- Indigenous physiology : metabolism, cold tolerance, and the possibility of human hibernation -- Spencer's double : the decolonial afterlife of a postcolonial museum prop.

"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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