Haunting Biology: Science and Indigeneity in Australia

by Emma Kowal

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478027539
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	10/13/2023
Series:	Experimental Futures
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	264
File size:	18 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

A Note on Terminology  xi
Acknowledgments  xiii
Introduction  1
1. Living with Ghosts  11
2. Blood, Bones, and the Ghosts of the Ancestors  33
3. A Century in the Life of an Aboriginal Hair Sample  67
4. Race and Nation: Aboriginal Whiteness and Settler Belonging  91
5. Indigenous Physiology: Metabolism, Cold Tolerance, and the Possibility of Human Hibernation  119
6. Spencer’s Double: The Decolonial Afterlife of a Postcolonial Museum Prop  143
Conclusion  167
Appendix 1. Dramatis Personae  173
Appendix 2. Timeline of Relevant Events  175
Notes  181
References  199
Index  235

Editorial 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

“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

"I recommend [Haunting Biology] to everyone; it is most important for our understanding of the history and present of bio-science and bio-politics in Australian settler colonialism."
-- Marianne Sommer Journal of the History of Biology

"Kowal’s book, Haunting Biology, is full of examples of how many different interests, desires, beliefs, and decisions shape the development of science and its impact on people’s lives. It is an engaging tour through the exceptionally difficult and complex history of the production of knowledge about biological differences between human populations, with a particular focus on Indigenous peoples of Australia."
-- Joanna Karolina Malinowska Journal of Political Power

"Kowal’s book reflects on the nature of science, medicine, and history. Every student of anthropology and its history should read this book."
-- M. Susan Lindee History of Anthropology Review

"Haunting Biology attempts to let the non-human speak, yet instead of exploring the history of technologies in the laboratory it focuses on ghosts that linger both inside and outside the lab. This is a book that narrates how scientists and indigenous communities love, hate, fascinate, embrace, and resist biology."
-- Yi-Cheng Wu EASTS

"Haunting Biology engages with material from the fields of Native American and Indigenous studies, anthropology, history, postcolonial studies, critical race studies, and science and technology studies and draws from primary sources including archival records, interviews, personal communications, and Kowal’s own long experience as a doctor and a participant in the governance of Indigenous genomics in Australia. The topic is of utmost importance and scholars from a multitude of fields will be engaging with her book for many years to come."
-- Meredith Alberta Palmer & Suman Seth Postcolonial Studies

"Haunting Biology offers carefully researched, thoughtful and deeply ethical reflections on past and present scientific aspirations. In sum, this book gifts us with good reasons to think that our efforts to ensure medico-scientific curiosity about Indigenous biology never again causes harm, require us to live with the ghosts of science past, and to not have the hubris to seek to exorcise them."
-- Paul Turnbull Australian Historical Studies

"Lively stories jumped out and kept me engaged while reading the book continuously over some days. . . . Haunting Biology is a must read for those interested in that issue in Australia, but this book is of enormous historical, national, and global significance more generally."
-- David S. Trigger The Australian Journal of Anthropology

"This beautiful book tells the tale of the troubled and troublesome history of Western sciences' obsession with Indigenous bodies and biologies. . . . This book is bound to play a crucial role in furthering the debate around Indigenous biological, genomic, and physical research. Kowal challenges practitioners, researchers, and communities to engage with their disciplines' haunted past and to deal with the ghosts of the past in order to move forward."
-- Lynette Russell The Australian Journal of Anthropology

From the Publisher