Alexandra Roginski

Science and Power in the Nineteenth-Century Tasman World (eBook, ePUB)

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

The contentious science of phrenology once promised insight into character and intellect through external 'reading' of the head. In the transforming settler-colonial landscapes of nineteenth-century Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, popular phrenologists - figures who often hailed from the margins - performed their science of touch and cranial jargon everywhere from mechanics' institutions to public houses. In this compelling work, Alexandra Roginski recounts a history of this everyday practice, exploring how it featured in the fates of people living in, and moving through, the Tasman World. Innovatively drawing on historical newspapers and a network of archives, she traces the careers of a diverse range of popular phrenologists and those they encountered. By analysing the actions at play in scientific episodes through ethnographic, social and cultural history, Roginski considers how this now-discredited science could, in its own day, yield fleeting power and advantage, even against a backdrop of large-scale dispossession and social brittleness.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Cambridge University Press
• Erscheinungstermin: 31. Mai 2023
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781009021098
• Artikelnr.: 68962195

Autorenporträt

Dr Alexandra Roginski is a historian and writer based on Wurundjeri Country in Melbourne, Australia, and a Visiting Fellow of the State Library of New South Wales and Deakin University.

Inhaltsangabe

1. Bumps on the road: phrenological touts and travellers
2. Massaging the town: phrenological ordeals and audiences
3. Tactics on stage: indigenous performers, cultural exchange and negotiated power
4. A godly touch of male power: phrenology, mesmerism and gendered authority
5. Talking heads on a Murray River mission
6. Black phrenologists, black masks
7. Popular science in a changing M¿ori world
8. Gardening a Duropean island: phrenologists, whiteness and reform for nationhood
9. Divinatory science in the city and the bush
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index.