Science and Power in the Nineteenth-Century Tasman World

Préface
A compelling history of popular phrenology in the transforming settler-colonial landscapes of the nineteenth-century Tasman World.

Auteur
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.

Texte du rabat

A compelling history of how popular phrenology featured in the fates of people living in, and moving through, the settler-colonial world of nineteenth-century Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. Innovatively using historical newspapers and other archives, Roginski traces the careers of a range of popular phrenologists and those they encountered.

Résumé
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.

Contenu

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 Mori world; 8. Gardening a Duropean island: phrenologists, whiteness and reform for nationhood; 9. Divinatory science in the city and the bush; Epilogue; Bibliography; Index.