European Naturalists and the Constitution of Human Difference in Oceania : Crosscultural Encounters and the Science of Race, 1768-1888

    Project: Research

    Project Details

    Description

    This innovative study in the entanglement of ideas and actions puts the generation of racial knowledge about Oceania (including Australia and eastern Indonesia) at the intersection of metropolitan science and actual encounters during a key transitional era. In natural history, a science of race displaced inchoate Enlightenment notions about human varieties. In Oceania, colonialism replaced voyaging as the main setting for crosscultural interactions. The core outcome will be a collective general history of the links between the field experience of European naturalists, their representations of Oceanian people and the new science of race. It will be empirically grounded in five detailed individual studies of particular groups of naturalists.
    StatusFinished
    Effective start/end date1/01/0630/06/10

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