Colonialism and the Science of Race Difference

Australian sociologists have given limited attention to scientific race theory and its historical relevance to the conditions of Indigenous peoples, leaving the work to historians and anthropologists, such as Elkin (1931), Berndt (1971), Ryan (1981), Beckett (1988), Cowlishaw (1988 and 1990), Reynolds (1989, 2000 and 2001), and Morris (1992 and 1997) Rowse (1994), Markus (1994), Kapferer (1995) and Glover (1998). Scientific race theory normalised social and biological theories of natural selection in scholarly and popular discourse, creating a classificatory system. This classificatory system formed the basis of the construction of an inferior other in colonising discourses, normalising the superiority of the dominant or colonising culture. The science of race difference is relevant to sociology in terms of how it gave rise to a particular way of viewing the Indigenous other that resulted in certain practices and organising strategies that controlled, excluded and marginalised the Indigenous other from Australian society. The purpose of the paper is, therefore, to reflect on what I refer to as the science of race difference and its relevance to the categorisation of the Indigenous peoples as other. 1