Health and Difference: Rendering Human Variation in Colonial Engagements(8 Rethinking Biosocial Anthropology)

Human variation represented a central research topic for life scientists and posed challenging administrative issues for colonial bureaucrats in the first half of the 20th century. By following scientists’ and administrators’ interests in innovating styles and tools for making and circulating documents, in reshaping landscapes and environments, and in fixing distances between humans, the book advances new understandings of the materiality of colonial institutional life and governance.

Table of Contents:
List of Figures Acknowledgments Introduction: Health and Difference: Rendering Human Variation in Colonial Engagements Veronika Lipphardt and Alexandra Widmer Chapter 1. Race, Health and Colonial Politics in the Third Reich: Nauck and Giemsa’s Expedition to Espírito Santo, Brazil in 1936 André Felipe Cândido da Silva Chapter 2. ‘Ill-suited’ Populations in German Nauru: Race, Health and Labour under Company Administration, 1888–1914 Antje Kühnast Chapter 3. The War on the Anopheles Mosquito: Malaria, Labour and Race in the New Hebrides, 1925–1945 Jean Mitchell Chapter 4. Medical Missions – Racial Visions: Fighting Sleeping Sickness in Colonial Africa in the Early Twentieth Century Sarah Ehlers Chapter 5. Colonial Histories of Cancers: Primary Liver Cancer in Africa, 1900s–1960s Jean-Paul Bado Chapter 6. Postponing Equality: From Colonial to International Nutritional Standards, 1932–1950 Maria Letícia Galluzzi Bizzo Chapter 7. The Gender of Nutrition in French West Africa: Military Medicine, Intra-Colonial Marginality and Ethnos Theory in the Making of Malnutrition in Niger Barbara M. Cooper Chapter 8. Medical Demography in Interwar Angola: Measuring and Negotiating Health, Reproduction and Difference Samuël Coghe Chapter 9. Indo-Europeans in the Dutch East Indies: An Indo-European Analysis of a Paradoxical Colonial Category Hans Pols Afterword: Following Racial Paper Trails Warwick Anderson Index

About the Author :
Alexandra Widmer is an anthropologist who teaches at York University in Toronto. Situating the Pacific islands in a global context, her work focuses on colonial and post colonial dimensions of biomedicine, population thinking, reproduction and care.

Review :
“The chapters each offer a clearly delimited case study, most taking a narrow timeframe (a decade or two, six at most) and geographical focus. This allows them to illustrate how very specific sets of concerns shaped how distinctions were generated, and acted on, by scientific and administrative practices.” • Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (JRAI) “This volume contributes valuably to literature by showing how medical knowledge practices both shaped, and were shaped by, categories and images of social, cultural, sexual,and biological difference, and ‘racial difference’.” • Ricardo Roque, University of Lisbon