Humanitarianism and Australian Nationalism in Colonial Papua

Hubert Murray and the Project of Caring for the Self of the Coloniser and Colonised

Dados Bibliográficos

ID19013151
AutoresAndrew Lattas (Macquarie University, autor correspondente)
Ano1996
Volume7
Fascículo2
Páginas141-165
Data de publicação1996-08-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoThe Australian Journal of Anthropology (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 1035-8811 • E-ISSN: 1757-6547
EditoraWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/j.1835-9310.1996.tb00159.x
OpenAlexW2046033014
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas12
Referências citadas18

This paper is about Australian nationalism in Papua at the beginning of the century. It analyses the role of science and humanitarianism in sustaining the colonial project and the white man's identity. Colonialism was formulated as philanthropy operating on a global scale, where the redemption and salvation of humanity involved the ‘higher cultures’ having a ‘sacred trust’ to educate and morally uplift the natives. This duty to pacify and civilise the tribal other was also a process of reworking the boundaries of western identity so as to remove it from too close a kinship with those forms of savage subjectivity over which it claimed moral superiority. Anthropology became part of the ethical task of how to be a good coloniser; it was heavily involved in reforming state power, such that it governed through culture rather than through violence. Indeed, anthropology was used to legitimise new understandings of native culture as something that could not be overly repressed without destroying the natives. A new internal form of colonialism emerged, one which required cultural pluralism and which was worried about the dangers of over‐assimilation

Aesthetics · Colonialism · Duty · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Ethnology · Humanity · Hybridity · Identity (music) · Kinship · Nationalism · Pluralism (philosophy) · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Subjectivity · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · Gender Studies · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Law · Philosophy · Tourism, Volunteerism, and Development