Science and Power in the Nineteenth-Century Tasman World

Popular Phrenology in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand

Bibliographic Data

ID23407128
AuthorsAlexandra Roginski (0000-0003-4792-1520, Deakin University, corresponding author)
Year2023
Publication date2023-06-30
Open AccessYes
TypeBOOK
VenueScience and Power in the Nineteenth-Century Tasman World (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherCambridge University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1017/9781009023665
OpenAlexW4376867055
Open LibraryOL48686857M
ISBN9781009023665
LanguageEN
Citations received2

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.

Aesthetics · Aotearoa · Archaeology · Art · Colonialism · Jargon · Media studies · Phrenology · Political science · Power (physics) · Reading (process) · Sociology · Australian Indigenous Culture and History · Gender Studies · History · Law · Science

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