Erik Linstrum. Ruling Minds

Could it be that social scientists—and scientists of the mind, in particular—are not as evil and collusive as we have come to think? Erik Linstrum’s highly accomplished first book about the history of psychology and empire transcends any simple morality tale of heroes and villains, offering instead a compelling and nuanced portrait of the vexed politics of expertise in an imperial age. Linstrum begins with a paradox: “how a field of expertise [psychology] that generated critical and even subversive questions about British imperialism also captured the imaginations of the empire’s rulers” (2). The story starts in 1898–1899 with the study of perception in the Torres Strait expedition, in which Cambridge researchers strove to determine whether the tools of Western science could be usefully applied far from the place of their invention. Their findings—that colonized minds were intelligent, adaptable, and diverse—posed a potential challenge to the racial hierarchies that undergirded colonial rule. If indigenous culture was flexible and dynamic rather than static, then how were the supposed boundaries between “primitive” and “civilized” minds to be upheld?

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