Papers by Warwick Anderson
História, Ciências, Saúde-Manguinhos, 2016
An interview by the editor and a member of the scientific board of História, Ciências, Saúde – Ma... more An interview by the editor and a member of the scientific board of História, Ciências, Saúde – Manguinhos with Warwick Anderson, a leading historian of science and race from Australia. He talks about his training, positions he held at US universities, his publications, and his research at the University of Sydney. He discusses his current concern with the circulation of racial knowledge and biological materials as well as with the construction of networks of racial studies in the global south during the twentieth century. He also challenges the traditional historiography of science, which conventionally has been told from a Eurocentric perspective.
Health and History, 2016
Professor Jacques F.P. Miller spoke about his career in immunology with Warwick Anderson on 3 Feb... more Professor Jacques F.P. Miller spoke about his career in immunology with Warwick Anderson on 3 February 2014. Born in Nice, France, Miller attended high school and medical school in Sydney, Australia. As a Ph.D. student and postgraduate researcher in London, Miller discovered the immunological function of the thymus gland. Spending the rest of his career at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute for Medical Research in Melbourne, Miller conducted pioneering research in lymphocyte population dynamics and the mechanisms of the human immune response. With Graham Mitchell, he demonstrated that mammalian lymphocytes can be divided into what became known as T cells and B cells, which interact to produce antibodies.
The Journal of Pacific History, 2010
The Image of Oceania Although not cited, Philip D. Curtin’s The Image of Africa haunts this colle... more The Image of Oceania Although not cited, Philip D. Curtin’s The Image of Africa haunts this collection of essays on the impact of Oceanic encounters and perceptions on European racial thought. Like Curtin, the contributors to this book have sought to reveal a regional influence on scientific and anthropological arguments about human similarity and difference. They suggest that close encounters in particular places shaped European ideas about other peoples and themselves. In so doing, these authors situate racial thought from the 18th century through the middle of the 20th century in colonial processes, among scattered archipelagos and densely travelled waterways, far from Europe. Following the same Oceanic currents that Bernard Smith discerned in European art history, they observe the racial dimensions of the ‘island laboratories’ of the Pacific, tracing their influence across the globe. It is remarkable that it has taken so long to locate the Oceanic predicates of so much racial thought. Introducing this collection, Bronwen Douglas laments the ‘near-total absence of detailed work on the history of race in Oceania as a broadly conceived region’ (p. 3). While one can point to national or local studies of racial thought in Australia, New Zealand, Hawai‘i and a few other places boasting Pacific shores, the regional focus is novel and illuminating. Douglas claims that historians generally have lacked the territorial overview — the Oceanic sense — that so many scientists and anthropologists possessed in the 19th century. She meticulously traces the emergence of ‘Oceania’ in the 1830s and 1840s, and its subsequent role as an organising framework for peoples and places. Douglas takes an expansive view of the region, including Australasia along with the Pacific, though drawing the line at the Malay Archipelago and the Philippines. The essays in this collection feed on this geographical generosity, alternating between Australia and the Pacific Islands, providing ample grounds for comparison within the region, though sometimes at the cost of analytic coherence. Had the collection focused solely on Pacific Islanders, it would allow neater arguments, if more modest conclusions. Almost half of the book is taken up with Douglas’s exhaustive account of European racial thought in the century after 1750. Some of her stories will be familiar, but few other treatments of this subject display her range of reference and her scrupulous engagement
Postcolonial Studies, 2009
It could be said that a title in need of an explanation*for example, the heading above this text*... more It could be said that a title in need of an explanation*for example, the heading above this text*is a title in need of replacement. Then again, such coded headings sometimes might better evoke a set of questions, a problematic, than plainer versions. They can, like this one, serve both to coalesce and to disintegrate a method or field of investigation. The term 'subjugated knowledge' has multiple resonances, of course. An echo of Michel Foucault crying out for insurrection, it also suggests the postcolonial legacy of Marxisant dependency theory and romantic visions of ethnoscience, along with the hopeful recovery of 'Third World' standpoints. 1 'Conjugated subjects' is trickier. It is meant to hint at postcolonial hybridity and heterogeneity, suggesting a more complicated and entangled state of affairs, one requiring intimate engagement with various theoretical stances popular in the humanities at the turn of the last century. Together these terms thus trace the trajectory of postcolonial studies of science, technology and medicine over the past twenty years or so. Further, the subtitle indicates my intention to track the recent decline (from a low base) of explicitly postcolonial approaches as scholars choose now to fetishise 'globalisation'. In science and technology studies (STS), as elsewhere, euphoric accountings of globalisation rapidly are displacing anhedonic postcolonial genealogies, often to the detriment of critical thought. The minor postcolonial agenda in STS has been generally subsumed in efforts to describe how formal knowledge and practice travel, and what happens to them at their points of arrival, how they articulate across and within cultures. 2 I use the word 'formal' to avoid defining or privileging anything in particular*but we all know the focus, willing or not, has been on those modern forms of science, technology or medicine commonly associated with Western Europe and North America. Since World War II, these efforts to explain how science travels, becomes transformed and interacts with other knowledge and practice have drawn on political theories of modernisation and dependency, development anthropology, sociological interactionism, and actor-network theory (ANT)*to name just a few approaches. While the phenomena continue to excite some scholarly interest, no one seems entirely
Osiris, 2004
During the twentieth century, disease ecology emerged as a distinct disciplinary network within i... more During the twentieth century, disease ecology emerged as a distinct disciplinary network within infectious diseases research. The key figures were Theobald Smith, F. Macfarlane Burnet, René Dubos, and Frank Fenner. They all drew on Darwinian evolutionism to fashion an integrative (but rarely holistic) understanding of disease processes, distinguishing themselves from reductionist "chemists" and mere "microbe hunters." They sought a more complex, biologically informed epidemiology. Their emphasis on competition and mutualism in the animated environment differed from the physical determinism that prevailed in much medical geography and environmental health research. Disease ecology derived in part from studies of the interaction of organisms - micro and macro - in tropical medicine, veterinary pathology, and immunology. It developed in postcolonial settler societies. Once a minority interest, disease ecology has attracted more attention since the 1980s for its explanations of disease emergence, antibiotic resistance, bioterrorism, and the health impacts of climate change.
Journal of the History of Biology, 2013
During the 1940s and 1950s, the Australian microbiologist F. Macfarlane Burnet sought a biologica... more During the 1940s and 1950s, the Australian microbiologist F. Macfarlane Burnet sought a biologically plausible explanation of antibody production. In this essay, we seek to recover the conceptual pathways that Burnet followed in his immunological theorizing. In so doing, we emphasize the influence of speculations on individuality, especially those of philosopher Alfred North Whitehead; the impact of cybernetics and information theory; and the contributions of clinical research into autoimmune disease that took place in Melbourne. We point to the influence of local experimental and intellectual currents on Burnet's work. Accordingly, this essay describes an arc distinct from most other tracings of Burnet's conceptual development, which focus on his early bacteriophage research, his fascination with the work of Julian Huxley and other biologists in the 1920s, and his interest in North Atlantic experimental investigations in the life sciences. No doubt these too were potent influences, but they seem insufficient to explain, for example, Burnet's sudden enthusiasm in the 1940s for immunological definitions of self and not-self. We want to demonstrate here how Burnet's deep involvement in philosophical biology-along with attention to local clinical research-provided him with additional theoretic tools and conceptual equipment, with which to explain immune function.
Health and History, 1998
It is an unremarkable truism that not so long ago most historians of medicine were white male doc... more It is an unremarkable truism that not so long ago most historians of medicine were white male doctors documenting the progress of medical ideas and practices. But now medical historians in Australia, the United States and Britain, if not elsewhere are more likely to have learned a wry scepticism in Ph.D. programs and to write a critical social or a cultural history of disease or health care. During the past twenty years or so the discipline expanded and became more diverse and, as it did so, the verbal qualifiers proliferated around our subject. What is it now that we do? Is it intellectual or social or cultural history of medicine, of biomedical science, of health, of illness, of suffering or of disease? And if this dispersal of interests had not already rendered our disciplinary identity sufficiently complex, it now seems that each element of this modern periodic table has an unstable valence. What is 'disease'? What counts as 'medicine? What is 'culture'? Even the
Critical Inquiry, 1992
... 1 When Andrew Balfour spoke to the London Society of Tropical Medi-cine and Hygiene in 1914, ... more ... 1 When Andrew Balfour spoke to the London Society of Tropical Medi-cine and Hygiene in 1914, his subject was "Tropical Problems in the New World," and he had some recent information from the Philippines that would surprise some of his audience and please others. ...
Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2012
Physicians and scientists dominated the first generation of nationalists in at least three East A... more Physicians and scientists dominated the first generation of nationalists in at least three East Asian colonies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the Philippines under the Spanish and United States' regimes, the Dutch East Indies, and the Japanese territory of Taiwan. There is substantial evidence that, in each place, decolonization was yoked to scientific progress—not only in a practical sense, but symbolically too. The first generation to receive training in biological science and to become socialized as professionals used this education to imagine itself as eminently modern, progressive, and cosmopolitan. Their training gave them special authority in deploying organic metaphors of society and state, and made them deft in finding allegories of the human body and the body politic. These scientists and physicians saw themselves as representing universal laws, advancing natural knowledge, and engaging as equals with colleagues in Europe, Japan, and North Americ...
Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 1996
Asian Studies Review, 2013
American Literary History, 2002
Heiser, after visiting a hospital in Sulu, during an investigatory trip he conducted in 1916 for ... more Heiser, after visiting a hospital in Sulu, during an investigatory trip he conducted in 1916 for the International Health Board of the Rockefeller Foundation (Notes 2: 537). Just a year earlier Francis Burton Harrison, the new governor-general of the Philippines, had forced Heiser to resign from his post as director of health. Now the wily, authoritarian hygienist, supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, had an opportunity to return to the archipelago and make life difficult for those who sought-prematurely in his opinion-to "filipinize" the American colonial bureaucracy. In general, it was evident to him that health work had been degraded in his absence. The town of Legaspi, for example, had no latrines and was "filthy in the extreme" (2: 553). Heiser felt that Filipino infiltration of the public health service now meant that "politics seems to dominate everything for the worst" (2: 553). In Manila, "the dead spirit seems to pervade everything" (2: 570). "Natives" in the health service constituted a corps of pathetic imitators of American public health, carelessly supervising lowerclass imitative "natives" in the barrios. "There is a great inefficiency and the machine is big and ponderous and the fuel does little more than oil the wheels, and progress is small, but this is to be expected with native control." 1 As they all went dutifully, slowly, through the motions, producing unfaithful copies of the American originals, Heiser watched, gleefully reporting on their deficiencies. "In leaving Manila," he wrote, it was "a satisfaction to see the indestructible monuments of cement which I left on the landscape and which they will be unable to destroy" (2: 621). Wherever he went in the colonial Philippines, Heiser found imitation, theatricality, ornament, and politics. There were times when he was heartened by Filipino enthusiasm for his projects. "Hookworm treatment is very popular with the people," he reported on a later visit in 1925. They "have become greatly inter
Current Anthropology, 2012
In the 1920s and 1930s, U.S. physical anthropologists imagined Hawai'i as a racial laboratory, a ... more In the 1920s and 1930s, U.S. physical anthropologists imagined Hawai'i as a racial laboratory, a controllable site for the study of race mixing and the effects of migration on bodily form. Gradually a more dynamic and historical understanding of human populations came to substitute for older classificatory and typological approaches in the colonial laboratory, leading to the creation of the field of human biology and challenges to scientific racism. Elite U.S. institutions and philanthropic foundations competed for the authority to define Pacific bodies and mentalities during this period. The emergent scientific validation of liberal Hawaiian attitudes toward human difference and race amalgamation or formation exerted considerable influence on biological anthropology after World War II, but ultimately it would fail in Hawai'i to resist the incoming tide of continental U.S. racial thought and practice.
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Papers by Warwick Anderson