Only two decades after colonists disembarked on the banks of the Yarra River, Melbourne became a marvel to behold as the discovery of gold propelled spectacular colonial development and, unsurprisingly indigenous destruction. Melbourne was a quintessential 'boom city' of empire, dramatizing anxieties about these speedy transformations and their correlative destructions whilst also producing new regimes of governance to manage this unsettling progress. Anthropologists from across the world watched these ethnographic explorations with interest. Through a collective biography of this intellectual community, Racial Thought at the End of the World will reveal the ways in which ideas from this small colonial outpost reverberated across the British world. The book examines how a thriving community of anthropologists employed the new science of anthropology to ask and answer deep moral questions about the relationship between settlers and Indigenous peoples, and how Indigenous peoples and communities employed this anthropological interest to carve out fragile spaces to exert agency over their own lives.
- ISBN10 0522870201
- ISBN13 9780522870206
- Publish Date 30 April 2017
- Publish Status Cancelled
- Publish Country AU
- Imprint Melbourne University Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 277
- Language English