Haunting Biology

“Resistances and refusals by bodies and spirits of Indigenous peoples continue to haunt and disrupt white settler bio-logics. Haunting Biology reveals settler colonial science as the white fellas’ desiring apparatus: generating meticulous inscriptions of blood, bone, hair, genomics, and metabolisms to try to make beguiling differences but repeatedly failing to capture lived Indigeneity. How, Emma Kowal asks, can all the ancestral ghosts troubling the white scientific machine be engaged with respectfully, not exorcised, in future biologies?” -- Warwick Anderson, author of * The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health, and Racial Destiny in Australia * “Examining exemplary cases in the history of biological, physical anthropological, and medical research, Emma Kowal uniquely argues that all biological knowledge contains the possibility of being affected and facilitated by a problematic practice from distant places and times. She shows that the messy history of biological differences is not a history left behind, but one that lingers and haunts our current-day shiny laboratory science. It is this realization that prompts a much-needed evaluation of the history of anthropology.” -- Amade M’charek, author of * The Human Genome Diversity Project: An Ethnography of Scientific Practice * “The quality of Kowal’s storytelling and prose are remarkable. A scholarly history of race science, influenced by postmodern theory, could easily become monotonously grim and plodding, but Kowal’s writing sustains a brisk readability. . . . Kowal has written a courageous, sophisticated and surprisingly engaging book. But what makes Haunting Biology important is that core message: the repressed always return."" -- Simon Farley * British Journal for the History of Science *