Dr James Hunt Revisited: The quest for awakening Robert Knox's ideas and reterritorialization of his racial theories into the mainstream scientific discourse in mid-Victorian Britain

This paper aims to explore James Hunt's role in the rehabilitation of Dr Robert Knox's diminished reputation by careful choice of original theories from "Races of Men" to establish ideological underpinning for political agenda of Anthropological Society of London (1863-1871). Additionally, Hunt had become empowered with the reliable tool to oppose Thomas Huxley, and his fellow Darwinists efforts to homogenise mid-Victorian Anthropology under the banner of Darwinism. Although Hunt had to pay the steep price for such accomplishment, since he had to de-radicalise core elements of Knox's racialist vision. Moreover, Hunt's orchestrated resurrection of modified version of Knox's writings helped him to smuggle a cunningly significant number of both Knox's original and upgraded racialist elements into contemporary Social Darwinism. Hence, the legacy of James Hunt should not be underestimated as a marginal contribution to further development of racism in following two decades after his death. Additionally, the purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how James Hunt managed to popularise and bring into the foreground racial theories pioneered by Robert Knox.The central thesis of this paper is to analyse the process of Hunt’s intentional manipulation with original ideas developed by Robert Knox to shape them for his political purpose and consequent popularisation of expanded corpus of racialist theory. We shall begin with a brief introduction to Robert Knox, who indeed inspired James Hunt to popularise racist views in mid-Victorian society, though Hunt later modified Knoxian racial doctrine rather unfaithfully to the original theory. This paper analyses Hunt’s transition from Knox’s admirer to a populariser of broader racist doctrine including not Knox, but elements of racial theories of Paul Broca, George Gliddon, Samuel Morton and Josiah Nott as well. The final part of the paper follows Hunt's shift from the populariser of toxic racist ideas to a wily political manipulator, who shaped his condensed racist beliefs and methods along with changes in British colonial policy to pass down ultimate racist underpinning for emerging wave of a new ideology of uncompromising imperialism.

The unmaking of an anthropologist: Wallace returns from the field, 1862–70

This essay follows Alfred Russel Wallace back from the field in 1862, tracing how his views on human evolution developed after his field experiences in the East Indies and how he articulated them within the social structure of British science during the 1860s. It analyses his involvement in the metropolitan scientific institutions dedicated to the study of man, the Ethnological Society of London and its breakaway counterpart, the Anthropological Society of London, which offered differing visions for a science of man and its intersection with political commitments. Using evidence from his participation in society meetings, the reception of his own anthropological papers, and the responses to the views he expressed in his field travel narrative, The Malay Archipelago , I show that although Wallace's involvement was initially enthusiastic, over time his views came into conflict with both groups. His involvement in established human science institutions declined, and Wallace turned towards other social locations for cultivating his knowledge of and engagement with questions involving the study of humanity.

Diwurruwurru: Towards a New Kind of Two-Way Classroom

A project is currently underway at http://arts.deakin.edu.au which is innovative on a number of fronts. It has multiple beginnings: in the proactive, as culture dissemination work of a number of Yanyuwa and Garrwa women, who proclaimed in the white man’s world that they were ‘bosses themselves’ (Gale 1983) and who in various ways have sought to bring their culture to the attention of the wider world. This has been accomplished through a prize-winning (Atom Australian Teachers of Media awards in 1991) film, Buwarrala Akarriya: Journey East (1989), of are-enacted ritual foot-walk in 1988 from Borroloola to Manankurra 90 kilometres away. They also made a another prize winning film called Ka-wayawayarna: The Aeroplane Dance (1993) which won the Royal Anthropological Society of London award for the best ethnographic film in 1995. Since 1997 senior Yanyuwa women have been involved on a regular basis in sharing their knowledge of Yanyuwa performance practice with tertiary students in a subject called Women’s Music and Dance in Indigenous Australia which is offered as a course in anthropology through the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Unit, they have also lectured in core anthropology subjects in the faculty of Social and Behavourial Sciences Department of Anthropology and Sociology at the University of Queensland. They have also engaged actively in work as language preservers and teachers at the Borroloola Community Education Centre (hereafter BCEC) and in the Tennant Creek Language Centre program called Papulu Apparr-Kari.

Victorian Historians and the Royal Historical Society (The Prothero Lecture)

SUPERFICIALLY regarded, the foundation of the Royal Historical Society a hundred and twenty years ago belongs to that spate of foundations of academic societies and specialised disciplinary journals, on the continent and in the United States as well as in Britain, which occurred in the concluding decades of the last century and around the beginning of this. Indeed if mere date of foundation were all that counted the Society is considerably more venerable than, for example, the Royal Economic Society, which, even under its earlier title as the British Economic Association, will not celebrate its centenary until 1900, and the British Academy which will not do so for two years beyond that. The Royal Anthropological Institute is three years younger than ourselves, though admittedly it represented an amalgamation of two earlier societies, the Anthropological Society of London which enjoyed a somewhat notorious existence through the eighteen sixties and the still older Ethnological Society. Our Transactions had been published, albeit intermittently, for fifteen years before the first issue of the English Historical Review in 1886. They had not, it has to be admitted, been fifteen glorious years. Although by the mid-'eighties matters were beginning to improve and the names of some notable historians, Acton, Creighton, Seeley, appear on the membership rolls, the productions of the Society and much of its membership were far from distinguished and it still had some way to go to establish itself as a respected institution.