Africa as a Living Laboratory

图书信息

作者	Tilley, Helen
出版社	University of Chicago Press
ISBN	9780226803487
出版时间	2011-04-15
字数	111.2万
分类	University of Chicago Press,进口书,外文原版书,文学,自传,回忆录

读书简介

Tropical Africa was one of the last regions of the world to experience formal European colonialism, a process that coincided with the advent of a range of new scientific specialties and research methods. Africa as a Living Laboratory is a far-reaching study of the thorny relationship between imperialism and the role of scientific expertise-environmental, medical, racial, and anthropological-in the colonization of British Africa.A key source for Helen Tilley's analysis is the African Research Survey, a project undertaken in the 1930s to explore how modern science was being applied to African problems. This project both embraced and recommended an interdisciplinary approach to research on Africa that, Tilley argues, underscored the heterogeneity of African environments and the interrelations among the problems being studied. While the aim of British colonialists was unquestionably to transform and modernize Africa, their efforts, Tilley contends, were often unexpectedly subverted by scientific concerns with the local and vernacular. Meticulously researched and gracefully argued, Africa as a Living Laboratory transforms our understanding of imperial history, colonial development, and the role science played in both.

目录

Cover

Copyright

Title Page

Epigraph

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Africa as a Living Laboratory

One: An Imperial Laboratory: Scientific Societies, Geopolitics, and Territorial Acquisitions

Two: A Development Laboratory: The African Research Survey, the Machinery of Knowledge, and Imperial Coordination

Three: An Environmental Laboratory: “Native” Agriculture, Tropical Infertility, and Ecological Models of Development

Four: A Medical Laboratory: Infectious Diseases, Ecological Methods, and Modernization

Five: A Racial Laboratory: Imperial Politics, Race Prejudice, and Mental Capacity

Six: An Anthropological Laboratory: Ethnographic Research, Imperial Administration, and Magical Knowledge

Seven: A Living Laboratory: Ethnosciences, Field Sciences, and the Problem of Epistemic Pluralism

Appendix: African Colonial Service Employment, 1913–51

Notes

Bibliography

Index