Science and Power in the Nineteenth-Century Tasman World

The contentious science of phrenology once promised insight into character and intellect through external 'reading' of the head. In the transforming settler-colonial landscapes of nineteenth-century Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand popular phrenologists - figures who often hailed from the margins - performed their science of touch and cranial jargon everywhere from mechanics' institutions to public houses. In this compelling work Alexandra Roginski recounts a history of this everyday practice exploring how it featured in the fates of people living in and moving through the Tasman World. Innovatively drawing on historical newspapers and a network of archives she traces the careers of a diverse range of popular phrenologists and those they encountered. By analysing the actions at play in scientific episodes through ethnographic social and cultural history Roginski considers how this now-discredited science could in its own day yield fleeting power and advantage even against a backdrop of large-scale dispossession and social brittleness.