“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
"I recommend [Haunting Biology] to everyone; it is most important for our understanding of the history and present of bio-science and bio-politics in Australian settler colonialism." - Marianne Sommer, Journal of the History of Biology
"Kowal’s book, Haunting Biology, is full of examples of how many different interests, desires, beliefs, and decisions shape the development of science and its impact on people’s lives. It is an engaging tour through the exceptionally difficult and complex history of the production of knowledge about biological differences between human populations, with a particular focus on Indigenous peoples of Australia." - Joanna Karolina Malinowska, Journal of Political Power
"Kowal’s book reflects on the nature of science, medicine, and history. Every student of anthropology and its history should read this book." - M. Susan Lindee, History of Anthropology Review
"Haunting Biology attempts to let the non-human speak, yet instead of exploring the history of technologies in the laboratory it focuses on ghosts that linger both inside and outside the lab. This is a book that narrates how scientists and indigenous communities love, hate, fascinate, embrace, and resist biology." - Yi-Cheng Wu, EASTS
"Haunting Biology engages with material from the fields of Native American and Indigenous studies, anthropology, history, postcolonial studies, critical race studies, and science and technology studies and draws from primary sources including archival records, interviews, personal communications, and Kowal’s own long experience as a doctor and a participant in the governance of Indigenous genomics in Australia. The topic is of utmost importance and scholars from a multitude of fields will be engaging with her book for many years to come." - Meredith Alberta Palmer & Suman Seth, Postcolonial Studies
"Though Kowal’s work is in conversation with Indigenous studies, it more directly intervenes with science and technology studies. Her detailed accounting of the movements and backstories of these exhibits are a boon to historians of science who may want to continue this research. Throughout the text, Kowal moves in and out of frames of interpretation for her exhibits, so the reader is never quite at ease in any one vantage point. The style of the text serves her goal of ambivalence and haunting. The questions she raises would be interesting to analyze through new materialism." - Paige Welsh, E3W Review of Books
"Haunting Biology offers carefully researched, thoughtful and deeply ethical reflections on past and present scientific aspirations. In sum, this book gifts us with good reasons to think that our efforts to ensure medico-scientific curiosity about Indigenous biology never again causes harm, require us to live with the ghosts of science past, and to not have the hubris to seek to exorcise them." - Paul Turnbull, Australian Historical Studies
"Lively stories jumped out and kept me engaged while reading the book continuously over some days. . . . Haunting Biology is a must read for those interested in that issue in Australia, but this book is of enormous historical, national, and global significance more generally." - David S. Trigger, The Australian Journal of Anthropology
"This beautiful book tells the tale of the troubled and troublesome history of Western sciences' obsession with Indigenous bodies and biologies. . . . This book is bound to play a crucial role in furthering the debate around Indigenous biological, genomic, and physical research. Kowal challenges practitioners, researchers, and communities to engage with their disciplines' haunted past and to deal with the ghosts of the past in order to move forward." - Lynette Russell, The Australian Journal of Anthropology
"One of the highly engaging aspects of the book is its biographical and contextual treatment of many of the key collectors and researchers over time. . . . Couching some of what has occurred in these biographies makes the book very readable and gives personal form to the shifts in ethical and scientific complexities." - Francesca Merlan, Anthropos
"Haunting Biology shepherds us across an intricate lattice of theories, proposed generally by men with a breadth of interests, very few of them actually the interests of the people they are attempting to group, describe, collect, display, and measure. Perhaps what makes it a great book, though, is its ability to take you out of itself, beyond its pages. Haunting Biology did this for me." - Ros Williams, Medicine Anthropology Theory
"Aside from providing a wonderful history and overview of the history of genomics and biological anthropology in Australia in the 20th century, the book is a fantastic case for the generative power of ghosts, for listening to and figuring out what they have to say." - Trevor Engel, Medicine Anthropology Theory
"Haunting Biology plays an important role in bringing these ghosts into the light and illuminating the paths we might take moving forward." - Coen Hird, Native American and Indigenous Studies
