Haunting Biology, written by anthropologist and STS scholar Emma Kowal, details the complicated history of how biomedical technologies have been applied to the study of Australian indigenous peoples over the past century. Using biomedical technologies to explore differences between ethnic groups or races has been a familiar practice from the twentieth century onward. Physical anthropology as a colonial base of knowledge has even become an accomplice to political violence, as is common knowledge within the history of science. 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.
