Scandalous Subjects: Island Lives and Demographic Anxieties from Race to Development in Melanesia

This project is an ethnography of the scientific practices of counting human populations and the anxieties engendered by the futures that the numbers forecast.  It is an account of the Melanesian modernities entangled with the apprehensions of depopulation and population growth.  

During the 20^th century, scientists have been fascinated by small islands as laboratories for experiments on understanding the relationships between environment, culture and population growth or decline. Islands have been sites for studying demographic trends through racial mixing, evolution and adaptation and carrying capacity.  The islands of Melanesia have held a fascinating place in scientific imaginings of cultural and biological diversity and understandings of race and population.  I explore these scientific debates from the vantage of the New Hebrides, now Vanuatu.

The project tracks the transition from scientific and early colonial debates on demographic decline to late colonial and post colonial debates about curbing overly quick population growth. This is a shift from describing changes in human population size in racial terms or evolutionary possibilities to the achievement of economic progress on development goals by optimizing population size. I explore how scientific understandings of human groups were associated with colonial management strategies to curb racial decline that gave way to post colonial plans about balancing fertility with economic development.

 Despite the humanitarian scandals foretold in the demographic research, neither colonial or post colonial governments launched a significant state approach to population control, but rather meted out their interventions on population in episodic, often failed, efforts.  While large scale state and transnational interventions on population are crucial aspects of the history of population politics, from this context I make the claim that studying the attempts and failures of population projects in small populations is worthwhile as they were part of the scientific practice of understanding population, and, significantly, part of colonial and post colonial realities. Colonial and post colonial failures to realize progress based on the implementation of scientific accounting of populations are, indeed, at the core of post colonial predicaments.