Little mangrove

June 2019

HCSM 25 years – Testimonies

Warwick Anderson is a leading historian of science and race from Australia. He has published several books, among them The Collectors of Lost Souls, that traces the story of kuru, a fatal brain disease that affected people in the isolated highlands of colonial New Guinea during the 1940s and 1950s. See his testimony about HCS-Manguinhos and relates articles:

“I remember being startled by the title: História, Ciências, Saúde—Manguinhos. Some twenty-five years ago, it was both pertinent and prescient to add Manguinhos to the conventional amalgam, as a kind of Derridean supplement revealing what was already inscribed in, even predicating, the preceding abstractions.

Thus from the start, Manguinhos would strive to situate the life sciences in the multiply reticulated “little mangroves” of the Global South. In the very first issue in 1994, editor Sergio Goes de Paula noted the “unmistakably vernacular” title, almost untranslatable, which broadcast the journal’s “indigenous character” and commitment to an unconventionally eclectic and inclusive format. And so, for twenty-five years, Manguinhos has inspired those of us across the southern hemisphere who hope to free histories of science from their European and North American moorings and maneuver them into our ownlittle mangroves—into the anchorages, or the places, that matter to us.”

Anderson, Warwick, Cueto, Marcos and Santos, Ricardo Ventura.  Applying a southern solvent: an interview with Warwick Anderson. Hist. cienc. saude-Manguinhos, Dec 2016, vol.23, suppl.1, p.213-226. ISSN 0104-5970

Luso-tropicalism and its discontents – This book reinterprets Gilberto Freyre’s Luso-tropicalist arguments and critically engages with the historical complexity of racial concepts and practices in the Portuguese-speaking world.

Applying a southern solvent – An interview with Warwick Anderson, a leading historian of science, medicine and race at the University of Sydney.