Mobility, sexuality and civilisation: settlers, strangers, nomads and gypsies in the Pacific to 1910
RIS ID
66974
Abstract
Settlers in British colonies, and settlement house workers in urban America in the nineteenth century, saw themselves as bringing civilisation to urban primitives, noble savages and savage immigrants. Civilisation in Europe and the colonies was often tied to land, the settlement of land, agriculture and cultivation. Nomads, gypsies, immigrants, itinerant labourers, tramps and other derogatorily defined mobile populations, were often constructed in relation to settlers, missionaries and explorers, who were associated with the civis, city, and civilisation. Yet settlers were themselves immigrants, explorers were often part of itinerant populations, and missionaries and colonial officials were mobile as well. This paper mines the archives of Intercolonial Conferences for relational constructions of mobile populations, civilisation and sexuality in the Pacific in the nineteenth century.
Publication Details
N. Seuffert, 'Mobility, sexuality and civilisation: settlers, strangers, nomads and gypsies in the Pacific to 1910' (Paper presented at the 2011 Fourteenth Annual Conference for the Association of the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities, University of Nevada, Navada, 11-12 Mar, 2011).