Media ethics codes concerning privacy must be updated considering the ease with which information now can be gathered from social networks and disseminated widely. Existing codes allow for deception and privacy invasion in cases of overriding public need when no alternate means are available but do not adequately define what constitutes need or alternate means, or weigh in the harm such acts do to the public trust and the profession. Building on the ethics theories of Sissela Bok and Helen (...) Nissenbaum, balancing tests can be developed under a mixed-rule deontology that confines online misrepresentation and exposing the private information of private people only to cases where good most clearly is served. (shrink)

The term “value of life” can refer to life’s intrinsic dignity: something nonincremental and time-unaffected in contrast to the fluctuating, incremental “value” of our lives, as they are longer or shorter and more or less flourishing. Human beings are equal in their basic moral importance: the moral indignities we condemn in the treatment of e.g. those with dementia reflect the ongoing human dignity that is being violated. Indignities licensed by the person in advance remain indignities, as when people might volunteer (...) their living, unconscious bodies for surrogacy or training in amputation techniques. Respect for someone’s dignity is significantly impacted by a failure to value that person’s very existence, whatever genuine respect and good will is shown by wanting the person’s life to go well. Valuing and respecting life is not, however, vitalism: there can be good and compelling reasons for eschewing some means of prolonging life. (shrink)

Mix & Stir', this book's aim is an endeavour to understand art as being a panhuman phenomenon of all times and cultures; to steer away from the persistent Eurocentric/Western-centric viewpoint towards a transcultural and transnational interconnected model of exchange and processes of interculturalization. Mix & Stir wants to expand this landscape by bringing to the fore new, recalcitrant, queer, idiosyncratic practices and discourses, theories and topics, methods and concerns that open up ways to approach art from a global perspective. Analogous (...) to a cookery book filled with recipes and instruction, Mix & Stir explores new outlooks on contemporary art from global perspectives. It intends to encourage studying art beyond national constraints, cultural dominances, and hierarchies: a voyage similar to that of culinary discovery. The book brings a variety of tastes and flavours to the table, and breaks new ground by allowing innovative, contrary, queer, idiosyncratic practices and discourses, theories and topics, methods, and concerns to access art in its global dimensions. Researchers, curators and artists with a special interest in this topical issue were invited to present, develop, outline, and contemplate compelling frames of reference, both theoretical and artistic, in order to arrive at a true 'world art studies'. Their contributions are structured in seven thematic fields: Undecidability and Spectatorship, Collectives, Circulations, Exhibitions, Artists at Work, Postcolonial Perspectives, and Deep Art History. The reader is invited to explore the vast supply of dishes, to taste and test the aromas and to feast. (shrink)

Volume 29, Issue 4, October-December, Page 273-274.

The paper attempts to explicate and justify the position I call `Agency Incompatibilism'- that is to say, the view that agency itself is incompatible with determinism. The most important part of this task is the characterisation of the conception of agency on which the position depends; for unless this is understood, the rationale for the position is likely to be missed. The paper accordingly proceeds by setting out the orthodox philosophical position concerning what it takes for agency to exist, before (...) going on to explain why and how that orthodoxy should be challenged. The relations between my own views and those of others writing on the issues of free will and moral responsibility, in three crucial and inter-connected areas are then explored. These are (1) the question how animals should figure in the philosophy of action; (2) the question what the lesson is of `Frankfurt-style' examples; and (3) the distinction between so-called `leeway' incompatibilism and `source' incompatibilism. The paper moves on to consider and respond to various objections to Agency Incompatibilism, including the claim that to embrace the conception of agency that makes incompatibilism plausible is to beg the question against the compatibilist, and also the worry that determinism is an empirical thesis which ought not to be straightforwardly falsifiable by such a priori reasoning as Agency Incompatibilism appears to involve. I also try to rebut the worry that Agency Incompatibilism is committed to the existence of an unintelligible and/or naturalistically impossible variety of irreducible agent causation. (shrink)

John Howard Whitehouse was a British educational and social reformer and the founder of Bembridge School on the Isle of Wight. George Peabody Gooch was a British historian and Liberal Party politician. Originally published in 1924, this book contains essays by Whitehouse and Gooch putting forward the case for an international perspective on education and educational policy, with particular emphasis placed upon links with the United States. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in educational theories (...) and the history of education. (shrink)

This chapter considers the ways in which whiteness as a skin color and ideology becomes a dominant level that sets the background against which all things, people and relations appear. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, it takes up a series of films by Bruce Nauman and Marlon Riggs to consider ways in which this level is phenomenally challenged providing insights into the embodiment of racialization.

Most patients suffering from progressive dementia have thoughts, emotions, perspectives, and perceptions of a world of experience. Decisions about life‐sustaining treatment should incorporate a principled approach to evaluating what life is like for these patients.

Cultural evolution depends on both innovation (the creation of new cultural variants by accident or design) and high-fidelity transmission (which preserves our accumulated knowledge and allows the storage of normative conventions). What is required is an overarching theory encompassing both dimensions, specifying the psychological motivations and mechanisms involved. The bifocal stance theory (BST) of cultural evolution proposes that the co-existence of innovative change and stable tradition results from our ability to adopt different motivational stances flexibly during social learning and transmission. (...) We argue that the ways in which instrumental and ritual stances are adopted in cultural transmission influence the nature and degree of copying fidelity and thus also patterns of cultural spread and stability at a population level over time. BST creates a unifying framework for interpreting the findings of otherwise seemingly disparate areas of enquiry, including social learning, cumulative culture, overimitation, and ritual performance. We discuss the implications of BST for competing by-product accounts which assume that faithful copying is merely a side-effect of instrumental learning and action parsing. We also set out a novel “cultural action framework” bringing to light aspects of social learning that have been relatively neglected by behavioural ecologists and evolutionary psychologists and establishing a roadmap for future research on this topic. The BST framework sheds new light on the cognitive underpinnings of cumulative cultural change, selection, and spread within an encompassing evolutionary framework. (shrink)

Helen Steward argues that determinism is incompatible with agency itself--not only the special human variety of agency, but also powers which can be accorded to animal agents. She offers a distinctive, non-dualistic version of libertarianism, rooted in a conception of what biological forms of organisation might make possible in the way of freedom.

Inequity has been a hallmark of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, especially in the sharply disproportionate impacts among people of color. Recent studies have confirmed that t...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Demystifying the Mystery of Alzheimer's as Late, No Longer Mild Cognitive ImpairmentPeter J. Whitehouse (bio)Keywordsaging, Alzheimer’s disease, deconstruction, mild cognitive impairmentProfessor Tom Kirkwood and Michael Bavidge's comments are welcome additions to our discourse as both emphasize the importance of considering mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and Alzheimer's disease (AD) in relationship to the normal biological and cultural processes of aging. Whereas I agree with my colleague and co-author, Atwood Gaines' (...) response, I wish to add my own commentary to update the reader concerning the dynamic political processes at work in the social construction and deconstruction of MCI and AD. I have referred to MCI as autodeconstructing AD because whatever we come to think of the MCI label on the spectrum of cognitive aging should alter our beliefs about the ultimate utility of the concept of AD. Tensions in the field of study of MCI have increased since the project reported in this journal began. The social science and philosophical contributions toward understanding MCI need to inform our debate now; otherwise, we will be less effective at influencing a critical debate for society about its relationships to medicine, science, and modern capitalism.This past year, Ron Petersen, the major proponent of the concept of MCI was awarded the prestigious Potamkin Prize for research in Alzheimer's disease by the American Academy of Neurology. The National Institute on Aging (NIA) placed the discovery of MCI as first on the list of contributions during twenty years of research funded through hundreds of millions of dollars poured into the NIA Alzheimer's Research Centers. Some have even suggested that we relabel MCI of the amnestic type, Petersen syndrome. Yet, John Morris, who was co-awarded the Potamkin Prize, has continued to write that MCI is early AD and most recently has suggested (Morris 2006) that we should revise our diagnostic criteria. He joins me and a growing list of other so-called thought leaders who believe (but do not always state publicly) that the term MCI is not useful clinically. Lon Schneider (2005) has recently joined the camp of critics publicly by suggesting that MCI is [End Page 87] not only confusing clinically but is now possibly retarding research.The proliferation of different kinds of MCI indicates that we are studying heterogeneous processes of brain aging. Whereas, John Morris suggests that we relabel MCI as early AD, I have suggested the converse. For example, in a grand rounds lecture at Johns Hopkins in March 2004, I used the lecture title "LNLMCI (late no longer MCI)" as a synonym for AD.Kirkwood is right to compare the quest for biological therapy for AD to the search to treat aging processes in other organs. He has been an outspoken critic of anti-aging medicine quackery that claims that aging itself is a disease that can be reversed today. But, if AD is brain aging, are we not in fact creating a "disease" category that raises false hopes and expectations?Kirkwood also points out that aging is a lifespan process. To prevent dementia in older individuals, we should prevent damage to neurons in younger individuals. Recently, it has been claimed, for example, that exposure to lead in young animals makes these animals more at risk for amyloid deposition in later life (Basha et al. 2005). Whether or not lead directly affects the pathogenesis of AD, it seems eminently reasonable to try to prevent damage to neurons in young children so that they may have maximum cognitive capacity throughout their lifespan.Almost ten years ago, when I stepped down as the editor of the Alzheimer's Disease and Associated Disorders Journal and as John Morris took over this responsibility, I wrote an editorial calling for the end of AD (Whitehouse 2001). In other words, I argued that thinking through the invention of the term mild cognitive impairment reveals that we are attempting to assign medical categories to what are a heterogeneous set of processes that affect our brains as we age. At the hundredth anniversary of the first case of what we have come to call Alzheimer's disease, perhaps it is time to reflect on the individual and social... (shrink)

Community discourse about the moral status of animals is critical to the future of bioethics and, indeed, to the future of modern society. Thomasma and Loewy are to be commended for sharing thoughts and trying to attain some common ground. I am grateful to them for fostering discussion and allowing me to respond. I cannot endorse the negative tone of the end of their conversation, however. They end with serious concerns about the possibility of any agreement between themselves. Even though (...) I perceive some moral differences between them, I do not believe that they are moral strangers. In this commentary I review the ways in which I agree and disagree with Thomasma and Loewy and conclude with some thoughts about the kind of broad ethical thinking we need to do to address our moral relationship to nonhuman, living creatures. (shrink)

Van Rensselaer Potter was the first voice to utter the word “bioethics,” yet he is too little appreciated by the bioethics community. My expectations for my first visit with Professor Van Rensselaer Potter were primed by conversations with leaders and historians of the field of biomedical ethics, including Warren Reich, Al Jonsen, and David Thomasma. When mentioning my interest in environmental ethics and my concerns for the current state of biomedical ethics, I was told that I must meet Van. On (...) my first visit to Madison, Wisconsin, Van met me at the McArdle Laboratories for Cancer Research at the University of Wisconsin, where he spent essentially his entire academic career as a basic oncological researcher. He was dressed informally and driving a rusting1984 Subaru station wagon with a license plate that read YES ZPG. We spent this first portion of our visit at the Institute where he is an Emeritus Professor and has contributed to understanding cancer metabolism as recognized by his election to the National Academy of Sciences. However, Van felt most at home in his shack located outside Madison. This country retreat included a rather primitive hut surrounded by acres of property owned by the family. I felt at the heart of Van's world when I sat in one of a pair of inexpensive plastic outdoor chairs in a particularly secluded part of the woods on the property, the place where Van himself communed with nature. (shrink)

This volume will be the starting point for future discussion and research.

Ideomotor actions are behaviours that are unconsciously initiated and express a thought rather than a response to a sensory stimulus. The question examined here is whether ideomotor actions can also express nonconscious knowledge. We investigated this via the use of implicit long-term semantic memory, which is not available to conscious recall. We compared accuracy of answers to yes/no questions using both volitional report and ideomotor response . Results show that when participants believed they knew the answer, responses in the two (...) modalities were similar. But when they believed they were guessing, accuracy was at chance for volitional report , but significantly higher for Ouija response . These results indicate that implicit semantic memory can be expressed through ideomotor actions. They also suggest that this approach can provide an interesting new methodology for studying implicit processes in cognition. (shrink)

In all facets of our lives, humans construct meaning to understand their place in the world and their relationships to one another and to broader environments. Within this semantic web, words, stor...

Causation is a central topic in many areas of philosophy. In metaphysics, philosophers want to know what causation is, and how it is related to laws of nature, probability, action, and freedom of the will. In epistemology, philosophers investigate how causal claims can be inferred from statistical data, and how causation is related to perception, knowledge and explanation. In the philosophy of mind, philosophers want to know whether and how the mind can be said to have causal efficacy, and in (...) ethics, whether there is a moral distinction between acts and omissions and whether the moral value of an act can be judged according to its consequences. And causation is a contested concept in other fields of enquiry, such as biology, physics, and the law. This book provides an in-depth and comprehensive overview of these and other topics, as well as the history of the causation debate from the ancient Greeks to the logical empiricists. The chapters provide surveys of contemporary debates, while often also advancing novel and controversial claims; and each includes a comprehensive bibliography and suggestions for further reading. The book is thus the most comprehensive source of information about causation currently available, and will be invaluable for upper-level undergraduates through to professional philosophers. (shrink)

Explores the avant-garde history of twentieth-century Europe through the lifestyle and music of the Sex Pistols.

The tobacco industry first began to promote the idea that a minority of smokers are 'genetically predisposed' to lung cancer in the 1950s. We used tobacco industry documents available as a result of litigation to investigate the role of the tobacco industry in funding the 'scientific bandwagon' described by Fujimura, in which genetics has come to dominate the cancer research agenda. From 1990-1995 inclusive, 52% of the project funding allocated by British American Tobacco's Scientific Research Group went to genetic research, (...) mainly based in universities and at one cancer charity. The largest project involved a pharmacogenetic research unit, based in a UK medical school, which was established with the help of tobacco industry PR consultants in 1988. The unit received half its project funding from the industry in 1992. Its main aim was to identify a minority of smokers who are supposedly 'genetically susceptible' to lung cancer, so that smoking cessation measures could be targeted at them. This aim was adopted and promoted by influential scientists at the US National Institutes of Health and the UK Medical Research Council in the late 1980s, in the run up to the Human Genome Project.BAT's research funds were also used to counter claims by others to have identified a unique 'genetic fingerprint' for tobacco smoke in lung cancer cells. We conclude that the tobacco industry has played a significant role in shaping research agendas, in particular, by promoting the idea that individual genome screening would be of benefit to public health. (shrink)

Hume is traditionally credited with inventing the ‘regularity theory’ of causation, according to which the causal relation between two events consists merely in the fact that events of the first kind are always followed by events of the second kind. Hume is also traditionally credited with two other, hugely influential positions: the view that the world appears to us as a world of unconnected events, and inductive scepticism: the view that the ‘problem of induction’, the problem of providing a justification (...) for inference from observed to unobserved regularities, is insoluble. Hume on Causation is the first major work dedicated to Hume’s views on causation in over fifteen years, and it argues that Hume does not subscribe to any of these three views. It places Hume’s interest in causation within the context of his theory of the mind and his theory of causal reasoning, arguing that Hume’s conception of causation derives from his conception of the nature of the inference from causes to effects. (shrink)

Most people believe that it is sometimes morally permissible for a person to use force to defend herself or others against harm. In Defensive Killing, Helen Frowe offers a detailed exploration of when and why the use of such force is permissible. She begins by considering the use of force between individuals, investigating both the circumstances under which an attacker forfeits her right not to be harmed, and the distinct question of when it is all-things-considered permissible to use force (...) against an attacker. Frowe then extends this enquiry to war, defending the view that we should judge the ethics of killing in war by the moral rules that govern killing between individuals. She argues that this requires us to significantly revise our understanding of the moral status of non-combatants in war. Non-combatants who intentionally contribute to an unjust war forfeit their rights not to be harmed, such that they are morally liable to attack by combatants fighting a just war. (shrink)

Helen Steward puts forward a radical critique of the foundations of contemporary philosophy of mind, arguing that it relies too heavily on insecure assumptions about the sorts of things there are in the mind--events, processes, and states. She offers a fresh investigation of these three categories, clarifying the distinctions between them, and argues that the category of state has been very widely and seriously misunderstood.

The paper considers whether psychiatric kinds can be natural kinds and concludes that they can. This depends, however, on a particular conception of ‘natural kind’. We briefly describe and reject two standard accounts – what we call the ‘stipulative account’ (according to which apparently a priori criteria, such as the possession of intrinsic essences, are laid down for natural kindhood) and the ‘Kripkean account’ (according to which the natural kinds are just those kinds that obey Kripkean semantics). We then rehearse (...) a more permissive account: Richard Boyd’s ‘homeostatic property cluster’ (HPC) account. We argue that psychiatric kinds can in principle count as natural kinds on the HPC account. Moreover, specific psychiatric kinds (Tourette’s, schizophrenia, etc.) can be natural kinds even if the category psychiatric disorder is not itself a natural kind. (shrink)

Making a Difference presents fifteen original essays on causation and counterfactuals by an international team of experts. Collectively, they represent the state of the art on these topics. The essays in this volume are inspired by the life and work of Peter Menzies, who made a difference in the lives of students, colleagues, and friends. Topics covered include: the semantics of counterfactuals, agency theories of causation, the context-sensitivity of causal claims, structural equation models, mechanisms, mental causation, causal exclusion argument, free (...) will, and the consequence argument. (shrink)

Essentialism--roughly, the view that natural kinds have discrete essences, generating truths that are necessary but knowable only _a posteriori_--is an increasingly popular view in the metaphysics of science. At the same time, philosophers of language have been subjecting Kripke’s views about the existence and scope of the necessary _a posteriori_ to rigorous analysis and criticism. Essentialists typically appeal to Kripkean semantics to motivate their radical extension of the realm of the necessary _a posteriori_; but they rarely attempt to provide any (...) semantic arguments for this extension, or engage with the critical work being done by philosophers of language. This collection brings authors on both sides together in one volume, thus helping the reader to see the connections between views in philosophy of language on the one hand and the metaphysics of science on the other. The result is a book that will have a significant impact on the debate about essentialism, encouraging essentialists to engage with debates about the semantic presuppositions that underpin their position, and, encouraging philosophers of language to engage with the metaphysical presuppositions enshrined in Kripkean semantics. (shrink)

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to introduce the term Slow Tech as a way of describing information and communication technology that is good, clean and fair. These are technologies that are human centred, environmentally sustainable and socially desirable.Design/methodology/approach– The paper's approach is based on a qualitative discourse that justifies the introduction of Slow Tech as a new design paradigm.Findings– The limits of the human body, and the need to take into account human wellbeing, the limits of the planet (...) and stakeholders' interests in decision making, all suggest the need for a new paradigm, Slow Tech, in the design of ICT and ICT systems. Three scenarios are described as case studies.Practical implications– In order to prepare the next generation of researchers and computer professionals, many different actions need to be taken. Universities and colleges need to redesign education programmes for computer scientists and engineers by introducing subjects related to the social and ethical implications of computing, and computer professionals' associations need to introduce a code of ethics or ethical analysis into their members' career development. As a result, future computer professionals who are familiar with the Slow Tech approach will be able to collaborate much more easily across the kind of cross disciplinary teams suited to design human centred, sustainable and desirable technologies.Social implications– Rather than simply focusing on the role of computer professionals, all members of society are called to play a new role in the design of future ICT scenarios. Starting a societal dialogue that involves computer professionals, users, researchers, designers, ICT industrialists, and policy makers is very much needed.Originality/value– The value of this paper is in its call for reflection followed by action. Based on an holistic approach to the design of new ICT systems, the paper advocates a new starting point for systems design: it should be based on a long-term view of the desirability and social importance of technologies, their environmental impact and sustainability, and the fairness and equity of the conditions of workers involved in the computing manufacturing processes. (shrink)

This paper argues that public statues of persons typically express a positive evaluative attitude towards the subject. It also argues that states have duties to repudiate their own historical wrongdoing, and to condemn other people’s serious wrongdoing. Both duties are incompatible with retaining public statues of people who perpetrated serious rights violations. Hence, a person’s being a serious rights violator is a sufficient condition for a state’s having a duty to remove a public statue of that person. I argue that (...) this applies no less in the case of the ‘morally ambiguous’ wrongdoer, who both accomplishes significant goods and perpetrates serious rights violations. The duty to remove a statue is a defeasible duty: like most duties, it can be defeated by lesser-evil considerations. If removing a statue would, for example, spark a violent riot that would risk unjust harm to lots of people, the duty to remove could be outweighed by the duty not to foreseeably cause unjust harm. This would provide a lesser-evil justification for keeping the statue. But it matters that the duty to remove is outweighed, rather than negated, by these consequences. Unlike when a duty is negated, one still owes something in cases of outweighing. And it especially matters that it is outweighed by the predicted consequences of wrongful behaviour by others. (shrink)

Imitation, the replication of observed behaviors, has been proposed as the crucial social learning mechanism for the generation of humanlike cultural complexity. To date, the single published experimental microsociety study that tested this hypothesis found no advantage for imitation. In contrast, the current paper reports data in support of the imitation hypothesis. Participants in “microsociety” groups built weight-bearing devices from reed and clay. Each group was assigned to one of four conditions: three social learning conditions and one asocial learning control (...) condition. Groups able to observe other participants building their devices, in contrast to groups that saw only completed devices, show evidence of successive improvement. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that imitation is required for cumulative cultural evolution. This study adds crucial data for understanding why imitation is needed for cultural accumulation, a central defining feature of our species. (shrink)

Whether upheld as heroic or reviled as terrorism, people have been willing to lay down their lives for the sake of their groups throughout history. Why? Previous theories of extreme self-sacrifice have highlighted a range of seemingly disparate factors, such as collective identity, outgroup hostility, and kin psychology. In this paper, I attempt to integrate many of these factors into a single overarching theory based on several decades of collaborative research with a range of special populations, from tribes in Papua (...) New Guinea to Libyan insurgents and from Muslim fundamentalists in Indonesia to Brazilian football hooligans. These studies suggest that extreme self-sacrifice is motivated by identity fusion, a visceral sense of oneness with the group, resulting from intense collective experiences or from perceptions of shared biology. In ancient foraging societies, fusion would have enabled warlike bands to stand united despite strong temptations to scatter and flee. The fusion mechanism has often been exploited in cultural rituals, not only by tribal societies but also in specialized cells embedded in armies, cults, and terrorist organizations. With the rise of social complexity and the spread of states and empires, fusion has also been extended to much larger groups, including doctrinal religions, ethnicities, and ideological movements. Explaining extreme self-sacrifice is not only a scientific priority but also a practical challenge as we seek a collective response to suicide, terrorism, and other extreme expressions of outgroup hostility that continue to bedevil humanity today. (shrink)

Emotion processing is known to be impaired in psychopathy, but less is known about the cognitive mechanisms that drive this. Our study examined experiencing and suppression of emotion processing in psychopathy. Participants, violent offenders with varying levels of psychopathy, viewed positive and negative images under conditions of passive viewing, experiencing and suppressing. Higher scoring psychopathics were more cardiovascularly responsive when processing negative information than positive, possibly reflecting an anomalously rewarding aspect of processing normally unpleasant material. When required to experience emotional (...) response, by ‘getting into the feeling’ of the emotion conveyed by a negative image, higher factor 1 psychopathic individuals showed reduced responsiveness, suggesting that they were less able to do this. These data, together with the absence of corresponding differences in subjective self-report might be used to inform clinical strategies for normalising emotion processing in psychopathic offenders to improve treatment outcome, and reduce risk amongst this client group. (shrink)

The paper considers and opposes the view that processes are best thought of as continuants, to be differentiated from events mainly by way of the fact that the latter, but not the former, are entities with temporal parts. The motivation for the investigation, though, is not so much the defeat of what is, in any case, a rather implausible claim, as the vindication of some of the ideas and intuitions that the claim is made in order to defend — and (...) the grounding of those ideas and intuitions in a more plausible metaphysics than is provided by the continuant view. It is argued that in addition to a distinction between events and processes there is room and need for a third category, that of the individual process, which can be illuminatingly compared with the idea of a substance. Individual processes indeed share important metaphysical features with substantial continuants, but they do not lack temporal parts. Instead, it is argued that individual processes share with substantial continuants an important property I call ‘modal robustness in virtue of form’. The paper explains what this property is, and further suggests that the category of individual process, thus understood, might be of considerable value to the philosophy of action. (shrink)

In the second half of the 19th century, anthropology rode the coat-tails of modernity, adopting new printing technologies, following new travel networks, and gaining increasing access to Indigenous people as colonialism spread and new policies were developed to contain and control people in settler-colonial states. The early innovator in kinship studies Lewis Henry Morgan and his two greatest proteges, Lorimer Fison and A. W. Howitt, working respectively in the United States, Fiji, and Australia, epitomised this conflation of governance, technologies of (...) representation, and anthropology. They corresponded on the alterity of kinship systems across increasingly regularised postal routes, and developed new forms of collecting and new diagrammatic representations of kinship using developments at the press. Nineteenth-century kinship studies were focused exclusively on relationships formed through biology and descent, and there was little recognition of kinship making beyond these forms. This was especially significant for Howitt, whose closest Aboriginal interlocutor, Tulaba, claimed him as a brogan (brother), according to Gunaikurnai kinship paradigms. This article tracks the links between the collection and publication of kinship material in the questionnaires and the books of the latter part of the 19th century across the English-speaking world and the outcomes for Indigenous peoples, as arguments for distinctive kinship systems helped define their ‘primitiveness’ and dismissed Aboriginal attempts to forge kinship links across the settler/Indigenous divide. (shrink)