"[This] system was not made for [you]:" A case for decolonial Scientia

The disposability and inclusion of Brown bodies

While there has been increased awareness of the ethics of curation, research, and teaching with human skeletal remains, there has been little recognition of the millions of skeletal remains from South Asia that were harvested illegally and/or unethically for educational institutions globally for over a century. This article gives a contextualization of the unique history and nature of anatomical teaching collections, and why they are an important locus for a decolonized and antiracist biological anthropology. I present the historical background of how the exportation and commodification of Indian bodies came to dominate the global bone trade. I also discuss how historical necropolitics explicitly erased the identity and objectified South Asian people made into study skeletons, and the way our current practices continue to uphold colonial violence. Finally, I discuss what we might do with these historical collections and the ways that inclusion of Brown voices is critical to ethical practice.

Caribbeanist casualties: Interrogating the application of structural vulnerability to forensic anthropology

Biocultural approaches are instrumental to the evolution of forensic anthropology, and this practice must first reckon with its own violences before it can ethically address structural violence at large. We take up the issue of coerced migrations of Caribbean populations and forensic practice at the southern border of the United States, to problematize how forensic identification standards contribute to the casualties of ethnic erasures and potentially exacerbate structural vulnerability of Black Caribbean populations. We put forward that forensic anthropology is complicit in maintaining inequality in death and identification for Black Caribbean migrants through the absence of necessary reference data and methods of population-affinity estimation, and the adoption of fundamentally flawed linguistic constructions of Blackness. Pushing forensic anthropology to continue engaging with the colonial logics that have shaped its understanding and motivation for quantifying human biologies is key in efforts toward a progressive disciplinary future.

William Montague Cobb: Near the African diasporic origins of activist and biocultural anthropology

William Montague Cobb, AB, MD, PhD, was the first African American PhD in anatomy and physical anthropology. He produced 1,100 publications while a professor at Howard University. His influence on the civil rights struggle from the 1930s to 1970s was profound as were his contributions to science and medical history. This article shows how he continued the activist and interdisciplinary traditions of African diasporic intellectuals and that these innovated what is today labeled biocultural anthropology, which focuses on the political, economic, and other societal influences on human biology and health. The human biology of the White "mainstream" has tended toward reductionism, biodeterminism, and eugenics. It drew a causal arrow from biology to society. Had they been able to listen to Black intellectuals, the world might have avoided the tragedy of mid-20th century eugenics and its long continuing biodeterministic shadow.

The constraints of racialization: How classification and valuation hinder scientific research on human variation

Human biological variation has historically been studied through the lens of racialization. Despite a general shift away from the use of overt racial terminologies, the underlying racialized frameworks used to describe and understand human variation still remain. Even in relatively recent anthropological and biomedical work, we can observe clear manifestations of such racial thinking. This paper shows how classification and valuation are two specific processes which facilitate racialization and hinder attempts to move beyond such frameworks. The bias induced by classification distorts descriptions of phenotypic variation in a way that erroneously portrays European populations as more variable than others. Implicit valuation occurs in tandem with classification and produces narratives of superiority/inferiority for certain phenotypic variants without an objective biological basis. The bias of racialization is a persistent impediment stemming from the inheritance of scientific knowledge developed under explicitly racial paradigms. It is also an internalized cognitive distortion cultivated through socialization in a world where racialization is inescapable. Though undeniably challenging, this does not present an insurmountable barrier, and this bias can be mitigated through the critical evaluation of past work, the active inclusion of marginalized perspectives, and the direct confrontation of institutional structures enforcing racialized paradigms.