More than Ethics: Changing Approaches to Research in Human Biology

Work in biological anthropology and human biology that engages with, extracts, manipulates, analyzes, and disseminates biological data from and associated with people requires serious ethical investment as central to method, theory, and practice. However, ethics is not enough. Moving beyond a call for better (or more) ethics, there is a core need for anthropological, historical, antiracist/anticolonialist method and theory in dealing with human data (existing, newly collected, and future collections). But there are structures in the academy, historical, financial, hierarchical, discriminatory, that impede sincere and effective actions to make such changes. Encouragingly, calls for structural change and some actions entailing it are under way. But individual efforts are not enough—systemic, profession-level processes need to be addressed.