Friday, February 7, 2014

Reconciling Race in Forensic Anthropology



As a biological anthropologist, I find the topic of race to be rather compelling since it, at best, is a poor indicator of human variation. Race's relationship with forensic anthropology is particularly interesting since forensic anthropologists are often expected to be able to determine the race of deceased individuals looking only at skeletal material. As we have already discussed in class, race is not based on biological categorizations, so how exactly are forensic anthropologists able to determine race?

To answer that question, "Race-Reconciled" Re-Debunks Race is a blog post that draws from a recent article in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology that explains in detail how forensic anthropologists determine "race" using statistical programs such as FORDISC:

"Wow. Forensic anthropologists do not determine race from bones. What actually happens is forensic anthropologists match bones probabilistically against known existing assortments. These assortments can be anything socially relevant. Changing the context of bone discovery could lead to different predictive classifications-of the same bones."


So, if forensic anthropologists are not really determining race from bones, then why do they continue to perpetuate the 'race' myth?

Pragmatically, forensic anthropologists are expected to be able to determine race. Race is an important social construction in our society. Therefore, it is often required to be able to accurately identify individuals in a legal context. Consequently, it is an assessment that cannot be ignored by professional forensic anthropologists. This situation is essentially a catch-22; attempting to identify 'race' perpetuates the assumption that race is biological, but not attempting to identify 'race' may delay or deny justice for the deceased.

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