Western notions of modernity have situated human society apart from nature, which encompasses those spaces and beings that are unmodified and unsullied by human activity. The Western conception of nature/society can be contrasted with that of the Cofán—an Indigenous people of Amazonian Ecuador and Colombia—who identify as tsampini can’jen’sundeccu (dwellers of the forest). The Cofán…
Category: research
Science as an Orientalizing Field
Science is a Western form of knowledge production and can be divided into three forms: 1) science as a set of methods for investigating the world we inhabit, 2) the pool of knowledge containing the data and conclusions drawn by science, and 3) a social institution through which empirical studies of the world are carried…
Born to Be Cute: Charisma and Niche Construction
As a multispecies ethnographer and evolutionary anthropologist, I am interested in the ways in which ecological interaction between various taxa affects their selection pressures and evolutionary trajectories. I spend much of my time thinking about niche construction–the ways in which organisms modify their own and others’ evolutionary niches (Laland et al. 2016)–and how we as…
Science as a Structure of Violence
The study of human diversity and subsequent racialisation of people has been examined and critiqued but has escaped interrogation as an institution by which structural violence is enacted. Works such as Is Science Racist? (2017) by Jonathan Marks have evaluated science as a means of reproducing culturally held racist beliefs and justifying subordination through cultural…
A Brief History of Race in the Western Thought
Race, as a concept, has important ontology in American society. In order to understand the relationship between race, genetic research, and the American class structure, it is necessary to first understand the historical production of race. The following section does not intend to be a comprehensive history of race but merely highlight trends in Europe…
Abstract for “Geno-colonisation: How science executes structural violence”
Social institutions such as healthcare and education have been examined through a lens of structural violence— the systematic ways by which social institutions place certain members at a disadvantage thus causing various types of harm. However, science has escaped such scrutiny. In a post-colonial world, new forms of colonisation have taken the place of traditional…
‘Archived’ My Last Project: Genetics, Race, and Class
One of the goals of contemporary human population genetics is to understand the distribution of humans globally, using population clusters to designate groups of people. Some researchers in the 21st century use this clustering to argue for the cogency of traditional Western racial types (see: Jorde and Wooding 2004 and Risch et al. 2002). However,…
