What Is Bioethos?

Abstract

From its nineteenth-century outset, anthropology’s studies of human remains have been tied to colonial projects with insidious ends. The prior chapter made this point clear. In the U.S., land appropriation and necropolitical governance by Euro-Americans yielded scientific opportunities and sizeable skeletal collections. These payoffs came at the expense of various disenfranchised groups. Reciprocally, anthropological observations about bounded, racial categories were consolidated to exclude Others—dispossessed Indians and enslaved Blacks—from the body politic. Ideologies of Whiteness informed emergent understandings of American citizenship..