Studying In Addressing Inequities within Anthropology

Social Inequalities ANTH 2301 Studying In: Addressing Inequities within Anthropology This section looks at how anthropologists have examined how their practices and methods may be contributing to injustices within their own field. The 1972 phrase "studying up" is used by anthropologist Laura Nader to advocate for greater study on powerful individuals and organisations. This chapter, in line with anthropologist Pamela Runestad (2017), employs the term "studying in" to discuss how anthropologists have examined their own methods, training, practices, and presumptions as well as how anthropology as a field may actually be a contributing factor to disparities for practitioners, students, and the communities that anthropologists work with. Anthropologist Leith Mullings (2005) contends that although anthropology is the source of the concept of race, critical studies of race and racism did not originate in anthropology. According to Mullings, this is because anthropologists are still at odds about how race and racism fit into the field or how racial categories have developed and endured in society. Mullings further contends that a large number of cultural anthropologists have concentrated on ethnicity and have became "race avoidant," failing to include race at all in their ethnographies. As a result, Mullings cautions, "race avoidant" anthropologists overlook racism (Mullings 2005, 670). Anthropologists have recently examined the White supremacist foundations of knowledge production and anthropological practices. Maria Franklin and colleagues, anthropologists, talk about how archaeology has been used all over the world to justify xenophobic nationalism, scientific racism, the removal of Native Americans and Indigenous peoples from their lands, and imperialism (Franklin et al. 2020, 754). Nonetheless, these anthropologists also talk about how to rethink archaeology to carry out anti-racism work, particularly in light of the Black Lives Matter movement. Archaeology does not exist in a vacuum. These initiatives include looking for study locations that reflect the lived realities of minority populations and supporting the increasing number of members of minority groups as academic colleagues. A study to identify Black archaeologists and excavators who had worked for Colonial Williamsburg in the 1930s but had not previously been recognised was started in 2020 by Meredith Poole, a researcher at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation in Williamsburg, Virginia. In addition, one of the oldest Black churches in the United States, the First Baptist, is now being excavated by Colonial Williamsburg archaeologists. These kinds of projects are vital to the scholarly quest for the truth. This information not only corrects errors in the historical record, but it also modifies the direction of scholarly research going forward. According to research by archaeologists Kylie Quave and colleagues (2020), beginning archaeology courses offered in the US have historically been problematic. However, instructors are now utilising anti-colonial and decolonial theories to modify their curricula in an effort to advance equity in the field. Quave and her colleagues discovered that students enrolled in the updated curriculum were more equipped to identify the disparities in the field and had more nuanced understandings of the advantages and disadvantages of producing archaeological knowledge. The Association of Black Anthropologists (ABA), the Society of Black Archaeologists (SBA), and the Black in Bioanthropology Collective (BiBA) together made a statement in April 2021 against the ownership and improper usage of the Africa family's and MOVE's children's bones. The MOVE complex, which housed "a revolutionary group of Black people opposed to capitalist growth and committed to environmental justice and interspecies harmony," was struck by two bombs dropped by the city of Philadelphia in May 1985 (ABA, SBA, and BiBA 2021). Eleven MOVE members, including five children, were murdered by the explosions within the facility, and the neighbourhood was completely demolished, with at least 61 homes destroyed. Officials from Philadelphia engaged forensic anthropologists Alan Mann and Janet Monge to identify the remains. Several news agencies reported in April 2021 that Mann or Monge moved the remains of the two young victims, Tree Africa and Delisha Africa, between the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University while maintaining personal ownership of them following the inquiry. Furthermore, neither the remains' location nor their repatriation to the deceased's family were disclosed to them. In response, Mike Africa Jr., who was six years old when the Philadelphia police detonated the bomb on MOVE, received support and his requests were republished by the ABA, SBA, and BiBA. The joint declaration recognised the long history of anti-Black prejudice and White supremacy in the field and urged White anthropologists to take proactive steps to stop the harm done to non-White people. The term "decolonizing anthropology" is used to highlight the obligation of anthropologists to work for the improvement and empowerment of those who are most marginalised and dispossessed in the 2010 book Decolonizing Anthropology: Moving Further towards an Anthropology for Liberation, edited by anthropologist Faye V. Harrison. The main objective of the Decolonizing Anthropology volume is "to encourage more anthropologists to accept the challenge of working to free the study of humankind from the prevailing forces of global inequality and dehumanisation and to locate it firmly in the complex struggle for genuine transformation," even though the term "decolonization" refers to different ideas in different disciplines (Harrison 2010, 10). There is still much work to be done in the subject to decolonize anthropology as a whole, including decolonizing its subfields and decolonizing pedagogy and methodologies to create more equal learning environments.