Investigating identification disparities in forensic anthropology casework

The Decolonial Turn in Forensic Anthropology

Forensic anthropology has matured into a formidable and fully fledged discipline that includes specialty graduate programs, diversified employment opportunities, an expanding scope, and improved regulation. As part of this maturity, and in step with other branches of science and the humanities, forensic anthropology has also experienced an upswing in discourse on decolonization and decoloniality. From its inception and throughout its history, anthropology has been a colonial venture that observes humans under a Western gaze. As a critique of the universality and superiority of Western systems of knowledge, the decolonial turn constitutes alternative ways of thinking and doing and provides space for these epistemes to circulate and thrive. In this synthesis, decolonization efforts within forensic anthropology are organized into five "C's" of appraisal: categories, casework, curricula, competence, and collections. Namely, these efforts feature the debates around sex, ancestry, and structural vulnerability estimation (categories); the expansion of humanitarian action and community involvement and the challenges to positivism, neutrality, and objectivity (casework); the assessment of how we educate, train, and value expertise (curricula and competence); and the interrogation of how we extract knowledge from the dead (collections). From the undercurrents of these five, a sixth C, care, is unveiled. Given the academic and practical value of forensic anthropology, especially vis-à-vis its consequences for colonized peoples, these discourses become imperative for the continued relevance of a colonialist field in a postcolonial world.

No Bones About It: Sex Is Binary

Anthropologists have led the way in formulating techniques that reveal skeletal differences between males and females. Understanding of physical differences in the pelvis related to childbirth, hormonal impacts on bones, and extensive comparative studies have provided anthropologists with an array of traits and measurements that help them estimate sex using just bones. Forensic anthropologists and bioarcheologists are improving their ability to differentiate males and females by increasing research on a variety of postcranial bones and through the use of molecular data, especially new methods called proteomics, to identify sex in prepubescent juveniles. As remains from more cultures and time periods are studied, sex identification will continue to improve, because skeletal sex differences are in large part biologically determined. Yet, anthropologists have also been at the forefront of arguing that sex lies on a spectrum. Anthropologists who view sex as on a spectrum may deter sex identification progress; from their perspective, an individual of an undetermined sex may just be a nonbinary individual. Anthropologists who consider sex is on a spectrum are coming to this conclusion in part because they are looking for anatomical ideals, mistaking pathology for variation, and confusing independent variables with dependent variables. Nonetheless, anthropologists need to continue to improve sex identification techniques to reconstruct the past accurately, which may reveal less strict sex roles than previously presumed and help with the identification of crime victims. Forensic anthropologists should also increase their efforts to identify whether individuals have undergone medical procedures intended to change one's gender due to the current rise in transitioning individuals.