Dr.Allysha Winburn is an associate professor of anthropology.
She is a Diplomate of the American Board of Forensic Anthropology, a
biological anthropologist with forensic and bioarchaeological
expertise. Her research focuses on skeletal aging and age estimation,
the skeletal embodiment of structural inequity, and the ritual use of
human remains. More specifically, her job is to measure the length of
limb bones to estimate height and examines bone development to
estimate the age of death. She studies the shape of the pelvis to find
clues to the person's likely sex. Until recently, Winburn measured
skull features, such as its overall length and the width of the nasal
aperture, to make what forensic anthropologists call ancestry
estimates. By statistically comparing the measurements with those of
skulls of known identity, she could predict continental ancestry and
the commonly used racial categories that may correspond to it. In
other words, she could predict whether she identified as black,
white, Hispanic, Asian or Native American.
Dr Winburn, however, is not alone in questioning whether or not she should continue to do so.
Over the past year, the debate over ancestry estimation has exploded
in US forensic anthropology, with a flurry of papers examining its
accuracy, questioning methods and challenging assumptions. A
committee of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences is now
drafting a new standard that, if adopted, would steer practitioners
away from racial categories and towards more specific social and
biological populations, such as Japanese instead of Asian, and is
likely to be voted on by the end of the year. The question arises
whether these ancestry estimates cause discrimination.
Translating
skeletal data into race, a socially determined category, still
reifies the misconception that race is biological, argue Bethard and
DiGangi. This work cannot be taken for granted. Other anthropologists
such as Stull, however, think that ancestry estimates are important
tools. He also states in an article that in the United States, race
is included in missing person reports, police files and almost every
other description of a person.
The fact that ancestry estimation sometimes works 'does not mean in any
way, that races are biological categories', points out Agustín
Fuentes, an anthropologist at Princeton University who is Hispanic.
There is no list of skeletal, physical or genetic traits shared by
all people of a certain race; in fact, there is much more variation
within race categories than between them.
At the same time, 'we are all a product of environment, evolution and
history' says Ann Ross, a forensic anthropologist at North Carolina
State University. People who share a deep evolutionary history and
more recent social contexts, such as an industrial lifestyle or a
history of discrimination, also tend to share certain biological
traits, including similar cranial measurements.
She and other
anthropologists question whether current ancestry estimates are
accurate enough to be useful. Winburn favours the move to population
affinity, but argues that more research is needed to ensure it lives
up to its potential. For example, many of the field's reference
samples are themselves classified by social race or continental
ancestry and will need to be refined for population affinity studies.
"We will have to be creative," Winburn says. In the
meantime, Winburn will not provide ancestry estimates until she is
able to adopt a population approach that does not focus on reductive
racial categories. She no longer wants to risk using a tool that he
believes will do more harm than good.
