Race and Ancestry in Forensic Anthropology

Speaking of Race

The idea that race is a biological reality has hung on longest and strongest in the parts of biological anthropology that deal with skeletal remains. In this episode we talk with two forensic anthropologists, Sean Tallman and Allysha Winburn, about how typological notions of race and ancestry have changed over time in this segment of the discipline. They have published a recent paper discussing this change (Tallman, S. D., Parr, N. M., & Winburn, A. P. (2021). Assumed Differences; Unquestioned Typologies: The Oversimplification of Race and Ancestry in Forensic Anthropology. Forensic Anthropology, Early View, 1-24. doi:https://doi.org/10.5744/fa.2020.0046). Additional resources: J. Bindon, M. Peterson, & L. J. Weaver (Producer). (2017, 11/14/2017). Race and the Human Genome Project [Retrieved from http://speakingofrace.ua.edu/podcast/race-and-the-human-genome-project Bindon, J. R. (2020). Race in the wake of the Human Genome Project. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342215956_Race_in_the_wake_of_the_Human_Genome_Project Crews, D. E., & Bindon, J. R. (1991). Ethnicity as a taxonomic tool in biomedical and biosocial research. Ethnicity & disease, 1(1), 42-49. Dixon, R. B. (1923). The Racial History of Man. New York: C. Scribner's Sons. Holden, C. (2008). Personal genomics. The touchy subject of ‘race’. Science (New York, N.Y.), 322(5903), 839. Hooton, E. A. (1931). Up from the Ape. New York: Macmillan. Lieberman, L., Kirk, R. C., & Littlefield, A. (2003). Perishing Paradigm: Race—1931–99. American Anthropologist, 105(1), 110-113. Morning, A. (2011). The nature of race. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wagner, J. K., Yu, J. H., Ifekwunigwe, J. O., Harrell, T. M., Bamshad, M. J., & Royal, C. D. (2017). Anthropologists' views on race, ancestry, and genetics. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 162(2), 318-327.