There’s been another murder on academic Twitter.
PSA: Bioarchaeologists hate this woman and her book too.
Any bioarch/osteology program worth its salt has lengthy discussions of ethics early on and plenty of discussion of the importance of NAGPRA and the various equivalents around the world (it’s kind of different in Europe because they’re our dead and land for reburial is expensive and very limited and the relevant laws here reflect that difference).
When Repatriation and Erasing the Past came out the main bioarchaeology association in the UK wrote a letter to the publisher soundly condemning the book and stating that the entire british field was appalled such an abhorrent book full of ‘out-dated colonial perspectives’ had been published. The publisher did apologise and take various actions, including a donation to the Association on American Indian Affairs, but unfortunately didn’t remove the book from publication.
Weiss has stuck to her guns consistently and been shouted down/caused fury at conferences, including one of the main anthopology conferences in the US, because of it.
As a side note, posting remains on social media is also generally considered a Bad Idea/ethically dubious and her twitter is full of that, not just her icon. If she was a student at my department and posted those pictures the lecturers would rip her a new one.
TLDR: almost all anthropologists/bioarchaeologists are just as horrified by this woman as everyone else.
Edit: Just went to see how bad her blog was and she keeps getting worse. According to her the fact that there’s evidence of pre-contact slavery and mistreatment of captives in the Americas is something we need to talk about more because that somehow justifies her being racist? jfc
She also claims that medieval Londoners were just as exploited and marginalised as Native Americans, which is wrong and ridiculous on so many levels that I don’t even know where to begin.
Pretty sure she’s published at least one paper with her ex-husband that’s basically phrenology. (Phrenology, for those who don’t know, is looking at the shape of the skull and using that to make claims about people’s intelligence, personality, etc. It’s pseudo-scientific nonsense, obviously. When it was first invented people were interested in using it to figure out if someone was likely to be a murderer. To the surprise of literally no one ever, once it hit America it became all about being profoundly racist instead). Their paper was ‘remember that bullshit about intrinsic racial IQ differences? Well we measured some skulls (and some kneecaps. I shit you not.) and we’re pretty sure the bullshit racist idea is right!
There are some incredibly shitty people in academia - it’s not the liberal haven some like to make it out to be - but every now and then there’s still someone that makes me go ‘okay but HOW do they still have a job??’
