For Goodness' Sake: The Coloniality of Research Ethics in Biological Anthropology

ABSTRACT

Modern science has emerged in relation with European colonization whereby virtuous logics have often animated dis/possessions and governing authorities over Indigenous Peoples and their territories. Indigenous Peoples have long resisted extractive and exploitative scientific practices. So too have we/they invested in governing scientific knowledge production and the ethical conditions regulating it. Research ethics are suffused with questions of governance, including how we regulate knowledge production and how we might analyze and disrupt their coloniality. In the case of science, the advancement of ethics governing research practice has been closely linked with notions of goodness. While this discourse is evident across multiple fields, here we engage with the ramifications of goodness in biological anthropology and genetics research in relation to Indigenous Peoples. We evaluate the ways that research ethics operate through possessive and virtuous logics as regulatory mechanisms in the production of scientific knowledge about Indigenous Peoples. When research with, about, and affecting Indigenous Peoples is approached through frameworks of goodness, inclusion, representation, and reconciliation, research ethics can obscure the colonial power dynamics shaping knowledge production. We argue that research ethics alone cannot account for or upend the coloniality of research even as adherence to institutional research ethics facilitates the appearance of good research praxis. Instead, the coloniality of research ethics operates precisely through benevolence and good intentions.

1. Introduction

For as long as Indigenous Peoples have resisted extractive and exploitative research practices characteristic of some modern sciences, so too have we/they ¹ had investments in governing the ethical conditions regulating scientific knowledge production. Research ethics are suffused with questions of governance, including how we regulate knowledge production and how we might analyze and disrupt their coloniality. In the case of scientific fields, including biological anthropology, the advancement of ethics governing research practices has been closely linked with notions of goodness. Here, our interest is in the coloniality of goodness as it operates through research ethics and data sharing. While this discourse is evident across multiple fields, here we engage with the ramifications of goodness in the history of biological anthropology and genetics research in relation to Indigenous Peoples. We evaluate the ways that research ethics operate as regulatory mechanisms animated by possessive logics of colonizing power in the production of knowledge about Indigenous Peoples, lands, and relations.

We begin by drawing on critical Indigenous studies and specifically the works of Moreton‐Robinson (2011, 2015) and Million (2013) to analyze the colonial production and possessive logics of virtue, goodness, and ethics. We then provide a brief genealogy analyzing the relational production of science, anthropology, goodness, and colonialism in the context of the Americas. Next, we draw on Moreton‐Robinson and Million's theorizations of goodness to analyze the development and deployment of institutionalized research ethics in biological anthropology and genetics. Specifically, we return to the landmark case of geneticist James Neel, his research among the Yanomami, and the scandal and ethical inquiry into his work that was sparked ahead of the publication of Patrick Tierney's Darkness in El Dorado (Tierney 2000). Finally, we briefly turn to the development of open data principles in biological anthropology, with specific reference to correspondence in the American Journal of Biological Anthropology (AJBA) since 2020. Taken together, we aim to analyze the ways that the production of good science in biological anthropology is bound up in and maintains colonial power dynamics in relation to Indigenous Peoples. When research with, about, and affecting Indigenous Peoples is approached through liberal frameworks of goodness, inclusion, representation, and reconciliation, research ethics can obscure the colonial power dynamics shaping a given project (Kolopenuk 2025). We argue that institutional research ethics alone cannot account for or upend the coloniality of research even as adherence to institutional research ethics facilitates the appearance of good research praxis. Instead, the coloniality of research ethics operates precisely through benevolence and good intentions.

Here we offer a critical intervention into the coloniality of research ethics. Crucially, this analysis should not be misunderstood or oversimplified as a call to abandon obligations to existing ethical principles in research. While research ethics cannot be separated from the colonial systems through which they were formed, neither should they be ignored. National and international ethical principles governing research grew out of, and in response to, multiple histories of scientific violence as mechanisms intended to reduce some forms of harm. As such, contemporary research ethics represent a deeply compromised yet nonetheless minimum responsibility of scientists to redress the ongoing violences embedded within the histories of their fields. Yet, this reality should not prevent our creative capacities to analyze and disturb the coloniality of goodness in research and the ways it maintains some forms of harm even as it reduces others. We therefore seek to analyze the normativities of research ethics and unmask the dis/possessing functions of their goodness—even as we live, think, and work within and through them. Here we excavate a regulatory mechanism of colonial power whereby possessive logics and virtue are deployed as strategic devices (Moreton‐Robinson 2015) in the production of scientific knowledge.

2. Critical Indigenous Studies and the Goodness of Colonialism

Critical Indigenous studies scholars have long critiqued the coloniality of research (e.g., Smith 2021) and the goodness of colonizing nation‐states. We draw inspiration from and extend key works among these critiques, including Moreton‐Robinson's (2011, 2015) theorization of patriarchal white sovereignty. Patriarchal white sovereignty describes the foundational power structures of modern colonial nation‐states such as the United States, Canada, Australia, and Aotearoa/New Zealand which are rooted in (1) racial and gendered ontologies (the rightful subject is the patriarchal white male), (2) possessive logics (the colonizing nation‐state is the rightful owner of Indigenous territories), and (3) strategic uses of virtue in constituting possession (colonizing power over Indigenous Peoples is deployed as benevolence to justify and maintain control). We draw additional insight from Million's (2013) related analyses of humanitarianism, Indigenous rights discourses, and reconciliation relating to colonial governance.

Extending these works to the ethical landscape of knowledge production, we argue that in certain colonial contexts, concepts of goodness, morality, virtue, and ethics must be understood not merely as abstract ideals, but as historically contingent, dis/possessive devices that justify and sustain colonial governance. Goodness operates as part of what we are describing as the coloniality of research ethics—regulatory mechanisms that conceal their possessive logics and investments in patriarchal white sovereignty. Moreton‐Robinson argues that anthropology, among other disciplines, “have operated as normalizing modes of rationality that facilitate procedures of Indigenous subjugation and mask non‐Indigenous investments in relations of patriarchal white sovereignty” (131) Moreton‐Robinson's (2015). Extending her analysis, we aim to show that the moral discourses and policies productive of nation‐state sovereignty get deployed through institutional research ethics and biological anthropology, among other fields. Virtue, in this sense, refers to the production of goodness and ethical conduct that ultimately protect non‐Indigenous interests in ownership, control, and knowledge production while eroding Indigenous self‐determination and sovereignty.

Moreton‐Robinson's (2011, 2015) theorization of virtue describes how colonial nation‐states like Canada, the United States, Australia, and Aotearoa/New Zealand mobilize discourses of benevolence and good intentions to justify ongoing Indigenous dispossession. She demonstrates how colonial nation‐states strategically deploy virtue in ways that maintain patriarchal white possession and sovereignty on the “ground of moral value” (Moreton‐Robinson 2015, 189). By analyzing over 20 years of contestation and then subsequent endorsement of the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) by Canada, the United States, Australia, and Aotearoa/New Zealand, Moreton‐Robinson concludes that these patriarchal white nation‐states practice violence against Indigenous Peoples with a strategically “calibrated moral compass” that changes its position over time (Moreton‐Robinson 2011, 641). First, these nation‐states mobilized virtue to account for their dissent when they were the only states among 148 countries to vote against the Declaration and again when they finally endorsed the document. Their application of virtue in these seemingly contradictory instances, according to Moreton‐Robinson, exemplifies the fundamental properties of patriarchal white nation‐states: the virtue of their naturalized possession of land and legal authority against which Indigenous sovereignty is to be reconciled through, among other regulatory mechanisms, rights. In this usage, “rights” operate as minor concessions in the form of legal recognition, but without relinquishing the condition of nation‐state sovereignty. Moreton‐Robinson powerfully demonstrates how claims of moral value, sovereignty, and rights function to reaffirm rather than relinquish colonial power and possession—insights which we will bring to bear on the coloniality of research ethics. As she argues, patriarchal white sovereignty invokes virtue to manage critiques of colonial possession while asserting continued control over Indigenous Peoples, lands, and relations.

Million (2013) provides a complementary critique. By offering a genealogy of human rights discourses about Indigenous Peoples in Canada after WWII (and to a lesser extent in the United States), she explains that humanitarian discourses of rights, trauma, healing, and reconciliation have tended to translate Indigenous political struggles (and the novel ontologies that animate their sovereignties) into manageable, apolitical issues of individual suffering and animate nation‐state benevolence as a response. Million deconstructs how Indigenous Peoples now live in a time where humanitarianism has become colonial politics by “different means” and how this reality has shaped an age of Indigenous human rights. Million points to the creation of an international human rights apparatus through, for example, the United Nations and UNDRIP, the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP), and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC). To connect Million's argument with Moreton‐Robinson, Indigenous sovereignty gets accommodated through rights, which, because of their framing in nation‐state law, paradoxically reproduce patriarchal white sovereignty (Moreton‐Robinson 2015, 133). Importantly, the moral landscape of nation‐state sovereignty includes more than just goodness. Million adds that shame has become a currency in the economy of humanitarianism and is deployed tactically by Indigenous and non‐Indigenous Peoples alike. In this frame, both goodness and badness become frequencies that uphold the legitimacy of regulatory mechanisms and disciplinary fields and their moralizing obligations to address the “deficits” of Indigenous Peoples rather than challenge the colonial violence that originated and continues to produce problems like “health gaps” (Kolopenuk 2024). Taken together, humanitarianism undermines and depoliticizes the exercise of Indigenous sovereignty in relation to colonial nation‐states, where the deployment of humanitarian aid reifies, rather than relinquishes, the foundational conditions of colonial power. Indeed, humanitarianism operates as a form of colonizing goodness in that it addresses some of the effects of dispossession but leaves intact the colonial power structures that produced and continue to produce such dispossessions.

Drawing on Moreton‐Robinson and Million's arguments to analyze the coloniality of research ethics, we argue that the field of biological anthropology's moral compass is not broken; it is calibrated to produce itself as virtuous while safeguarding the continuity of colonial possession in scientific knowledge production. In biological anthropology and genetics, institutionalized research ethics and their ongoing elaborations are often invoked as evidence of the field's moral progress. Yet these exact mechanisms can depoliticize and conceal colonial conditions of knowledge production, reducing the redress of colonial violence to procedural compliance and leaving unquestioned their colonizing conditions of power in relation to Indigenous Peoples. Institutional ethics become a regulatory mechanism that authorizes knowledge production, ultimately recasting the possessive logic of patriarchal white sovereignty as a liberal‐scientific imperative to know and to know ethically. Said differently, in addition to regulating research conduct, institutional research ethics produce a moral authority that often obscures the underlying power dynamics of colonial knowledge production that constitute it. In this configuration, ethics are not outside of colonialism but are produced by and productive of colonial logics, mechanisms, and apparatuses shaping the conditions through which research with, about, and affecting Indigenous Peoples becomes possible and legitimated.

3. The Relational Production of Science, Anthropology, Goodness, and Colonialism

The primary intervention offered here is a critical analysis of institutional research ethics as regulatory mechanisms deployed through the logic of goodness that operate to secure colonial dis/possessions in knowledge production. These features of research ethics inherit a long history of interrelation between goodness, science, and colonialism, which we briefly consider here. In the context of much of the European colonial world, the natural, human, and social sciences emerged in connection with colonization whereby possessive and virtuous logics have often animated dis/possessions and governing authorities over Indigenous Peoples, their territories, and their knowledge systems (e.g., Brockway 1979; Adas 1989; Headrick 1981; MacLeod 2000; Anderson 2000, 2002; Wynter 2003; Schiebinger 2004, 2005; Harrison 2005; McNeil 2005; Anderson 2008; Harding 2008; Seth 2009; da Silva 2015; Moreton‐Robinson 2015; Subramaniam et al. 2017; Kolopenuk 2020; Goss 2021). While the advent of European colonization in the 15th century preceded the development of what might be understood as modern sciences in the 17th century, accounts of the natural world produced from the earliest phases of European colonization were among the antecedents and conditions of possibility through which modern disciplinary fields took shape (Goss 2021). Importantly, it is not merely that scientific thought and its precursors expanded with European colonization to categorize and explain the colonial world, but that colonization and modern disciplines were “relationally produced” (Kolopenuk 2020) and would not have existed as we know them without the other (Goss 2021). What have become known as the natural, human, and social sciences, therefore, cannot be understood apart from colonialism insofar as they grew out of mis/representations and appropriations of Indigenous Peoples, lands, resources, and knowledges.

In the context of Indigenous Peoples in what is now the Americas, the precursors of modern anthropology are partly rooted within the written accounts of early colonizers and travel writings about non‐Western peoples produced for and circulated within Europe since the late 15th and early 16th centuries (Niekerk 2024). While these accounts are often not considered the proper objects of anthropological knowledge production or as residing within the discipline as it began to formalize across subsequent centuries, these writings are among the antecedents upon which the development of modern anthropology depended. The disciplinary formation of anthropology dates to at least the late 18th century, as an outgrowth of natural history during the Enlightenment which focused on questions of the “nature of Man,” debates centered on how to make sense of human difference in a colonial world, and the development of empirical methods to address such questions (e.g., Foucault 1966; Wynter 2003; Niekerk 2024).

In this article, we center North American Anthropology and its various subfields in the context of our analysis of the colonization of what has become known as the Americas, ethical goodness, and scientific knowledge production. From at least the advent of Boasian Anthropology in North America, Indigenous Peoples have been central objects of formal anthropological study. Perhaps no other academic discipline in the Americas owes its existence more directly to the extraction and study of Indigenous Peoples bodies, cultures, languages, and material patrimony (e.g., Deloria 1969; LaRocque 1975; Medicine 2001; Watkins 2005; Simpson 2014; Smith 2021). The historical entanglement between Enlightenment thought, colonialism, and scientific knowledge production about Indigenous Peoples, their Ancestors, and their non‐human and land‐based relations has been a sustained subject of analysis in Indigenous studies and anthropology, and to varying degrees in the history and philosophy of science and science and technology studies (e.g., Deloria 1969; Asad 1973; Lewis 1973; Anderson 2008, 2012; Simpson 2014; Subramaniam et al. 2017; Radin 2018; Sysling 2021; Niekerk 2024). Taken together, this scholarship has shown that the relationship between anthropology and colonialism was fractured, heterogeneous, and contingent over time and across geopolitical contexts. In some cases, scholars have argued that anthropologists' work was drawn upon to advance colonial governance and Indigenous dispossession. Others have argued that the direct relationship between anthropology and the development of colonial governance is less clear, and that some anthropologists opposed hierarchies of humanity undergirding chattel slavery and violence against Indigenous Peoples. A contrasting position is offered by some who have explicitly defended anthropology and argued against the idea that anthropologists worked in collusion with colonial nation‐state powers. Instead, this position suggests that anthropologists' historically “good” work of “salvaging” Indigenous Peoples' cultures, languages, and material patrimony in North America and elsewhere was itself a kind of anticolonial act of preserving their “vanishing” life/ways in the face of civilizing colonial “progress” (for some critical perspectives, see Fabian 1983; Clifford and Marcus 1986; Clifford 1988, 1989; Trouillot 1995; Simpson 2014).

While anthropologists and their critical discontents have held varying positions on the place of anthropology within colonialism, here we wish to put aside well‐worn questions of anthropologists' intentions as well as their investments in or criticisms of colonialism's impacts on the peoples they have studied. Instead, we wish to turn attention to the underlying conditions of possibility for anthropological knowledge production and especially the representation of goodness and colonialism as oppositional phenomena. The institutionalization of Indigenous Peoples through, for example, forced attendance at church and state‐run Residential and Indian Boarding Schools, have in fact long been framed as civilizing acts of benevolence in advancing colonial governance (e.g., Gebhard et al. 2022). Indeed, goodness has, at times, operated as a logic of colonialism, rather than its antagonist. Therefore, even as some anthropologists may have defined their work in relation to Indigenous Peoples as “good” or “salvatory,” we argue that ethical goodness can and does function in ways that maintain colonial power relations productive of anthropology past and present. It authorizes ongoing research about Indigenous subjects, mediates the appearance of benevolence, and obscures the persistence of colonial relations under the umbrella of ethical progress. Rather than neutral tools of moral conduct, we argue that ethical goodness requires critical examination as part of the epistemological and institutional infrastructure that enables the continuity of colonial power and knowledge in anthropology and elsewhere.

Importantly, the conditions of colonizing goodness which we analyze here hold across anthropological and other fields whether their referent is bodies, culture, language, or material objects. As Rutherford (2012) reckons of the boundaries often drawn between humanistic and empirical approaches, “counting people is not the only way to control them.” There should therefore be no illusions of epistemic freedom from colonialism in anthropology, regardless of one's subfield location or positionality. Indeed, from the vantage point of anthropology's “others,” the racial and colonial power relations across anthropology are strikingly similar whether there are skeletons or cultures in the closet. Here, we also resist a neat distinction between “anthropologists” and “Indigenous Peoples,” acknowledging that Indigenous Peoples have been both objects and producers of anthropological knowledge. Taken together, anthropological knowledge production, critiques of anthropology, and the ethical conditions regulating the field cannot be abstracted from colonialism but require analysis and methodological transformation. The analyses we offer in this piece gesture toward these considerations, and our forthcoming work will offer additional methodological approaches for disturbing goodness in knowledge production in and beyond anthropology.

4. Research Ethics in Biological Anthropology and Darkness in El Dorado

I am not calling you “bad.” I am saying, calmly, that we want our blood back. (Toto Yanomami; AAA 2002)

In biological anthropology, we have predecessors who have grappled with the history and ethics of the field, its relationships to Indigenous Peoples, and its limitations, including notably the work of Trudy Turner and many others in the first comprehensive edited volume on the topic (Turner 2005). Prior scholarship has analyzed the history and formal development of Western ethics since antiquity, their elaboration as international scientific research standards after the eugenic horrors and research abuses of the 20th century, and the ongoing development of ethical codes, standards, and practices within the subfields of biological anthropology (e.g., Kaestle and Horsburgh 2002; American Association of Biological Anthropologists 2003, 2016; MacKinnon and Riley 2010; Malone et al. 2010; Turner 2012; Radin 2014, 2018; Clancy et al. 2014; DeWitte 2015; Turner et al. 2018; Nelson 2017; Schroeder 2020; Buikstra et al. 2022; Fleskes et al. 2022; Fuentes 2023; Agarwal 2025).

Recent interventions on research ethics in biological anthropology have noted structural barriers to ethical research, questioned whether better adherence to, or expansion of, ethical guidelines are a tenable counter to ongoing problems in the field, and called for anti‐colonial analyses and approaches to research (Fuentes 2023). Here, as one possible path to address Fuentes's call, we offer an analysis of the coloniality of research ethics in relation to Indigenous Peoples in the Americas. Our analysis is not merely that ethical standards do not take the history and conditions of coloniality into full account, but that institutional research ethics in themselves always already operate as regulatory mechanisms, conditioned by possessive logics and disciplinary knowledges, that circumscribe Indigenous sovereignty. As Fuentes argues, ethics should not be regarded as a separate category for thinking in biological anthropology, but rather that the lifecycle of scientific knowledge production ought to be shaped by a more robust and integrated ethics. We argue that research ethics are, in fact, often inseparable from anthropological and other colonial knowledge practices. Indeed, institutional research ethics operate as regulatory mechanisms that produce anthropological practice by possessing the authority to govern the terms of good research.

Our analysis here is primarily concerned with the practice of genetics in biological anthropology and the coloniality of its research ethics in relationship to Indigenous Peoples. Therefore, we offer a brief analysis of Turner and Nelson's (2005) contribution to the field's first comprehensive ethical volume, as it provides an important case study on the human geneticist James Neel and anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon, their work among the Yanomami, and author Patrick Tierney's accusation that Neel had deliberately started and/or exacerbated a measles epidemic in their communities to “test his hypotheses about the genetics of chiefdom” (AAA 2002; Turner and Nelson 2005).

Yanomami is a collective name typically referring to multiple groups of Indigenous Peoples whose territories span the contemporary border between what is now southern Venezuela and northwestern Brazil. Chagnon, a cultural anthropologist, was one early ethnographer of the Yanomami in the 1960s who had written an influential and highly controversial book on violence among the Yanomami (Chagnon 1968, but see Ferguson 1995 for critiques, among others) and collaborated with Neel by connecting him to Yanomami communities for genetic research. Neel was one of the pioneers (in the colonizing sense) of human genetics in the mid‐20th century and played a key role in the development of the field of genetics and epidemiology in the United States, including his research among Indigenous Peoples in the Americas. The accusations of human experimentation among the Yanomami were therefore profound not only because they were deeply disturbing, but also because of the prominent anthropologists and geneticists who were involved. Given this, Tierny's allegations ignited one of the most significant and internationally consequential ethical controversies in recent decades and the American Anthropological Association (AAA) assembled the El Dorado Task Force (EDTF) to inquire into these allegations (AAA 2001, 2002). Numerous analyses including historical studies and association reports/statements have addressed these allegations, with the consensus that Tierney's accusations of human experimentation by Neel were unfounded (e.g., Alberts 2000; American Society of Human Genetics 2002; AAA 2002; Baur et al. 2001; Cantor 2000; Cox 2001; Hagen et al. 2001; Turner and Nelson 2005; Dreger 2011). Nonetheless, these events led to notable developments in ethical standards within various professional associations of anthropology and genetics. In the decades since, Turner and Nelson's (2005) analysis of these events has become a canonical study through which many biological anthropologists are trained in ethics.

Turner and Nelson's (2005) chapter presents some of the results of their work as part of the EDTF and describes “major issues of concern to biological anthropologists” based on the investigation. The authors provide a brief history of Neel's field research among the Yanomami beginning in the late 1960s. They note that Neel was aware that the Indigenous communities involved were vulnerable to European‐borne pathogens like measles and worked to develop a vaccination program to accompany his field research. When Neel and his colleagues arrived in South America, they learned that measles was already present among local Indigenous communities and began vaccinating them. Upon analysis of Neel's records, correspondence, and other evidence, the EDTF ultimately refuted the accusation that Neel's vaccination program either intentionally or unintentionally caused a measles outbreak among the Yanomami (AAA 2002), and Turner and Nelson (2005) mounted a remarkable ethical defense of his work.

In reaching their conclusion, the EDTF also evaluated Neel's work in relation to the ethical standards in place at the time his research was undertaken. Neel's work in South America and other contexts took place in the midst of significant periods of ethical change in scientific fields—occurring after the creations of the 1947 Nuremberg Code, the 1953 National Institutes of Health Clinical Center Code, the 1962 Drug Amendment Act, the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki—but before the Belmont Report in 1979, which became the gold standard governing human subjects research in the United States (AAA 2002; Turner and Nelson 2005). Turner and Nelson (2005) note that Neel himself helped produce ethical guidance for scientific studies of “non‐Westernized” groups, including reports for the World Health Organization in 1964 and 1968. These developments preceded subsequent ethical debates regarding Indigenous Peoples which, among others, include the convening of a United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations in the 1980s, subsequent developments in the 1990s related to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), and Indigenous and other critiques regarding the development of the Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP) (Harry 1994; Harry and Marks 1999; Reardon 2001; TallBear 2013a, 2013b; Radin 2018). Using survey data and archival sources, Turner and Nelson (2005) find that Neel's work largely complied with the ethical research standards of the time.

A major consideration of the EDTF was the practice of consent used among Yanomami whose blood was sampled for research. According to the EDTF final report, the “Yanomami were told that the project would look for diseases that were 'in the blood'” and that “this knowledge would help treat them more effectively” (AAA 2002). However, the EDTF Final Report (2002) notes that the “consent techniques used by the 1968 expedition would not measure up to contemporary standards of informed consent.” Yanomami blood samples collected during the Neel‐Chagnon expedition were used in subsequent decades by other researchers and were a part of the methodological and intellectual foundations of anthropological genomics. It has therefore been important to consider whether such research went beyond the original scope of health‐related studies in using/developing new scientific methods and defining new goals that likely could not have been described or consented for in the context of their original collection in the 1960s. Some key examples include methodological advancements for the analysis of degraded DNA from frozen blood (Buchanan et al. 1993) and numerous foundational analyses of the peopling of the Americas (some of which were reviewed in Merriwether 1999). Importantly, the ongoing uses of frozen blood and other tissues in scientific biobanks are an ongoing site of critical and institutional intervention (e.g., Radin 2017; Radin and Kowal 2017; TallBear 2017; Tsosie, Yracheta, Kolopenuk, Smith 2021; Tsosie, Yracheta, Kolopenuk, Geary 2021).

While it is necessary to adjudicate the serious accusations levied against Neel, as Turner and Nelson (2005) and others have done, such a project can be in contrast to analyzing the self‐determined interests of the Indigenous Peoples with whom Neel worked. This contrast helps illuminate one of the ways that we seek to intervene in the landscape of research ethics and take up the task of extending Turner and Nelson's (2005) analysis. First, we consider the EDTFs deliberations over Neel's vaccination program as a humanitarian effort. Second, putting aside the question of whether Neel's work abided by the ethical standards “of his time,” we assess how and whether Neel's approach comported with Yanomami knowledge, standards, and expectations of his research.

First, it is remarkable that such great significance was placed on Neel's vaccination work as a humanitarian effort in the EDTF's evaluation of his ethical praxis. We acknowledge, of course, that the focus on his vaccination program by the EDTF was preconditioned by the specific nature of Tierney's accusations and the institutional obligation to evaluate Neel by his adherence to the ethical standards of his time. We also acknowledge that Neel may have felt compelled, as many institutional research ethical standards now mandate, to act in ways that ameliorate suffering among the communities in which researchers work and in all the ways they are capable. It seems clear that Neel's vaccination program intended to do this and much ink has been spilled in recounting his humanitarian efforts among the Yanomami. However, informed by Moreton‐Robinson (2011, 2015) and Million's (2013) analyses described above, we are simultaneously conscious of the ways that virtue and humanitarianism can be deployed in ways that reproduce colonial relations of knowledge/power in science. Indeed, discussions of Neel's humanitarianism may be viewed as one of the fulcrums upon which the goodness and validity of his science teetered, leaving the colonial conditions of its possibility largely uncontested.

Here we ask what colonial power relations are left in place when adherence to normative ethical standards and the humanitarianism of researchers are the frequencies against which the legitimacy of science is attuned? Put another way, how is it possible that normative ethical approaches leave intact and even protect the uneven landscape of colonial power dynamics that enables the rights of some to extract and to know, and others to be rendered as the unknowing objects of analysis? We argue that this is the very function of goodness as a dis/possessing force, past and present. To elaborate this point, we consider some of the Yanomami's own stances on Neel's work and the tensions between colonial research ethics and Indigenous sovereignty. Even as many scholars seem to distance Neel from “bad science” by evaluating him under shifting historical research ethical standards, our question is about what conventional research ethics do in relation to Indigenous Peoples and their sovereignties? Turner and Nelson (2005) do briefly acknowledge Yanomami perspectives near the end of their chapter. They write:

Thirty years later, however, the Yanomami feel as if they were not provided with adequate information for informed consent. Scientists who were part of the expedition have stated that the Yanomami were told that they were going to look for diseases in the blood. This was certainly true; there are many publications about Yanomami health. However, the Yanomami expected that they might receive greater medical benefits from the work. Although Neel and his team did help during the measles epidemic and after they could not continue to meet the medical needs of the Yanomami. And as a result, those Yanomami who have spoken to outsiders since the publication of Tierney's book contend that there remains a feeling of betrayal.

While there is no singular Yanomami perspective on the history of Neel's research, Volume II of the EDTF Final Report (AAA 2002) contains transcriptions of interviews with Yanomami leaders conducted and/or translated by Janet Chernela which comport with Turner and Nelson's (2005) assessment. The report also included statements from Yanomami leaders and community members delivered during anthropological conference proceedings at universities in the United States. These interviews and statements represent perspectives from Yanomami people who knew of the events of the original study as well as Yanomami people whose own blood, and that of their immediate family and other kinspeople, was collected by Neel's team in the late 1960s. Collectively, the Yanomami perspectives represented in the EDTF Final Report (2002) convey a sense of being misled and/or otherwise wronged by researchers. It is clear that these individuals were not fully informed of the study's purpose, why they were being asked for blood samples, or what would be done with them. It also seems clear that many participants did not know that their blood samples would be preserved in long term cold storage for ongoing research, including that which was unrelated to health among the Yanomami. They make clear that such long‐term storage of blood, particularly from Yanomami persons who had already died, went against Yanomami funerary practices for the treatment of the dead, which involves the destruction of everything from the deceased's body. Finally, the available interviews and statements underscore the broken promises of Neel's team in that no results and no clear health benefits deriving from the research had been returned to Yanomami people. Chernela writes, “If promises of health benefits or results were delivered [by researchers], they were never kept” and “the possibility remains that these promises were never intended [to be kept] but served as instruments in motivating participation” (AAA 2002, parenthetical additions by authors).

The EDTF Final Report (2002) records multiple requests from Yanomami leaders and community members for the cessation of ongoing research, remuneration for any ongoing uses, and the return and/or destruction of their blood samples. Indeed, Turner and Nelson (2005) note that the Darkness in the El Dorado episode resulted in Yanomami reviewing “the disposition of samples taken from them.” During the EDTF investigation, researchers curating the samples stated that they would not continue using them until they were satisfied that they had been collected ethically and with Yanomami permission (AAA 2002). While some researchers advocated for permission to continue using the original samples, they agreed that they would return them to the Yanomami if consent for ongoing use could not be obtained (AAA 2002). That permission, however, seemingly never came.

The relationships and obligations of researchers to communities remain as salient today as they were then, and Turner and Nelson (2005) argue that the “sense of betrayal [among the Yanomami] is instructive to current researchers.” Exactly how this is instructive is one objective of our analysis. We argue that not only is it instructive about questions of ethical research integrity, but more than this, about goodness as a colonial device animated by a dis/possessive logic. One that ultimately maintains the relationship between anthropology as a disciplinary knowledge, ethics as a regulatory mechanism, and patriarchal white sovereignty, which together provide some of the conditions upon which American anthropology exists. Indeed, institutional research ethics operate through the adjudication of goodness entitling researchers to know while leaving the coloniality of its power relations insufficiently questioned.

At least part of convening the EDTF was driven by legitimate fears that anthropologists' access to study communities in South America could be compromised, and to help secure that access if possible (Dreger 2011). This connection between anthropological goodness as a raison d'être for preserving access to Indigenous research subjects is exemplified in at least two ways. First, in efforts to establish Neel as a medical humanitarian for his vaccination program as part of multiple investigations into his research conduct discussed above. Second, the function of anthropological goodness is illustrated in the following quote from Jane Hill, former president of the AAA and chair of the EDTF:

“…I think the AAA had to do something because I really think that the future of work by anthropologists with Indigenous Peoples in Latin America—with a high potential to do good—was put seriously at risk by [these] accusations, and silence on the part of the AAA would have been interpreted as either assent or cowardice.” (Adapted from Dreger 2011, emphases ours)

Part of what motivated the formation of the EDTF, then, was the risk to anthropologists' access to Indigenous Peoples. The discipline's “high potential to do good” would be rhetorically deployed to secure such access. However, as the epigraph from Toto Yanomami that frames this section makes clear, questions of the goodness or badness of researchers are often ancillary to possessive logics that animate much scientific knowledge production. While many anthropologists had been setting themselves about the task of evaluating the ethics of Neel's work, we read Toto Yanomami's remarks as being less concerned with questions about the goodness or badness of researchers and more concerned with disturbing scientists' and research institutions' possession and control of that which belongs to the Yanomami. Here, the ethical status of any one or all researchers takes a back seat to Indigenous peoples' demand for the material repossession of ownership, control, and governance. Given this, we question whether the practice of conventional research ethics past and present, and debates of whether their basic conditions are/were met, is capable of disturbing colonial power imbalances. We contend that it has been through efforts to secure the goodness of Neel's research that the transformative potential of Indigenous sovereignty in Toto Yanomami's critique of goodness/badness has not been fully realized.

Notably, as part of the EDTF Final Report (2002), Chernela makes a call to remedy wrongs experienced by the Yanomami through collective reparations, which could include the return of blood samples and resources to their communities. Related to our analysis above, Chernela argues that “individual accusation(s) among researchers has superseded concerns for the Yanomami themselves” and that reparations could invite “the [ongoing] debate to take place on Yanomami terms” (AAA 2002). However, she frames this imbalance as a failure to meet ethical standards in the field. Given our analysis of the coloniality of research ethics, we have argued that anthropology's ethical compass is not broken; rather, the imbalance described by Chernela is evidence of the ways that research ethics are calibrated to secure the goodness of researchers and fields while maintaining dis/possessions of Indigenous Peoples.

In response to Chernela's case for reparations, Joe Watkins agrees with the basic premises of her argument, but reframes “reparations” in terms of “atonement.” Watkins' terms of atonement are framed broadly, emphasizing the ongoing power dynamics that have existed between American Anthropology and Indigenous peoples throughout the field's history and which continue to reproduce extractions of Indigenous peoples. On this basis, he argues against reparations in the specific case of the Yanomami and instead urges anthropologists to consider the broader colonial power relationships that exist between the field, its institutions, and the people they have studied. Jane Hill, former president of the AAAs, offers a related reflection on the case of the Yanomami and the broader anthropological power dynamics of which it is emblematic (AAA 2002). Hill writes:

We have … undertaken a reflexive exercise, on the implications not simply of some specific moments of anthropological practice among the Yanomami, but on anthropological practice more generally, and its location in those relatively enduring regimes of knowledge and power which we can refer to in shorthand as the confrontation of Western elites with “others” whose presence requires classification, explanation, and incorporation into the systems of knowledge through which that power is in part constituted. These regimes do more than merely shape anthropological practice; they make it possible.

In the end, Chernela's case for reparations was turned down by the EDTF in 2001 (AAA 2002), though some of hers and others' recommendations regarding Yanomami blood samples were ultimately realized. Nearly five decades after their original collection, and following calls from Yanomami people for their return, many of the blood samples were finally repatriated to the Yanomami in 2015 from multiple research institutions in the United States (Couzin‐Frankel 2010; Guedes and Guimarães 2020). Indeed, perhaps the clearest outcome of investigating Neel's work was the eventual repatriation of Yanomami blood and the cessation of ongoing genetic research. Nonetheless, we aim to make clear that the recovery of Neel's goodness means that the exclusion of Indigenous peoples from governance over the contours of knowledge production about themselves was ethical. The broken or exaggerated promise of meaningful health interventions from the research was ethical. Even as institutional research ethics may mitigate some past, present, or future harms, we underscore their ongoing operation as moralizing regulatory mechanisms invested in anthropology's possessive entitlement to produce knowledge about Indigenous Peoples.

We close this section by noting that models of community‐based genetics done in concert with Indigenous Peoples were offered by O'Rourke et al. (2005) in the original Turner (2005) volume on ethics in biological anthropology. In addition, more recent ethical guidance for genomic work (in this case microbiome research) with the Yanomami has been developed by a Yanomami descendant in collaboration with other researchers and community members, representing practices of knowledge coproduction in research with Indigenous Peoples (Good et al. 2025). Both approaches represent what we see as departures from normative research ethics in that they take more seriously the task of reconfiguring scientific power and knowledge production in relation to/with Indigenous Peoples. However, even as meaningful strides continue to address the landscape of colonial power in science, and as ethical literatures continue to proliferate in biological anthropology and genomics, we urge continued vigilance whenever goodness is conditioning the elaboration of ethical standards in anthropological praxis. For what we do in the name of good research can often maintain rather than overturn colonial power relations in our work.

5. Data Dis/Possession: Open Data and Data Sharing in Biological Anthropology

Our intervention on the coloniality of research ethics extends to practices of data sharing as a form of dis/possessive governance. Debates about ethics and data sharing are in no way new. As one example, in his article on scientific ethics and physical anthropology, Hulse (1969) advocated for data sharing for the purpose of reproducibility, arguing that researchers “should provide data, in publishing, which will enable potential skeptics to check our work.” In addition, the first comprehensive volume on ethics in biological anthropology concludes with a comment from Turner (2005), largely addressing open data mandates for federally funded research in the United States. Turner cautions that “the application of this ideal to real situations… is anything but clear and easy,” and raises numerous questions about what constitutes data, how they should be used, how to safeguard confidentiality, and the growth of infrastructures and large‐scale databases for data deposition (Turner 2005).

More recently, a set of guiding principles and best practices was compiled following a workshop on data sharing in biological anthropology, which was organized by the American Association of Biological Anthropologists (AABA) ad hoc committee on data access and data sharing in 2019 (Turner and Mulligan 2019). This publication opened a critical conversation in the field on data sharing in the pages of the American Journal of Biological Anthropology (AJBA) and beyond, resulting in multiple letters to the editor and articles in response to the topic (Boyer et al. 2020; Leigh 2020; McDade 2020; Wagner 2020; Tsosie, Yracheta, Kolopenuk, Smith 2021; Tsosie, Yracheta, Kolopenuk, Geary 2021; Mulligan et al. 2022). Scholarly discourse on open data and data sharing has often been connected to ethical research practices in the field as an imperative to democratize research in biological anthropology and address problems of colonialism by evening the landscape of data access (Leigh 2020). The move to open data has also been characterized as necessary to produce “good science” (McDade 2020), as essential for the “advancement of the field,” and for “scientific integrity, world heritage, and advancing knowledge” (Turner and Mulligan 2019). Importantly, while open data is their goal, Turner and Mulligan (2019) note that there are various “limitations with respect to specific datasets,” including what they describe as “cultural heritage considerations,” among others. They also note that living communities should be consulted to establish “conditions under which data sharing is acceptable” (Turner and Mulligan 2019).

Ourselves and our colleagues have previously intervened in this conversation on open data and data sharing in biological anthropology by incorporating insights from Indigenous data sovereignties (Tsosie, Yracheta, Kolopenuk, Smith 2021; Tsosie, Yracheta, Kolopenuk, Geary 2021)—outlining the lack of attention to colonial power relations in the push toward data sharing and to distinguish between data democratization and data sovereignty, among other issues. Risks of colonialism in data sharing have also received some attention in archeology, notably in relation to large‐scale LIDAR datasets of archeological zones outside of the United States (Chase et al. 2020). Chase et al. (2020) note, “when scholars push cultural practices for digital openness onto countries that are unwilling, without seeing appropriate consideration or accommodation of national concerns, that act itself can perpetuate colonialist research attitudes and increase, rather than lessen, divides.” Biological anthropologists may therefore benefit from the insights of our colleagues in other subfields where debates about open data and data sharing have been playing out in parallel.

Here we extend our prior analysis (Tsosie, Yracheta, Kolopenuk, Smith 2021; Tsosie, Yracheta, Kolopenuk, Geary 2021) by returning to the way that ethical imperatives around data sharing are often intellectually knotted (even within this brief conversation in the AJBA) with ideas of goodness, rigor, progress, advancement, and democratization. In contravention to universal standards, affected communities ought to lead decision‐making about the production, use, and sharing of their data. In our own experiences, some communities may want open data while others may not, or there may not be a clear consensus, but institutional requirements for open data as ethical and democratic imperatives that lack sufficient consideration of Indigenous Peoples' data decisions may again be understood as being shaped by colonial power dynamics and a possessive logic to define the terms of “good” research and “good” knowledge sharing practices. In these contexts, open data requirements therefore might productively be viewed as a replanting of anthropology's historical claims to Indigenous Peoples' bodies, knowledges, and material patrimony as objects that belong not to Indigenous Peoples, but to everyone. That is, data are often framed as objects of “world heritage” (Turner and Mulligan 2019), a move which may erode Indigenous Peoples' exercise of their sovereignty.

6. Conclusion

We have argued that institutional research ethics in biological anthropology, as in other fields, function less as safeguards against colonial dis/possessions and more as regulatory mechanisms that reproduce them through the operation of virtue and scientific progress. Drawing on the critical work of Aileen Moreton‐Robinson and Dian Million, we have shown how ethical discourses rooted in liberal ideals of goodness, morality, and democracy obscure the structural and discursive dynamics of colonial governance that continue to shape knowledge production about Indigenous Peoples. Through historical and contemporary case studies, including the El Dorado controversy and debates on open data sharing in the AJBA, we have sought to reveal how research ethics adjudicate the moral legitimacy of researchers and may obfuscate Indigenous sovereignties. While the case studies analyzed here are directed to certain episodes of anthropological knowledge production, we intend our interventions to address conditions of colonial power and knowledge production beyond these specific cases and even beyond anthropological fields. Our historical case studies therefore do not define the coloniality of research ethics in ways that are confined to the past, but seek to reveal the relationship between goodness, colonialism, and science in ways that inform ongoing research.

Crucially, we are not implying or arguing a need to “decolonize” research ethics, as if it were possible to live and work outside the colonized grounds on which they stand (literally and figuratively). Neither are we suggesting that existing structures and institutions governing research should be ignored or eliminated, as they represent a deeply compromised yet nonetheless minimum responsibility of practitioners in biological anthropology and other fields to redress certain historical violences embedded within the forms of research that they have inherited. Rather, we seek to analyze and disrupt the normativities of research ethics and unmask the dis/possessing functions of their goodness—even as we live, think, and work within and through them. The argument articulated here must therefore not be taken as an invitation or an excuse to circumvent existing ethical standards in research, nor to absolve those who do. Those who would use this article to such ends intentionally misread us. However, this reality should not limit our creative capacities to critically analyze and disturb the coloniality of goodness in research.

Author Contributions

Jessica Kolopenuk: conceptualization, writing – original draft, writing – review and editing. Rick W. A. Smith: conceptualization, writing – original draft, writing – review and editing.

Data Availability Statement

Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.