The Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences was founded in 1965 and History of the Human Sciences was first published in 1988. Much can be learned by surveying both across their histories. The Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, established in 1965, has a mission rooted in the idea of disciplines and disciplinary history. During its early years, notable figures in psychology, sociology, and anthropology contributed articles that offered reminiscences on their fields or revisited landmark debates. Despite its wide chronological breadth, the journal recognized that concepts from antiquity or the early modern world did not always fit neatly into disciplinary chronologies. History of the Human Sciences, first published in 1988, in contrast emphasized the intersectional study of the way scientists constructed the human world. It focused on the years after 1850 and employed social science methodologies to frame historical investigations. In its first decade, it took an interdisciplinary approach, drawing inspiration from Foucauldian engagement, science studies, and postmodernism.

Both journals drew on traditions in intellectual history and the history of biology that foregrounded internalism, the history of the inner workings of the sciences.Footnote ¹ Many articles in both contributed to internalist debates within the human sciences, treating epistemological and methodological trends in past science as important in their own right. Anthropology, psychology, and sociology, as enterprises seeking ontological insight into notions like “nature/nurture” or “human nature,” were explored in depth, as were developments and debates in geography, economics, population studies, neuroscience, and even medicine. Each emphasized scientists who specifically encountered people as subjects or who drew on human sciences knowledge to elaborate on technoscientific societies and cultures that characterized the period of late industrialization or after. Both took up the challenge of the construction of scientific facts as that trend became magnified in the 1980s and after.Footnote ²

To me, looking back on the history of both journals, both show a surprising lack of engagement with ethics, gender, and sexuality, even as books published from the 1980s onwards made these subjects salient.Footnote ³ Equally, I observe in both slight influence from settler colonialism, alterity, decolonialism, and postcolonity – despite significant literature on these ideas since the 1970s, and which this book shows to be crucial to understanding the context of human science work.Footnote ⁴ The irony of this latter observation is poignant given that the human sciences’ past is closely intertwined with imperial conquest, racial supremacy, colonial governance, Indigenous affairs, integration, and apartheid.Footnote ⁵ Moreover, by 2010 it was clear that the methods and questions of postcolonial, subaltern, and Indigenous Studies are intellectual projects that qualify for – even demand – inclusion in the narrative of the methodologies of the human sciences.Footnote ⁶

The fact that this irony exists leads me rather inevitably into a contemplation of my own position in the academy. As a white male, a gray-haired scholar, and an editor of this book, I am in the necessary position to reflect upon the way I have personally contributed to this unsettling shaping of the canonical history of the human sciences. Through such reflexivity, I hope to shed light on inherent biases within the history of the human sciences that this anthology reveals to be untenable. Looking back on all of those matters that slowly brought me into a career in the history of medicine and science, I see that for much of my career, I surrounded myself with historical texts authored by white men. I am often also teaching the history of the human sciences primarily to science students, many of whom are white, male, and hail (as I did) from rural areas of the United States. I see in them, in other words, a reminder of myself. As I once was, I find many of my students are drawn to the historical secularism of European and American techno-science. As I once did, I suspect they view technocracy as a path toward economic opportunity and security.

Obviously, any attempt to generalize from my personal experience would be of limited import. Still I suppose many of the deceased white males who contributed to the human sciences, and their successors who documented the history of the human sciences, found solace in the idea that science and its methods, when applied to human nature, could provide universal tools for plumbing human existence and even improve the human condition. In essence, my personal encounter with the human sciences continues to be an encounter with ideas, abstractions, and ideologies primarily.

Having never knowingly been a subject of human science research myself, the subjects of those many past encounters, like those discussed across the book’s chapters, proved incidental to my own fascination with the human sciences, fields supposedly on a quest to use scientific knowledge to bestow dignity on humans and humanity. For me, the intellectual allure of the human sciences lay in the way they revealed the intrinsic value of cultures or psychological processes through their variability, making the difference and otherness of the human form the source of dignity and value. This alternative dignity provided a last defense against the commodification of being in the face of artificial intelligence, synthetic life, transhuman studies, or capitalism. Because I never felt myself the object or subject of study, I could extrapolate on future risks to “the human” rather than face any immediate structural violence caused by human scientists who use me as an incidental presence for their studies of our nature.

My hope is that the readers of this anthology have realized by now (I assume most readers knew this before they opened this book) that almost every aspect of my privileged frame is questionable – morally, intellectually, methodologically, and ideologically. For those who share my origin story, I hope this self-reflection generates productive discomfort in the face of the question: How then can we frame the history of the human sciences moving forward, knowing or at least suspecting that we must? To think through an answer to that question, I will focus my argument on the larger organization of this book. This is no impartial review of each author’s individual case. Instead, I am hoping to take what I see as the larger persuasive argument of this whole book and state it succinctly to you. I think this book’s authors in total are collectively calling for a revisionist stance against an epistemological conceit within the human sciences: namely, the narrative that a particular scientist’s situational context allows them to retain their own moral reasoning and imperatives even as they seek universal knowledge from others who are incidentally available. This book insists that knowledge made through encounters simply does not work like that.

The Savage Expedition to Civilization

The opening of our anthology centers around the theme of expedition science. While this phrase may seem innocuous, it holds significant meaning in its relational context, as demonstrated in the chapters by Rodriguez, Warren, and Gil-Riaño. The romanticized notion of Victorian and Edwardian anthropologists, naturalists, and geographers as adventurers on expeditions has persisted in our cultural consciousness, perhaps stemming from a confluence of cultural representations in such examples as Muscular Christianity, Rudyard Kipling, H. G. Wells, National Geographic Magazine, Tom Swift, Indiana Jones, colonial clothing chic, and David Attenborough. However, a critical examination of the term “expedition science” shows its position within a particular Eurocentric power dynamic. Those who were colonized, captured, and then traveled to Europe (think Jemmy Button the Yámana boy taken hostage by Captain Robert Fitzroy of the HMS Beagle) were not considered to be on expeditions, nor were individuals like C. L. R. James, Gandhi, or Aché children who found themselves in settings imagined civilized.Footnote ⁷

These observations highlight a range of euphemisms within the human sciences that similarly obscure the relational nature of research. Expressions such as “going native,” for example, are overtly racist, while other terms like “ethnoscience,” “ethnomethodology,” “cultural competency,” or “participant-observer” may appear more benign but still rely on the premise that those being studied are not fully aware of or able to participate in the research being conducted on them. Such language reinforces the power dynamics inherent in research that studies marginalized communities or exploits colonized subjects.

Three potential responses to the romantic ideal of scientific adventurers are described by Rodriguez, Warren, and Gil-Riaño. The first response is that the adventurers participated in projects larger than science, such as imperialism, colonialism, or genocide. Rodriguez clarifies that the pursuit of Indigenous skulls in the late nineteenth century cannot be regarded merely as a typical event in the history of craniometry when, during the same period, the Argentinian military (by then a nationalist and settler force) exterminated and displaced thousands of Indigenous people. Gil-Riaño further illustrates this point by emphasizing that the relationship between scientists and children in twentieth-century Paraguay concealed the relationship between scientists and their military contacts, as well as the relationship between settler societies and groups compelled to assimilate to settler logic and governance. The fact that the children became loot from expeditionary violence, and subsequently became evidence against hereditarian racial determinism, demonstrates that even antiracist human science drew strength and substance from colonial violence.

The second response is that visible patterns of resistance and refusal to cooperate with the logic of expeditionary science demonstrate the subjects/objects’ shrewd recognition of, and thus subversive autonomy within, these episodes of normal science. The subjects shaped human science knowledge. Warren’s case highlights that frustrated scientists interpreted their subjects’ autonomy and resistance as evidence of irrationality. Their label of irrationality fits well with other similar terms, such as “savage,” “child-like,” “innocent,” “happy carefree,” “insane,” and so on.

There is no scholarship so far as I am aware that has considered such labels through the postcolonial insight that such alterity could be a type of doublespeak by the subject that generated evidence that contradicted the objectives and reasoning of human science investigation. However, to even begin to comprehend how such actions may have influenced European or settler scientific knowledge, it is necessary to have a nuanced understanding of how subjugated peoples created and practiced resistance, recognize that it occurred, and accept that this autonomy shaped scientific knowledge. Such a project of reclamation of the human sciences would have profound consequences.

Finally, historians of expeditionary science have perhaps asymmetrically accepted that the scientists possessed knowledge while the objects/subjects did not. With the political and economic upheavals occurring from the late 1870s (as depicted by Rodriguez) to the 1930s (as illustrated by Riaño), it is plausible that relationality increasingly implied a shared desire for scientific knowledge by all parties involved – albeit for different purposes. The violence of colonial structures, as described by Rodriguez and Warren, shaped the work of scientists while supporting these structures’ ulterior logics and goals. It is not unreasonable to think individuals encountered by these so-called adventurers may well have had analogous objectives in mind for their own human sciences.

One of the peculiarities of colonial and settler science is its certainty that science possessed universal characteristics while simultaneously assuming that those characteristics were not understood, valued, or desired by those who encountered it as objects and subjects. As noted by Warren, many individuals photographed for the purposes of racial science were actively involved, even holding rulers in specific ways. Despite the deplorable experiences of expeditionary science, it is possible that some people who encountered it became interested in creating useful knowledge to understand why human scientists were prone to violence and supportive of oppression. While such speculation may appear unfounded or absurd, Riaño’s conclusion, though centered on a child of assimilation, testifies to the fact that such desires fueled future resolve.

Externalism in the History of the Human Sciences Is Internalism

So far, my analysis of positionality has focused on “expedition science” as an example to illustrate how postcolonial, Latin American, and Indigenous Studies have redefined internal frameworks within the history of human sciences, critiquing internalist claims. My inquiries into the ownership of scientific knowledge, methodological limitations in historical arguments, and the impact of violent contexts on scientific knowledge may appear to stem from externalist criticism when it comes to the natural sciences. Externalism in the history of science argues that historians must consider social contexts to comprehend the conditions for scientific progress. However, matters become more complex in the human sciences where both the context and the human are the subject and object of study. Studying context is simply part of the internal logic of the human sciences. This makes it difficult to recognize that the intellectual history of the human sciences is never inherently externalist.

Traditionally, historians of the human sciences accepted institutions, disciplines, and their archives as useful ontological constructs to shape their historiography. Intellectual schools, institutes, and disciplinary origins played significant roles for storytelling the history of the human sciences. While this may suffice for historiography, it is important to recognize the normative oddity that the concept of disciplines was itself a human science analytic. Studies of discipline formation originated in sociology, and what appears to be contextual is now in historical writing, in fact, an historical acceptance of an abstract construct construed as possessing ontological recognizability. Critiques, if any, have primarily drawn from Foucauldian analysis, which is often applied to total institutions such as asylums, museums, prisons, and schools, but less frequently to central ideas or entire projects, as Foucault explored in works such as The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge.

This tendency has resulted in an unusual framework for externalism. Historians of science often use an alternative human science category as a framework against which to study the history of its alternatives. Thus, one finds political science, economics, or biomedical frameworks and theories analyze sociological, anthropological, or psychological claims to declare past scholarship limited. Anthropology is often employed to evaluate the veracity of sociology or economics; medical knowledge is brought into dialogue with economics. To simplify, the history of the human sciences often amounts to little more than an argument about a different form of internalism as getting at the “truer context.” Occasionally, this trend becomes known as a “turn,” a kind of cultural vogue – such as the “cultural turn,” “linguistic turn,” or “neuroscience turn.”

Much of this work ends up in a self-referential loop, often only made evident through postcolonial criticism. Yet the leap from there should not be to conclude that the territorial location of these sciences matters and thus that they were somehow different or purer within European nations or the United States. Instead, it appears that the circularity of these sciences contributed to their power, utility, productivity, and violence everywhere.

Part II of this book addresses the self-referential ambiguities present in the human sciences. While the organization of this section may suggest a traditional exposition of encounters within institutions, each of the three authors of the cases in this section asks why power was necessary if the sciences worked. Equally they ask why the sciences seemed to have had mixed successes. Each author finds a distinct obliviousness within the sciences themselves that raises the unsettling question about whether that oversight was contextually generated or whether it is baked into the nature of the objectivity human science researchers have historically claimed.

Arvin exposes the inadequacies of the human sciences through Indigenous and Disabilities Studies frames. She recounts the history of the human sciences in Hawaiʻi as a backdrop for territorial violence and assimilation, while also directly focusing on the desires of Native Hawaiians and the fact that new structural violence contended with extant (if vanishing) institutions and structures as well. What stands out clearly in Arvin’s analysis is the poverty of imagination the human scientists brought to their observations and applications. The inadequacies of their methods led them increasingly backward toward the racial determinism and normative Calvinism that characterized the origins of human sciences. Psychology and social science, which strove (admittedly failing) by the mid twentieth century for nuanced pluralism, perception, cognition, and understanding of interpersonal and community interactions and dynamics, pathologized differences rather than seeking to understand them when confronted by an encounter with alternative worldviews. In other words, the scientists denied the agency their sciences sought to recognize in generalizable ways as characteristic of humans.

Ortiz Díaz explores the territorial violence and assimilation process in twentieth-century Puerto Rico, examining how social scientists from imperial and nationalist backgrounds tried to create a more nuanced human science that matched their societal experience, expectations, and identities. Their goal was to apply it toward prisoner rehabilitation in carceral settings and deliver humane ends, restorative justice, and repair. However, the self-referential logic of looking for a science modeled upon itself proved to be problematic. Ortiz Díaz demonstrates that the available tools for such a reimagined science had to be reforged ideologically, but even then, the tools were unfit for purpose. Unfortunately, the scientists seeking reparative methods ultimately also fell into pathologizing tropes.

Stark’s chapter provides an additional frame for understanding how human sciences are rooted in violence. She argues that bioethics in the United States is an extension of American settler colonialism. Her case study follows the biography of Carolyn Mathews, who began as an undergraduate at NIH and eventually participated in studies of the Akimel O’odham people in Arizona. Mathews in her later life became skeptical about the use of human subjects in experimentation, but her earlier position as a settler was not visible to her. Stark infers from this example that as bioethics emerged in the 1970s and after, it sanctioned an understanding of ethics that aligned with settler colonial precepts in the US Empire. The creation of a bioethics discourse led to self-referential ambiguity, as human subject research could be deemed ethical simply because it had declared it so.

Awareness of these legacies of empire, coloniality, and nationalism adds a critical lens to the study of the human sciences. Postcolonial and decolonial theory and methods run the risk of simply replacing old concepts with new ones in the human sciences. Silva, for instance, envisions neocolonial versions of the human sciences, powered by a correct linguistic currency, which create a global pastiche of elite academic discourse that recognizes sensibilities while perpetuating extractive practices in service to global capital.Footnote ⁸ These concepts, theories, and methods may not be sufficient on their own to articulate a new relationality within the knowledge/power dynamic woven into the human sciences. In other words, these languages may merely place historians of the human sciences in a position not dissimilar from Stark’s interlocutor, Mathews.

The archive of the human sciences comes with no warning, but perhaps there should be one. Focusing solely on the scientists results in a history that may critique their logic but still duplicates their story. Concentrating only on the scientists’ subjects ends up accepting the scientists’ ventriloquism. What sets these sciences apart is that the archives and the theories they create are often a product of unsettling encounters. Ortiz Díaz’s case makes this clear, as the scientists in his study fail to elide the problematics of their work. Similarly, Arvin’s story ends with Stanley Porteous, the scientist she highlights, having his name stripped from a building named after him in 1974 at the University of Hawaiʻi and renamed after Allan Saunders, a noted faculty activist associated with politically left-wing causes who nonetheless regarded slaveholder Thomas Jefferson as “one of my heroes.”Footnote ⁹

The Human in the Mirror

In the history of the human sciences, there is often a duality of nature. In studying “the Other” (whomever “the Other is supposed to be”), human scientists hoped to reveal larger truths about themselves-cum-the human. Indeed, this book has sought to make clear that when human scientists used nature as a mirror for the purposes of studying human nature, they often ended up studying their own reflections. Their mirror of nature reflected their sciences’ circular relationality; almost everything seemingly returned to the observer. This hermeneutics of these past encounters now produce the historian’s text, and historical explanations shed light on why the historical claims made within these sciences adopted forms of ownership and governance. In Part III of this book, Karin Rosenblatt, Eve Buckley, and Rosanna Dent explore what happens when both sides claim possession of the mirror.

In Rosemblatt’s case, the discovery of the last Mexica emperor’s bones, Cuauhtémoc, in Ixcateopan, Mexico, resulted in conflicting claims of ownership and self-referential truth claims by opponents. The Indigenous community and Eulalia Guzmán, Rosemblatt’s biographical subject, celebrated the discovery as an anticolonial assertion of identity through ownership of the bones. However, masculine and cosmopolitan science accused Guzmán and the community of perpetuating a fraud. The history of bone gathering in the human sciences takes on a new significance in this case. It highlights the longevity of meaning that bones can acquire, a phenomenon familiar in the conventional history of the human sciences. The bones acquired a double rationality, invested with political meaning through conflicting scientific claims and methods. Craniology, now widely regarded as a pseudoscientific relic of racist, racial science, is a prime example of the larger pattern behind Rosenblatt’s argument. In her story, the pursuit of hard knowledge to legitimate claims of authenticity came from the marginal and vulnerable. The resulting collision occurred through scientific claims, methods, disciplinary differences, and innuendo, with gender playing a significant role in attacks against Guzmán. Ultimately, the claim that the bones were a fraud prevailed, but for the community of Ixcateopan the bones retained their meaning. Rosenblatt’s case might encourage some reckoning with the way bones continue to contain meanings for settlers as well, with even their rightful repatriation extracting new symbolic meanings while mediating novel new forms of erasure within often hallowed cultural institutions.

Eve Buckley’s work similarly showcases dual rationality. Her case focuses on population and development studies during the Cold War era and exposes the longevity and reach of neo-Malthusian tenets through dialogues on fertility and scarcity. She examines the writings and advocacy of Josué de Castro, a Brazilian physician and intellectual who challenged the theories of a population crisis in poor nations, arguing that the crisis was due to agricultural fertility rather than human fertility. He called for structural reforms of the global food system to balance out the observable overabundance in wealthy nations. Intriguing in de Castro’s encounter with population studies is the reciprocal forms of abstraction it shows, an infinity mirror of nature reflecting a relationality of object and subject purely determined by the holder. While Buckley rightfully highlights how population control emerged as neocolonial benevolence, denying its human costs, de Castro’s technique for holding the mirror reversed the direction of power by subjecting his wealthy interlocutors in the Global North to their own form of armchair theorizing, albeit about their nature rather than his own. De Castro, in so doing, employed one of human science’s cherished rhetorical practices – creating a “big picture” account of humanity’s condition. De Castro’s inversion of center and periphery articulated global cosmopolitanism against European cosmopolitanism, and thereby submitted Northern and Western cosmopolitan intellectuals in the 1950s to an unusual examination of themselves as subjects in a technocratic, world historical analysis. Like Rosenblatt’s Guzmán, de Castro’s reasoning and writing did not emerge as a winning position, but it did demonstrate the way supposedly factual social science theory assumed ideologically the naturalness of imperial and colonial relations.

Rosanna Dent concludes this anthology’s third section on an optimistic note that extends Rosenblatt and Buckley’s narratives toward particularized alliances, as she analyzes the relational conditions that emerge from the Genographic Project, a recent study proposing a general evolutionary history of humanity based on blood samples. Dent explores the logic of possession and bureaucratic vulnerability, which creates opportunities for abuse for A’uwẽ people, as they navigate their sovereignty with the Brazilian state and transnational researchers, while insisting on a relational and affective ethics of their own. Despite the risks, both the Brazilian state and the A’uwẽ recognize the potential benefits of bioprospecting, as it establishes a foundation for the community’s recognition with the state. However, the scientists navigate Brazil’s regulatory state with a logic of possession of their own, and they historicize samples taken before ethical guidance and modern technologies existed to continue their research. Dent describes how the researchers seek to embrace the affective ethics of the A’uwẽ through long engagement and acceptance of their desires, in a convincing relational shift. While this solidarity may seem puzzling at first, it makes sense as a liberatory project for A’uwẽ sovereignty. Dent hopes that this solidarity will shift the logic of research toward a more ethical approach.

Together, Rosenblatt, Buckley, and Dent point to a growing recognition that the phenomenological characteristics of encounters can sometimes escape or transcend the physical and structural violence of the human sciences. Although neither Rosenblatt nor Buckley can do more than recognize the double rationality of the human sciences, which can create epistemic discomfort, both authors show that the human sciences can be used as decolonizing tools too. In Dent’s case, the rejection of the violence of the human sciences may lead to the hermeneutics of the encounter, producing identification, solidarity, and knowledge – although the entire story is becoming rather than told.

Concluding Clearly

As Warren, Rodriguez, and I were working on Chapter 1, I was reminded to read finally an English-language essay by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui criticizing Aníbal Quijano. My initial engagement with Quijano had been revelatory, and thus Cusicanqui’s critique equally gave me pause. It stimulated in me a reconsideration of what historians usually mean when they demand clarity from each other. Cusicanqui highlighted that the jargons and languages of critical theory and human sciences are more than just alienating for many; they represent a form of re-colonialism by language on colonial subjects. According to her, colonial subjects in these jargons became caricatures of the West, and “multicultural adornments for neoliberalism,” unrecognizable to people in the upside-down worlds of colonialism.Footnote ¹⁰ The authors of the essays in this book may experience discomfort as they read Cusicanqui’s words. I understand their perspective. We all are in a position with jargon not dissimilar to Aníbal Quijano’s, the subject of her critique.

For historians, too, the complaint hurts. How many times have historians been told to avoid jargon for the benefit of clarity. The request for clarity may be viewed as an attempt at aesthetics. But clarity in the way that historians demand it of each other is obviously a source of power too. It has its own double meaning. Who is deemed unclear? Who must strive to write with acceptable clarity? Who possesses the definition of clarity? Who gets to demand it? Clearly, clarity constitutes a form of dominance over meaning, and thus Cusicanqui’s demand for it feels stubbornly like a shoe that fits uncomfortably. However, this book intends to elicit a different type of discomfort regarding how historians of the human sciences present a history that is profoundly tied to varieties of Enlightenment liberalism. Our book, as a whole, unsettles encounters by insisting that it is ethical to listen in the way Cusicanqui suggests we listen.

It is important to note that this book is not anti-science or illiberal. However, it argues that the human sciences, including their history, must either adopt inclusive methods and nonnormative means of quantification and measurement, or acknowledge that they are not sciences but rather technologies created to perpetuate specific forms of domination.Footnote ¹¹ We have argued collectively that while these technologies of domination may have limitations, they are also useful for facilitating capricious uses – and by implication that the people who use them now do so at their own risk. This interpretation suggests that future human sciences, fueled by bio-recognition technologies, sensor data, neuropharmacology, large-scale data analyses, keyboard and mouse patterns, geo-tracking, and artificial intelligence, are likely to become harbingers of new forms of domination. The danger is that these technologies may frame normal and pathological behaviors, with the goal of predicting patterns with a degree of accuracy that may overlook novel forms of resistance, double rationality, and survivance.

How then can we frame the history of the human sciences moving forward, knowing or at least suspecting that we must? At the risk of being too clear, I offer then in answer to this question a final summary of the argument of the book you have now read: The history of the human sciences is primarily a history of physical and structural violence in which historians of the human sciences are also implicated. Writing about this history requires recognizing that accounts of these sciences may make the violence invisible or cast it as incidental or the result of a few bad actors, while hoping that the larger program will prove viable and emancipatory. The self-referential nature of the human sciences reveals that structural violence is fugitive within the linguistic and epistemic frameworks of the human sciences regardless of intent. Applying the hermeneutics of encounters modeled in these essays to other populations who became objects of study, and according frameworks that draw on affect, desires, agency, needs for reparative justice, and a place in the narrative, is thus crucial and ethical. The object of the encounter is not incidental or abstract, nor is the encounter apolitical, and thus what can be said about it, should be said accordingly.

Empire, Colonialism, and the Human Sciences is a timely, impressive, and generative contribution for thinking about the politics of historical scientific engagement and especially its intimate entanglement with coloniality, power, indigeneity, race, and gender. Reading these chapters, and especially my affective engagement with them, brought up a lot. In this short epilogue, however, I want to focus on three main themes: (1) the encounter with Indigenous Studies; (2) the importance of engaging with Native ideas of affect – what Dian Million calls “felt theory”; and (3) the significance of thinking with haunting and ghosts as central to reimagining the history of science in the Americas.

Some of the central questions that emerged for me as I read echo the questions and concerns many of the authors directly address in their contributions to this book. To begin where the book ends, that is, in the spirit of “productive discomfort,” I offer some thoughts about what an encounter with Indigenous Studies might, or maybe even should, produce. To phrase it perhaps a little provocatively, if the “human sciences” are to engage meaningfully with Indigenous Studies – with theorists from the Native North and Native South – then I would suggest that that engagement must be transformative, not just additive. To be clear, I think many of the contributions here do reflect this move toward transformation. To give an example of what I mean, we can consider the work of K’iche’ Maya scholar Emil’ Keme who is cited in the introduction. In his influential essay, “For Abiayala to Live, the Americas Must Die,” he calls for a reconsideration of the geographies of knowledge we continue to work with.Footnote ¹ He asks us to question the very category of Latin America and proposes a shift toward the concept of Abiayala for thinking otherwise and toward what he calls a transhemispheric Indigenous bridge. This raised questions for me about terminology, naming, and language. While contributors to this book do not use this terminology, I do think in many ways the book gestures toward the transhemispheric Indigenous bridge Keme is calling for in placing discussions of Indigenous Brazil, Paraguay, Peru, and Hawaiʻi (for example) into conversation. But perhaps there is a way to more explicitly engage with or address this call.

In other words, it is not enough to simply cite Native theorists. How does thinking with Native theorists, Native epistemologies and ontologies, radically transform the work we are doing? How does it shift the why, the audience, the approach or method used? How does it transform the way we think about knowledge production? About what counts as knowledge? Who is this for? Some chapters answer these questions more directly than others, but as a whole they encourage us to think along these lines.

Another question the book raises is about scholarly representation. Who is at the table? Who is inviting whom? What are the networks and processes that have already shaped who participates in this conversation? Let me be clear that I am not questioning the editorial decisions that led to inviting this group of unquestionably talented scholars. My point is about the broader workings of disciplinarity and academic boundaries that makes specific projects legible in specific ways.

I wondered too about the tensions inherent in placing Indigenous Studies and decolonial scholarship in the same frame without more fully unpacking both the possibilities and tensions that exist. In his conclusion, Stephen T. Casper mentions Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’s critique of Aníbal Quijano’s use of “decolonial” jargon. But Rivera Cusicanqui’s critique went beyond that, and focused in particular on Walter Mignolo and other scholars of decoloniality for what she understands as extractive/imperial knowledge production. Here is one memorable quote: “Walter Mignolo and company have built a small empire within an empire, strategically appropriating the contributions of the subaltern studies school of India and the various Latin American variants of critical reflection on colonization and decolonization.”Footnote ² Moreover, she was concerned not only with neologisms but with structures of power. Let me quote Rivera Cusicanqui once more:

I think it is in these tensions and in explorations of the limits of this project that we might find some interesting possibilities. I really appreciated Casper’s conclusion and the importance of productive discomfort. He writes: “I hope this self-reflection generates productive discomfort in the face of the question: how can we frame the history of the human sciences moving forward, knowing that we must?”

One of the opportunities this language offers – the language of discomfort as an embodied, affective response – is to engage with what Athabascan literary scholar and poet Dian Million famously called “felt theory.” Million’s work came forcefully to mind, for example, when I read Eve Buckley’s chapter discussing the significance of emotion and affect in debates about overpopulation, hunger, and poverty between Brazilian geographer Josué de Castro and American conservationist William Vogt. But the discomfort that Casper describes is a kind of understanding that is fueled by a decolonizing desire, and I mean this very much following Million who wrote about a key part of decolonization. “To ‘decolonize’,” she writes, “means to understand as fully as possible the forms colonialism takes in our own times.”Footnote ⁴ And I would add in our own lives. Naming the embodied responses our work provokes is not just self-flagellation but an indicator that signals the need for new forms of relationality and repair. Holly Barker, cultural anthropologist and curator for Oceanic & Asian Culture at the University of Washington’s Burke Museum, once told some of our students during a visit to the Burke that she feels a “knot in her stomach” every time she sets foot in the building that houses Native artifacts and ancestors without Native permission. Yet, Barker used that discomfort to create a form of knowledge production she calls “research families,” a form that has mentored an incredible number of Pacific Islander students and shown them how to use museum collections to reconnect with their own peoples, waters, and lands.

Like Barker’s work, many of the contributions in this book model responses to this productive discomfort and some possible paths forward. In his chapter, “Subverting the Anthropometric Gaze,” Adam Warren offers an explicit engagement with Indigenous methods, even or especially when they are not part of the work. I found in Warren’s direct and honest discussion of his methodological choices and decisions, of the practical issues raised by considering how his research could or should shift through engagement with Indigenous methods, a model for seriously considering the possibilities and the limits of this kind of work, for thinking through the implications of designing research that is not situated within decolonial or Indigenous frameworks from the beginning, but also for what can change moving forward. For example, his determination to translate his work into Quechua to share with communities for very specific political uses is inspiring and offers a concrete and important path forward.

Maile Arvin’s chapter, “Replacing Native Hawaiian Kinship with Social Scientific Care,” is also a beautiful gift. The care she begins with is a striking gesture of relationality and accountability, and a model for others working in this field. “Throughout this essay,” she writes, “I do not use the real names of children who are named in archival records given I have not (at least not yet) been able to contact descendants or other kin who may have particular desires about sharing these stories.” Her work reflects an elegant move away from damage-centered research, without ignoring the harm and brutality of what she terms the “settler colonial transinstitutionalization” of children in the territory of Hawaiʻi. Her chapter was particularly inspiring for me as I begin working with the archived testimonies of Indigenous survivors of the recent war in Peru.

Similarly, Rosanna Dent’s engaging discussion of the history of genetics research in A’uwẽ communities in Brazil, underscores the importance of affect and relations in discussions about ethics and bureaucracy. She explores the various affective dynamics that have shaped the experience of researchers and the communities and peoples impacted by this research, as well as the bureaucratic regulation of research itself. And she insists on centering the agency of A’uwẽ aldeias as they work toward developing their own frameworks for regulating and overseeing research conducted in their communities. Dent’s discussion of adoption and kinship in relation to research, and her emphasis on affective fields were particularly compelling. She describes the adoption of researchers by community members as an Indigenous strategy for “claiming” researchers, and thus asserting “a relationship of kinship by publicly announcing their chosen relationship to the researcher.” This claim compels researchers to behave according to particular familial and community social norms, thus offering the A’uwẽ moral authority and a dimension of control over researchers’ actions. And, she writes, in taking these relations seriously, in “working through the affective field of A’uwẽ regulations of research, we may open ourselves up to being changed.” And quoting Kim TallBear, she continues: “A researcher who is willing to learn how to ‘stand with’ a community of subjects is willing to be altered, to revise her stakes in the knowledge to be produced.” This is a central concern in Indigenous Studies, a concern that Dent takes seriously and tackles thoughtfully and with great care.

These and other contributors in this book invite serious, careful, detailed reflection on approaches that can transform the field in significant ways. But let me move to the next theme, which is the significance of thinking through and with haunting. As I read the chapters in this book, I kept returning to what thinking with ghosts might offer. In “A Glossary of Haunting,” Eve Tuck and C. Ree write that haunting does not “hope for reconciliation. Haunting lies precisely in its refusal to stop … For ghosts, the haunting is the resolving, it is not what needs to be resolved.”Footnote ⁵ In my own work in Peru on the afterlives of war, and more specifically on the impact of political violence on more-than-human life, I have found this an incredibly generative conceptual tool. In Peru – and in so many other places – we need ghosts to continue their work, to continue to haunt so that we may never forget, so that we may continue to work not toward any kind of false reconciliation, but rather toward altogether reimagining possible worlds. Perhaps, we can think about haunting as a kind of healing, or better, as a disruption, a call to wake up. We may even begin to think about haunting as a kind of anticolonial practice, especially if we think with and from Indigenous standpoints. As Tuck and Ree put it, haunting is a “relentless remembering and reminding” that “with some crimes of humanity – [such as] the violence of colonization – there is no putting to rest.”Footnote ⁶ This, to me, also includes thinking about the disruption of relations, and the repairing of those relations, not only among humans, but also in relation to nonhuman kin. In my own work, I want to think about the many nonhuman ghosts that may also wander through Andean valleys and rivers. I wonder, do they too demand justice? Do they too ask to be remembered? How do they figure in these histories and politics? What are the nonhuman relations disrupted? And what are the ghastly memories embedded in lands, in rivers; what do glaciers remember and how do they respond?

I read and feel this book as an invitation to sit with and think with ghosts, to take them seriously. From haunted institutions in Hawaiʻi and Puerto Rico (Arvin and Ortiz Díaz), to the potential haunting of/by the ghosts of kidnapped Aché girls (Gil-Riaño) or of/by the Akimel O’odham people from Arizona – Carolyn Matthews’ “human subjects of research” (Stark), to the afterlives of Cuauhtémoc’s bones (Rosemblatt), and skulls as “uncanny objects,” (Rodriguez), many of the contributors gesture to this and in various ways ask what it means to think of how the human sciences are haunted. However, it is worth slowing down to think with the many entities that haunt the entire book: bones, skulls, DNA samples, spirits. I hesitated to name these as human, nonhuman, or once-human, since the very category of the human (and “the living”) seems to be one that is being interrogated by this project, and also by radical Black and Indigenous scholarly traditions.Footnote ⁷ Indeed, it might be worth complicating the human subject/nonhuman object distinction made a few times throughout the book. Taking Indigenous Studies, epistemologies, and ontologies seriously, means reframing and rethinking who or what is animate and inanimate, alive or dead. Bones are not things, they are ancestors who can be dangerous, restless, or at peace. If thinking with “the materiality of human remains expands the historian of science’s toolkit” (Rodriguez, this book), that toolkit expands even further when we attend to what Rodriguez calls evocatively the “spiritual materiality” of bone, which I take to mean the ontological, epistemological, and metaphorical possibilities that come with thinking of bones as more-than-material. It is notable that in several Polynesian languages the word for bone is also the same word for people, tribe, or nation (e.g., Kanaka ‘Ōiwi in Hawaiʻi; iwi for Maori in Aotearoa/New Zealand). In the supernatural and historical Peruvian novella Adios Ayacucho by Julio Ortega, a tortured, murdered, and disappeared Andean campesino searches for his own remains.Footnote ⁸ He fails to find them and resorts to stealing the bones of the conquistador Francisco Pizarro and laying in his tomb to reassemble himself, metaphorically linking the violence of the late twentieth century with that of the sixteenth. Rosemblatt’s discussion of the afterlives of Cuauhtémoc’s bones could be placed in interesting conversation with Ortega’s novella and its broader implications. This is not the place to add more flesh to these bones, but possibilities are many, and the essays here push us to think expansively.

Rodríguez’s description of the “haunting effects” of bones also inspired me to think with photographs as haunted. In particular, the work of anthropologist Lisa Stevenson came to mind. In an essay titled “Looking Away,” she draws on Roland Barthes and John Berger to describe the care that can be part of anthropological encounters and ethnographic writing. This kind of approach, she writes, “addresses how images – whether, photographic, painted, or written – may come to be seen as ‘just’.”Footnote ⁹ And she considers the possibility that “it might be necessary to look away from our interlocutors, or the images we have of them, in order to be able to sense, and then communicate to others, their singularity. The traces they leave behind in our memories can allow us to register an aliveness that exceeds our existing labels, categories, and styles of thinking.”Footnote ¹⁰ In other words, Stevenson calls for “looking away” from those we are trying to understand, in order to more fully “see.” For her, “looking away” – from a photograph, a person, someone we are trying to represent – can be a form of “seeing with our eyes closed” that gestures to “the singularity of another being.”Footnote ¹¹ As she writes, this form of looking – or not looking – might “allow us to go beyond seeing someone as a specimen from a social category.”Footnote ¹²

Stevenson is writing about photographs she encounters in the archives of McMaster University’s Health Sciences Library, photographs from the mid-1900s of Inuit patients in Canadian sanatoriums. She explores the idea of “looking away” as one form of refusing the “look” of the colonial gaze, refusing “categorical ways of looking” that reduce lively beings to specimens, ethnic categories, anthropological types. She is searching for an “un-stately, unseemly, un-fixative” way of looking; for a way to move “beyond the clinical label or social category [that] involves a play between seeing with our eyes and seeing with our soul.”Footnote ¹³

I find inspiration in Stevenson’s invitation to look away to more fully “see” individual beings. Gil-Riaño’s work in particular brought Stevenson to mind as I wondered what the photographs of some of the Aché girls he writes about would reveal if approaching them through and with Stevenson’s framing. And yet, the privileged focus on sight raises important concerns about this approach. We must find ways to push beyond ableist language and framings that are so often part of scholarly discourses. Perhaps, then, we might read Stevenson in multi-sensorial conversation with Tina Campt’s powerful work on “listening” to images. For Campt, “‘listening to images’ … designates a method of recalibrating vernacular photographs as quiet, quotidian practices that give us access to the affective registers through which these images enunciate alternate accounts of their subjects.”Footnote ¹⁴ “To listen to them,” she writes, “is to be attuned to their unsayable truths, to perceive their quiet frequencies of possibility …”Footnote ¹⁵ This last point, “to be attuned to their unsayable truths, to perceive their quiet frequencies of possibility,” is what I think Stevenson is trying to do through her play with the language and practice of looking and seeing. It invites a move toward a multilayered affective attunement to others, one that perhaps allows for a more complex relation to and with others, one that recognizes the emotional richness of their lives, as well as their multifaceted experiences of and in life. What would it mean for historians of science to think more explicitly with such an approach?

And to return once again to Dian Million, this kind of looking, not looking, and hearing is also a kind of feeling, a kind of “felt analysis.” This work helps us take seriously the “structures of feeling” that were both part of the extractive and colonial mode of the human sciences that all the contributors describe so well, and also the new kind of structures of feeling that emerge once we center Indigenous Studies values like radical relationality, reciprocity, and accountability in the writing, teaching, and mentoring we do. I think that the conversations modeled in this book can help reveal how Indigenous Studies have transformed our work and can signal alternative ways forward.

On May 10, 2023, a delegation from the Gitxaała Nation entered Harvard’s Peabody Museum. Wearing ceremonial red and black, the seven members had traveled from their territory in the Pacific Northwest to the ground floor of the museum where a small group of museum staff, invited guests, and chance visitors observed a palpably momentous event. Even unsuspecting museum-goers who wandered out of the Lakota images exhibit to the galleries on the first floor seemed to sense the importance of the occasion. Surrounded by Penabscot canoe exhibits and the Kaats’ and Brown Bear Totem Pole, the Gitxaała Nation and university representatives acknowledged in a poignant ceremony the return of a Gitxaała house frontal pole and associated fragments. Repatriation of the totem pole had taken 126 years.Footnote ¹

This moving ceremony was not to hand over the totem pole; its actual return had taken place months earlier. Rather, this observance served as an acknowledgment of closure, and, potentially, a blueprint for possible future encounters. In fact, the Gitxaała Nation had come to leave a marker, a gan niidza, “to explain what happened.” In selecting an object to represent them as a living people, the Gitxaała Nation was purposefully disrupting the official narrative that others had constructed about them. They are still present, a delegate asserted; not simple objects to be collected or studied. The Gitxaała Nation representatives were there “closing a circle that should never have been opened,” when sacred objects were stolen from their territory in the nineteenth century and transformed through new claims of ownership into scientific “artifacts.”

What can repatriation of a sacred object like the Gitxaała house pole tell us about troubling encounters and their possible afterlives? Rather than delve into the rich themes of data collection, knowledge making, research ethics in science, and other topics covered so well in this book, I wish to center the ceremony at the Peabody as one of meaning making and repair that situates respect and reciprocity as an ethical frame for possible futures. Many of the chapters in this book foreground disquieting interactions whose future endings are yet to be written. Who can collect and who gets collected, studied, and exhibited are certainly stories about domination, but they are also tales about the manifold constructions – evidentiary “slivers” of both material objects and human remains (blood, skulls, or other genetic material) – needed to cement the colonizing idea of difference. How might historians of the human sciences think about these stories as we move forward?

The Totem Pole

To the Gitxaała and other Indigenous peoples, totem poles or house posts (or pts’aan) possessed history and power. Not only were they territorial markers but they also contained stories of the clans they represented. Purchased by a skipper of a New England Fish Company in 1885, the totem pole, an integral part of Gitxaała culture, was sold under duress to be “displayed as a historic oddity” in the offices of the Boston harbor fishing company.Footnote ² As the Gitxaała museum webpage explained, “It was cut down, saved, sold, abused, given away, and displayed.” Though the returned pole stood at an already imposing 12 feet, it is thought to have been as tall as 50 feet when it originally stood outside a clan home.

On the day of the ceremony at the Peabody, I learned more about the history of the pole from the director of the museum and a member of the Gitxaała Nation. I am not a scholar of the Gitxaała Nation but I was there as a mere member of the faculty museum committee. In other words, I, like the many scientists in this book, am rendering my interpretation of the events wholly aware of my power in being able to write an account. Having said that, though I was in the first row, my view was partially blocked by someone who, despite arriving late, planted themselves in front of occupied chairs and stood there for the duration of the ceremony. To see, those who were seated needed to strain, leaning to either side of the man, who turned out to be a Boston Globe reporter. From my uncomfortably slanted viewing position, I could not help but reflect what it means to be able to see/to witness/to rewrite histories with an unobstructed view. As I moved my body to the left and right, trying to capture as much of the experience as possible, there were inevitable moments when I missed key details and was left to infer what had happened. Even my advantaged seating precluded me from fully understanding subtle movements, words spoken, and the meaning of songs and rituals. In short, I lacked a broader historical context and training to give a truer account, made more difficult by the reporter who, now part of my account, continued to obstruct my view.

Though these blocked views were mere moments, afterwards I found myself thinking how they rather neatly captured the partial views we have been given from archives, oral histories, ethnographies, and erstwhile collecting expeditions of those who have long been the living subjects of science. Indeed, what I was witnessing was a mere instant in a much longer and complex history – described in most of the chapters of this book – of colonizers, sailors, businessmen, intermediaries, and social scientists, among others, who trafficked in objects, facts, and conjecture.

The pole or pts’aan was the first of seventy-three culturally significant objects that are currently held in more than twelve national and international museums and which are at different stages of being returned to the Gitxaała Nation. Those who had come to acknowledge the return were also there to reframe the history, to retell it from their perspective. Hearing the spokesperson explain the theft of the pole was a powerful reminder of what was lost when objects – and people – were captured during, as a Nation member explained, “one of our darkest moments.” The loss was more profound for it was more than the material object displayed first by the fishing company and later the museum; it is what the objects represented, the history and the spirits of the ancestors. For the Gitxaała Nation the pole was living, holding the spirits of those who came before.

Indigenous newspaper coverage of the return of the totem pole eschewed words like “artifact” and “repatriate,” replacing them instead with Sm’algyax words to describe the return of the pole as putting the “value and sacredness back in” and most importantly reasserting “we are still alive.”Footnote ³ Historian Vera Candiani reminds us that words, especially in extractive economies, have deeper meanings. She writes, “Using such descriptors not only treats objects, processes, and people as products of random genetic combinations, but also, by so swiftly categorizing it thus, also prematurely forecloses on deeper understandings of the things in themselves and their relationships to processes around them.”Footnote ⁴ Candiani uses this argument to urge historians to think more broadly about environments, but deliberate word choice, as used here, is a powerful assertion against imposed scientific terminology and categorization.

Explaining why the use of “artifact” erased multiple meanings, a member told a reporter:

The afterlives of troubling encounters hence necessitate new words for ruptures created in communities but also for, as in this case, the jigsaw-like pieces needed to bring them together. Words, like the sacred objects now being returned to US Tribal Nations through the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), have power.

In her introductory comments at the Peabody ceremony, the director of the museum, Jane Pickering, raised the question of what ethical stewardship of Indigenous objects might mean in the twenty-first century. She spoke not just about acknowledging that many of the objects the museum obtained and withheld came to it under duress and violence, but also argued for an ethics of repair. To establish open communication with communities whose objects had long been on display, repair, the director clarified, “sometimes meant return to the community.”Footnote ⁶

But the return of sacred objects opens the possibilities for other portrayals, other interpretations in museum spaces. For instance, on that day as the ceremony neared its ending, the representatives unfurled the marker they had brought to leave at the museum: a flag of their nation. With the gifting of the flag, the Gitxaała Nation reclaimed power over those who had taken their culture to display as an exotic talisman, both the shipping company and the museum. By requesting that it be the Gitxaała Nation flag, a representation of a sovereign nation, that is displayed where the totem pole once stood is laden with meaning. It creates another encounter, one infused this time with a deeper understanding, a fuller picture of both the historical context and cultural meaning. It affirms sovereignty and the dignity and power of telling one’s own story. It was also a reminder for future museumgoers that the Gitxaała people are not relics of the past but, as the delegates remarked several times, “we survived.”Footnote ⁷