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Annual Review of Anthropology
Soylent Is People, and WEIRD
Is White: Biological
Anthropology, Whiteness,
and the Limits of the WEIRD
Kathryn B.H. Clancy1,2 and Jenny L. Davis1,3
1Department of Anthropology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana,
Illinois 61801, USA; email: kclancy@illinois.edu, loksi@illinois.edu
2Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois 61801, USA
3American Indian Studies Program, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana,
Illinois 61801, USA
Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2019. 48:169–86
The Annual Review of Anthropology is online at
anthro.annualreviews.org
https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-102218-
011133
Copyright © 2019 by Annual Reviews.
All rights reserved
This article is part of a special theme on Social
In/justice. For a list of other articles in this theme,
see https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/
10.1146/annurev-an-48-themes
Keywords
whiteness, race, WEIRD, Western
Abstract
WEIRD populations, or those categorized as Western, educated, industri-
alized, rich, and democratic, are sampled in the majority of quantitative
human subjects research. Although this oversampling is criticized in some
corners of social science research, it is not always clear what we are cri-
tiquing. In this article, we make three interventions into the WEIRD con-
cept and its common usage. First, we seek to better operationalize the terms
within WEIRD to avoid erasing people with varying identities who also live
within WEIRD contexts. Second, we name whiteness as the factor that most
strongly unites WEIRD research and researchers yet typically goes unac-
knowledged. We show how reexivity is a tool that can help social scientists
better understand the effects of whiteness within the scientic enterprise.
Third, we look at the positionality of biological anthropology, as not cul-
tural anthropology and not psychology, and how that offers both promise
and pitfalls to the study of human variation. We offer other perspectives
on what constitutes worthy and rigorous biological anthropology research
that does not always prioritize replicability and statistical power, but rather
emphasizes the full spectrum of the human experience. From here, we offer
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several ways forward to produce more inclusive human subjects research, particularly around exist-
ing methodologies such as grounded theory, Indigenous methodologies, and participatory action
research, and call on biological anthropology to contribute to our understanding of whiteness.
INTRODUCTION
What sets the sciences apart is that they claim to construct reality but not to be themselves constructed.
—Emily Martin (1998, p. 26)
Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic—WEIRD—populations are a bit of a
niche among the sprawl of humankind. The overuse and oversampling of WEIRD populations by
WEIRD scientists may have led us to a gross mischaracterization of what it means to be human.
Rather than sampling from the broad range of lived experiences, research on human behavior
and physiology has been done mostly by WEIRD people, on WEIRD people, without much re-
ection on how the specicity of that lived experience might inuence how we dene and value
problems, how we collect data, and how we analyze and interpret these data.The oversampling of
the WEIRD exposes the ways in which essentialism around human nature does more harm than
a recognition of context and inter- and intrapopulational variation.
This acronym, WEIRD, was introduced nearly a decade ago by Henrich et al. (2010) to
highlight the prevalent norm within psychological science to use data collected from under-
graduate university student populations within the United States and Western Europe in studies
that nonetheless purport to represent all humans. It served to identify aspects of these study
populations that might differ from those of other groups across the world along a number of
social, political, and geographical axes. However, as we discuss in this article, this acronym and its
adoption within science, while exposing the weirdness of the WEIRD, may also contribute to the
erasure of multiple groups and, in doing so, reinforce rather than disrupt the practices it aims to
critique. Here, we join long-standing and recent calls for more rigorous methods and ethical re-
search as well as for a more inclusive anthropological science (Bader et al. 2018; Bardill et al. 2018;
Bolnick et al. 2019; Brodkin et al. 2011; Harrison 1995, 1998; Mukhopadhyay & Moses 1997;
Shanklin 1998).
WEIRD is now in common usage in many disciplines: Henrich and colleagues’ Behavior and
Brain Sciences article has been cited 191 times, and the same authors’ shorter opinion piece in Na-
ture has been cited 817 times as of the writing of this article. These authors and others are also
continuing to extend the meaning and reach of the term (Muthukrishna et al. 2018, Schulz et al.
2018). We contend that how this acronym is employed leads to additional assumptions about who
constitutes WEIRD that risk erasing black, Indigenous, and other identities. The original authors
did not spend signicant time dening their terms: Western according to whom? Do we mean
rich as a whole, or can a population still be rich if there is pervasive income inequality? Does a
population count as democratic if there is rampant voter suppression? WEIRD seems so easy to
dene; we are clearly talking about all those aforementioned, pesky studies of US undergraduate
students. The question is, what are the components of these undergraduate students that are the
real problem? As anthropologists, we nd limited utility in generalizing ndings from one pop-
ulation to all people everywhere and nd value in including everyone in research. So, with the
appropriate caveats, the problem may not be with studying the WEIRD so much as with under-
standing WEIRD in context and as the primary comparison point.
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Thus, we argue that the main trouble with WEIRD is in how whiteness is made invisible in
its invocation. The concept of WEIRD caters to a type of color-blind ideology (Shanklin 1998)
that erases the varying lived experiences of racial and ethnic minority undergraduates and other
participants. It also appears to provide a critique of the “view from nowhere” once aspired to in
the sciences (Smith & Bolnick 2019) while further burying our ability to observe or think about
race. Yet the differences in lived experience for nonwhite participants are signicant. For instance,
racial and ethnic minority undergraduates live with daily racial harassment in the form of racist
mascots and racist imagery, as well as microaggressions in the form of exclusion and outgrouping
(Cross et al. 2017, Harwood et al. 2012, Lewis et al. 2013). Ample research has shown the negative
effects of these factors on mental health, cognition, and school performance, as well as healing
paths toward resilience (Bowes & Jaffee 2013, Rasmus et al. 2014, Walters & Simoni 2002).
Although hate crimes have been on the rise since the 2016 US election (Levin & Reitzel 2018),
the different experiences that racial and ethnic minority students face on college campuses, as
compared with those of their white peers, have a long history (Harper 2012, Lawrence et al.
1993). These differences begin in home communities, in K–12 schools, and in the structural
racism that fundamentally limits access to the same life granted to white people. We contend that
these different experiences are critical, which complicates whether WEIRD/not-WEIRD is the
frame that creates the most meaning in understanding variation among human populations.
Next, few scientists are aware of, or offering, WEIRD caveats or context alongside their
limited-in-scope research. Most published science is edited and written by white WEIRD scien-
tists, in English, and most human behavior and physiology research is conducted on white WEIRD
people (Arnett 2008, Johnson et al. 2018). The dominant (though by no means exclusive) history
of science as a practice and a process, as most understand it today, has developed within white
Western European culture; this limited and limiting focus trickles down to inuence not only our
methodologies, but also the questions we nd important and the ways in which we interpret results
(Kimmerer 2013, TallBear 2013, Todd 2016, Tuck & Yang 2014). The culture of science makes it
difcult to criticize from outside of science (Shapin 2010), which limits the abilities of those with
appropriate expertise to intervene. For these reasons, cultural psychology, Indigenous methods,
and reexive approaches introduced within cultural and linguistic anthropology have had limited
purchase across the quantitative social sciences (see recent counterexamples: Athreya 2019, Bader
& Malhi 2019, Smith & Bolnick 2019, TallBear 2019).
The nal problem is that, in criticizing oversampling of the WEIRD, there is a risk of exoti-
cizing everyone else. The romance of eldwork and studying so-called small-scale societies has a
long history in anthropology. This tendency, along with our othering of everyone else, continues
to set up the WEIRD as the population against which we should always compare as the dominant
human norm (Dominguez 1994, Harrison 1995, Martin 2017, Tuck & Yang 2014). Early models
of anthropological eldwork assumed the necessity of the perspective of the scientist as the neutral
observer.The people with whom scientists work and study became the Other, and so studying the
“exotic” (Henrich et al. 2010, p. 61) in the name of increasing variation in our research base only
perpetuates the problem.
This review attempts to coordinate multiple existing and complementary discussions of and
community responses to issues with WEIRD research. We offer three interventions into the
invocation of WEIRD. First, we attempt to operationalize the term WEIRD and make visible
some of the assumptions implicit in the term. Second, we show how whiteness, especially when
combined with male privilege, constricts our understanding of human variation owing to the
predominance of white male WEIRD researchers and to the prioritization of their research
perspectives even among those holding different subjectivities. We hope to invite social scientists
into a conversation about our own lived experiences, the history of our disciplines, and the harm
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that can be caused by trying to move beyond race and other social identiers by adopting a
color-blind ideology. Finally, our third intervention is to begin to identify the bind in which bio-
logical anthropologists nd themselves. Not psychologists, but not cultural anthropologists, they
occupy a third space that brings with it both the promise and the problems of homogenizing and
quantifying people and othering them by situating them outside white researchers’ experiences.
The bind in which biological anthropologists nd themselves, as scientists who understand the
problems of biologizing race but who rarely make visible its social implications, requires that we
start interrogating whiteness and make understanding its effects on researchers and research par-
ticipants a high priority in our research agendas. This bind is also a result of our romanticizing
of non-WEIRD populations, particularly those sometimes classied as small-scale societies, as an
analog for the environments of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA). How we characterize the EEA
(despite recognizing its variation in our research practice) is simply the other side of the coin of
color-blind ideology (for a similar argument regarding the out-of-Africa hypothesis, see Athreya
2019). The exoticizing and othering of research participants who are not white and male have
already been done: This work represents most of the history of anthropology as a four-eld disci-
pline. We suggest the introduction of methodologies that decenter whiteness while incorporating
the contributions of scholars of color into our theory, methods, and pedagogy. Reexive method-
ologies, as well as the application of a critical lens to how whiteness becomes embodied, will better
serve biological anthropology.
FIRST INTERVENTION: DEFINING WEIRD
Comparative work is important to the research enterprise, in biological anthropology generally
and in human biological variation specically, because it allows us to test hypotheses about varia-
tion in lived experience and adaptation across different environments. All comparative work must
set some conditions over what makes their groups of comparison distinct. The WEIRD concept
emphasizes that those who fall into this designation have some similarity in history, perspective,
and lived experience that is often invisible to those of us who practice science because often it is
our history as well. The concept also exposes how some of the claims around evolved behavior,
adaptability,and human universals have rested on a research base composed mostly of one type of
population.
Without operationalizing WEIRD, however, a few problems emerge. First, ambiguity in the
term contributes to and worsens its appearance of homogeneity,creating a stronger perception of
difference between WEIRD and non-WEIRD groups than may be fair. In their commentary on
Henrich et al. (2010, pp. 84–85), Baumard & Sperber point out that ambiguous methodologies
lead to participants bringing their own sets of assumptions and biases to the table in their responses
to social science experiments. In turn, these ambiguities can lead to researchers also unintention-
ally fueling their interpretations with the bias of their own, nonneutral perspectives. They note
that these misunderstandings could widen the gap between WEIRD and non-WEIRD reactions
to ambiguous experiments and lead to our interpreting more difference than may strictly exist
between human populations. We suggest that the ambiguity of the terms that constitute WEIRD,
and the assumptions that get infused into these terms, produces a similar problem. For example,
recent work that includes one of the original authors attempts to quantify the distance between
WEIRD and non-WEIRD groups, further reinforcing the original messaging that all other pop-
ulations should be contrasted with the WEIRD (Muthukrishna et al. 2018). Second, choosing
to distinguish WEIRD populations from others only reinforces our historic tendency to mea-
sure all human variation against one particular norm—the norm that just happens to be the one
experienced by the scientists themselves. Third, in this perceived homogeneity, we erase certain
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constituencies and, in particular, feign ignorance about the factor that is arguably its dening one.
As we argue in this section, WEIRD is a way for researchers in predominantly white environ-
ments to discuss history, culture, and context without having to talk about race. To this end, we
enumerate and dene the terms within WEIRD to show how, ultimately, WEIRD is just another
way of saying white.
“Western” usually denotes countries within Western Europe and the countries they settled,
such as the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The cultures of these countries
originate from the Greco-Roman tradition and are largely Christian. Yet these “Western” coun-
tries are not monolithic cultures. Both “American” and “Western” are terms that often serve as
a dog whistle for conrming the dominance of white or white Western European perspectives
(Said 1978), but many of these Western countries are colonized countries still inhabited by In-
digenous people. When we use Western or American as shorthand for white, which is the work
these terms are implicitly doing, we reinforce structures of white privilege that dene white as
normal (Frankenberg 1993, 2001; Harrison 1995) and erase everyone else. In their article, “When
Are Persons ‘White?’ On Some Practical Asymmetries of Racial Reference in Talk-in-Interaction,”
Whitehead & Lerner (2009) show how scholars of race have noticed the inequities of how we talk
about white and nonwhite people:
The color-blind ideology described in this literature is characterized by members of the dominant
(white) racial group viewing themselves in nonracial terms, as “just people,” rather than identifying as
members of a racial category. Consequently, the framework of norms and values associated with the
dominant group comes to be unquestioningly, and hence invisibly, treated as equally applicable to mem-
bers of other groups. Thus, although discourses of color-blindness may arise from well-intentioned
attempts to “move beyond race,” such positions begin from a predominantly white experience of the
world, where race is perceived as unimportant, thereby negating the lifeworld of people of color, whose
experiences are still very much shaped by race. (p. 617)
The word Western in WEIRD is not intended to be inclusive of everyone living in a Western
society, but rather of only those white people with Western European ancestry. For example, at
one point, Henrich et al. (2010, p. 67) use Western to contrast with two Indigenous communities in
the Western hemisphere: rural Native American communities in Wisconsin (specic tribal nations
not provided) and Yukatek Maya communities in Mexico. Here, Native Americans are clearly
not considered “American” and Indigenous Maya are not considered Western even though their
cultures are original to what is now the United States and Mexico, respectively. Because of the
assumption that Western equals whiteness, in cases where who is included within this term is
ambiguous, the people of color who have not had the same experience of Western culture that
white people have had are rendered invisible. The continued use of the term Western is a means
through which race is socially constructed and reinforced even by those who recognize and argue
that it has no biological basis.
Other categories and terms have been provided by scholars to point out many aspects often
assumed to be part of what Western entails, such as invoking colonial or settler colonial nation-
states, the “First World,” the Global North, non-Indigenous, etc. Such examples make clear both
how ideologically laden this term is and how its lack of specicity renders it at best unuseful as a
scientic descriptor and at worst a continuation of the anthropological sciences as a tool of empire,
racism, and exclusion. The remaining components of WEIRD are similarly often assumed com-
ponents of what is classied as Western. As such, their use bundled within the WEIRD acronym
serves more to reinforce one central idea of what Western means, rather than denoting variation
within the term.
The proposed denition of educated within the acronym characterizes someone in the process
of getting a degree beyond high school or who has already gotten a higher-education degree. This
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is a very specic and white Western notion of education. And so we must inquire again: What are
the privileges made invisible by this term’s ambiguity? Most likely, when we think of educated
in this context, we are thinking of students enrolled in four-year colleges, perhaps even more
specically students who are getting or have gotten traditional four-year degrees immediately
after high school—but what about educational processes and university systems outside of this
dominant paradigm? Are we criticizing all research performed on students who have ever gotten
an education after high school, including trade schools, tribal colleges or universities, Historically
Black Colleges or Universities? Or are we specically criticizing the research performed at
R1 Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs) with large psychology and other social science
departments offering high enrollment introductory survey courses where extra credit is offered
for research participation? In short, does the term educated capture the reality within the United
States: that the universities most likely to have funded research programs and course structures
that are currently the norm for gathering quantitative data are those least likely to have student
populations that represent the diversity of the national population? Again, education is not
monolithic, and the hidden privilege of attending an R1 PWI is not extendable to all educated
people.
The term industrialized often refers to those populations or countries where there is sufcient
infrastructure for businesses or goods to be produced locally.It is not clear whether industrialized
is inclusive of populations with a market economy, which is an economic system where decisions
around the pricing and distribution of goods and services are made by individual citizens and busi-
nesses rather than by the government. Many if not most so-called small-scale societies marveled
at by anthropologists are themselves no longer subsistence economies but are transitioning to
market economies or even planned economies. In fact, some of these populations have centuries-
old international trade relationships and high rates of participation in both national politics and
military service, as with the Shuar in Ecuador (Rubenstein 2001, 2006; Steel 1999). It seems to
us that industrialized may in fact refer to an economic state far beyond the simple production of
local goods: the postindustrialized economy. The postindustrialized economy, which is the one
found in most white, Western European countries to begin with, is an economy dened by re-
duced manufacturing in favor of increased services, information, and research. In each of these
countries, this economy has arisen out of and is maintained by colonialism via the extraction of
resources from colonies or territories.
Next, the term rich may have very different meanings if we are applying it to a country, a pop-
ulation in that country, or an individual research participant. Rich in its broadest sense refers to
the total value of goods produced and services provided per capita in a given country.Many if not
most of the richest countries in the world also have signicant income inequality, which refers to
uneven distribution of family income. The United States, where studies included in the WEIRD
framework are most frequently located, is currently ranked thirty-ninth in the world for its in-
come inequality and has the most income inequality among white Western European countries
(CIA 2019). Therefore, the variety of lived experience among those who live in the United States,
and other white Western European countries, is far greater than the rich designation seems to
allow. So the designation of WEIRD at a national level erases both the great disparities in so-
cioeconomic realities within the country and also the fact that R1 PWIs, discussed above, are
still attended predominately by white, upper- to middle-class, US citizens. As such, the partici-
pants in such studies are especially not representative of the United States, much less all humans.
And, in this way, the categories of educated and rich, as they are utilized here, fail to address differ-
ences between nation-states where university education is available to most people for free or with
minimal tuition and those where it is available only to those with signicant economic resources
(i.e., whether being rich is a requirement of being educated).
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Finally,the term democratic is intended to refer to a system of government run by elected rep-
resentatives. However, this term is not specic, including within it an incredibly diverse array of
government structures and processes. Depending on the denition of democracy used, as many as
60% of the world’s governments are classied under this category—even more if we rely on the
self-categorization of nation-states (Wike et al. 2017). Within the United States, the passing and
subsequent erosion of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, particularly in the 2016 and 2018 elections,
demonstrate the wide variation in people’s access to vote in a democratic society. US undergrad-
uates, those most reviled forms of WEIRD participant pools, experienced signicant voter sup-
pression in the 2018 elections owing to the closing of multiple campus polling places in efforts to
dissuade voting among young adult students (Hakim & Wines 2018, Lanmon 2018, Smith 2018).
Without clearly operationalizing the terms Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and demo-
cratic, most people will default to the most dominant and visible forms of these denitions. As
we have demonstrated, each of the categories within WEIRD does not operate independently
but rather as co-constitutive of each other, adding specicity (and levels of erasure) to an ever-
narrowing category. Thus, WEIRD is dened as the white Western European–derived popula-
tions of the following regions: North America (excluding Mexico), Europe and the British Isles,
the Baltics, Scandinavia, and Australia and New Zealand.It is worth asking whether this list would
change if we dened them only as “white Western” given that white people have the majority of the
wealth on the planet (Kochhar & Fry 2014, Oliver & Shapiro 2013). Alas, the answer is no. This
very specic subset of the global population has most of the wealth and exerts very strong cultural
inuences all over the world. These populations cannot be divorced from the privilege they enjoy
by being white and living in national and global systems that privilege whiteness. Thus, people of
color, immigrants, First Nations and other Indigenous people, cannot be categorized as WEIRD.
SECOND INTERVENTION: NAMING WHITENESS AND OFFERING
REFLEXIVITY
WEIRD is used predominately to characterize the participants in psychology and other social
sciences research studies. What happens when it is not just the participants who are WEIRD
but also the researchers? The top ve producers of published science research are the United
States, China, Japan, Germany, and the United Kingdom. The United States is still the largest
producer of science (spending 26% of global research and development funds). Although China
and possibly Brazil and Japan are on the rise in terms of research investment and publications,
English language researchers from WEIRD populations still conduct by far the largest percentage
of published science research ( Johnson et al. 2018).
For years preceding Henrich and colleagues’ papers on the WEIRD, psychologists have
noted that those from the United States dominate, and therefore dictate, psychological research
(Arnett 2008). Meadon & Spurrett’s commentary in Henrich et al. (2010, pp. 104–5) also makes
a similar point. In an analysis of top psychology journals in the early 2000s, fully 73% of rst
authors were based at United States universities, with an additional 14% of rst authors from
other English-speaking countries and another 11% from other European countries. Thus, 87%
of psychology research is conducted in or by English-speaking, WEIRD researchers, and 98%
from WEIRD countries more broadly (Arnett 2008). Fully 100% of the editors in chief in this
analysis, and 82% of associate editors, were from the United States. These percentages decrease
some as one moves away from the most elite and highly cited journals, and there are, of course,
thriving research programs across the world. But when the most elite journals are run by and
publish those scientists from the United States, the discipline is going to be determined in large
part by that particular worldview and lived experience.
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And even here, we need to complicate the picture further. Ample evidence suggests that an
inclusive science that creates room for a variety of lived experiences and social identities leads
to better problem solving and more interesting research (Amos et al. 2015, Nishii 2013, Shore
et al. 2011). Yet the problem is not only, or at least not exactly, the identities of the scientists
themselves. Rather, when scientists are trained to see the scientic method as objective—itself an
artifact of white, Western European culture—and are dismissive of other ways of knowing, when
scientists are often then encouraged to see scientists themselves as objective, and when scientists
are trained that ignoring bias is what helps them overcome it, we end up with problematic science
interpreted through only one lens. An added problem is that when scientists most often hold or are
trained by scientists with the same subjectivities, all work will necessarily be comparative against
this dominant lived experience. Therefore, better science should include a more inclusive and
racially and geographically diverse scientic practice that includes more perspectives and better
perspective taking on the part of researchers who hold dominant social identities (Fuentes 2019,
Smith & Bolnick 2019).
As we have sought to make clear thus far,white Western European male perspectives and values
have long dictated which questions we nd worthy of answering and frame how we understand
the fundamental nature of research. Dening problems, developing hypotheses, designing and
conducting research, and interpreting results are all inuenced by a scientist’s lived experience.
This idea is not new nor is it expressed only by those who wish to critique the sciences. Rather,
this meta-scientic observation is often accepted when said by scientists but roundly criticized
when the perception is that the person saying it is outside of science (Shapin 2010). When the
dominant voices in science are WEIRD, and not only WEIRD but historically and currently
white and male, a certain amount of ignorance is, unfortunately, going to permeate the study of
humans, which leads to defensiveness rather than openness.
When we talk about WEIRD researchers and WEIRD participants, the ignorance of, or invis-
ibility of, white supremacy creates an unspoken tension around whom we are talking about. Part
of the reason WEIRD is so rarely clearly dened, yet seems to be so easy to understand, is that it
is aligned with the dominant cultural paradigm of many of our experiences. Charles Mills devel-
oped the idea of the epistemology of white ignorance to describe the ways in which white people
have developed a lack of awareness around white supremacy (Mills 2007). For those of us who
are white (n.b., Clancy is white), it is in our interests not to understand or to see the systems that
benet us. If the dominant group does not see racism, we can enforce the idea that racism does
not exist and discredit those who would suggest otherwise. Put another way, white ignorance of
white supremacy is “routinely repackaged as credible, authoritative ‘knowledge,’ even as ‘science’”
(Fleming 2018, p. 35). Henrich et al. (2010) do not mention the words “white” or “whiteness” any-
where in their paper,and only two commentaries mention white as a racial category at all [Gosling
et al. (pp. 94–95) and Stich (pp. 110–11) in Henrich et al. 2010]. Frankenberg (2001) refers to this
phenomenon where both “whiteness does not speak its name” and “neutrality or normativity is
claimed for some kinds of whiteness” as the “invisibility of whiteness” (p.81). In their discussion of
the continued barriers to anthropology becoming racially inclusive, Brodkin et al. (2011) highlight
this avoidance of naming race, and whiteness in particular, as a central barrier:
Racial inequality remains deeply woven into the fabric of our social institutions, including the academy,
so that today’s racism includes but is far more than merely the cumulative expression of individual
prejudice and bias. Central to its practice are race-avoidant discourses and patterns of institutional
behavior that nevertheless index race and promote racially unequal outcomes. (p. 547)
The invisibility of whiteness while explicitly naming nonwhite Others within scientic research
is a fundamental process maintaining anthropology as a “white public space” (Harrison 1995,
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Hill 1999), whose practices “carry racial baggage but also deny their racial subtexts and racially
unequal outcomes” (Brodkin et al. 2011, p. 545).
The fact that Western specically and WEIRD generally are poorly operationalized suggests
that those of us who use it (Clancy included: Clancy 2013) have not thought about our own iden-
tities in relation to the term or the privilege that becomes invisible when invoking it. Therefore,
white scientists are as susceptible as any other group of white people to being blind to their own
privilege and assuming that their lived experiences are the default and therefore do not require
special reection. A substantial literature exists that provides the framework for how to decolo-
nize research (e.g., Ciccariello-Maher 2017, Harrison 1991, Smith 2013). In large part, women of
color have led this movement, and their work is frequently overlooked across the history of science
(Haynes 2014). A short review will necessarily leave out important nuance, but for the purposes
of this article, we dene efforts to decolonize science as those that decenter white, European ways
of knowing; acknowledge the existence of and harm caused by structural oppression; reintroduce
variation into our understanding of all populations; and explicitly bring forward Indigenous and
other nondominant ways of knowing.
We could stand to improve our ability to turn this lens inward, to our own positionality. Many
if not most scientists within our eld(s) are white (as well as any number of other privileged
positions, e.g., cisgender, straight, able-bodied), and many more are steeped in white European
traditions of science. Cultural and linguistic anthropologists, and other social scientists, use
reexivity to turn their analytical lens inward to be aware of how their lived experiences inuence
their relationship to their research. This component of research methodology emerged, for the
most part, out of the eld of anthropology’s call for reexive anthropology in the 1970s and 1980s
and is grounded in the understanding of reexivity as the way in which research is affected by
the people and processes involved at each stage of the research process—from identifying the
research question through to producing and circulating nal results. Reexivity, then, calls on
the researcher to consider carefully their own positionality (and that of their research team) as
well as the institutional, disciplinary, and sociocultural dynamics under which their research is
shaped. Cultural anthropologists such as Clifford & Marcus (1986) and Behar & Gordon (1995),
in particular, have pointed to the importance of reexivity in the writing and circulation portion
of the research process. This approach was echoed last year when biological anthropologists
Alyssa C. Bader, Savannah Martin, and Ripan S. Malhi called for biological anthropologists to
“improve public trust and support of science,” especially as it relates to genetic and genomic
research with Indigenous populations. In their talk, they suggest that “biological anthropologists
need to increase their own reexivity and critically examine the balance of power within their
research relationship when engaging with communities who have historically been exploited or
otherwise harmed by biological anthropology research” (Bader et al. 2018).
In the context of considering work in which the researchers could also be categorized as
WEIRD, reexivity requires the naming of whiteness (Harrison 1995) and its role within our
eld(s). The reexive naming of whiteness by white WEIRD researchers is thus one way to an-
swer the calls within anthropology to make race central to the discipline (Mukhopadhyay & Moses
1997) in order to undo the harm its dominance and yet its invisibility have caused (Brodkin et al.
2011). Efforts to decenter white, European ways of knowing should cause us to ask about the fun-
damental methods we use to measure humans. We should also ask about the trope of the detached
scientist whose perspective of those he studies is the most valuable and objective (Haynes 1994).
A recent Vital Topics Forum for American Anthropologist edited by Rick W.A. Smith, Deborah
Bolnick, and Agustin Fuentes covers these and other related topics and shows the specic harm
that false objectivity and dominant white framing cause both to the narrative of human evolution
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and to researchers themselves (see in particular, Nelson 2019, Pérez 2019, Smith & Bolnick 2019,
TallBear 2019).
THIRD INTERVENTION: FIGURING OUT WHERE BIOLOGICAL
ANTHROPOLOGY FITS
Science culture is characterized by a few factors: positional hierarchy, an emphasis on pedigree,
principal investigator control over funding, and a rm belief that all processes are inherently mer-
itocratic (Natl. Acad. Sci. 2018). Many of these phenomena are intertwined: science culture is
dictated in large part by the culture of elite institutions in the United States, themselves founded
on models of Western European institutions. Elite universities tend to collect scientists with the
goal of hiring the “best” in any given discipline, which solidies the belief that there can be such a
thing as the best in any area of scholarship. Obtaining federal funding increases the chances that
one will receive more funding in the future (Bol et al. 2018) and is tied more to one’s networks
than to productivity or number of citations (Ebadi & Schiffauerova 2015). These relationships
between funding success, networks, and long-term success perpetuate the belief that once the best
are identied, their future success is justied. The runaway success of networked scientists can
lead to a belief among those who are successful that their success is tied entirely to their abilities
and never to their privilege(s).
The hustle culture, where success is built on effort, is one that frequently appears in the social
and biological sciences (Leslie et al. 2015). Cultures of hustle encourage a work–life blurring,
as well as the transgressing of other boundaries. When professional boundaries are blurred,
misbehavior such as harassment and assault can be perpetrated in the name of collegiality or
overfriendliness (Natl. Acad. Sci. 2018), particularly when tied to a culture of silence around
“what happens in the eld stays in the eld” (Nelson et al. 2017). Fieldwork is fundamentally
less accessible for certain social identities, where we dene accessibility as being included fully
in the research enterprise, being mentored equally well as students with dominant identities, and
having equally successful career outcomes. Women in biological anthropology are still less visible
and successful than expected given our numbers, and in a recent mixed-methods paper, this
success is at least partly attributed to mentoring (Turner et al. 2018). Students of color abound in
undergraduate biological anthropology programs but pursue graduate school and beyond in far
fewer numbers (Antón et al. 2018). And scientists who are underrepresented on account of race,
gender, class, or all of the above often face additional hurdles owing to family commitments that
complicate their ability to conduct this eldwork (Lynn et al. 2018).
Thus, we are left with a culture among anthropologists that prizes hard work and hustle in
a way that excludes people who may not be able to participate in work–life blurring. Women of
color and white women, non-Western scholars, and other people who do not have the resources
or networks that white male WEIRD scientists have may not have the pedigree or network to
conduct eld research in the rst place. And so the eldsites that are most prized—the limited
number of sites that continue to work with small-scale societies in the most remote parts of the
world—are accessible to, and thus advance the careers of, a limited number of people.
Yet many claim that eldwork among small-scale societies are the bedrock upon which the
study of humans should instead rest. Henrich et al. (2010) write, “Such in-depth studies of seem-
ingly ‘exotic’ societies, historically the province of anthropology, are crucial for understanding
human behavioral and psychological variation” (p. 61). Yet, as pointed out by Astuti & Bloch’s
commentary (in Henrich et al. 2010, pp. 83–84) on this article, the term small-scale societies is
never operationalized and is taken up as terminology throughout the other commentaries. The
term small-scale societies functions as a euphemism for the thoroughly problematized category
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of “primitive” (Durkheim & Mauss 1963), which depends on out-of-date realities of societies and
is dened, not by an inherent set of characteristics of their own, but rather in contrast to the
WEIRD. Among biological anthropologists, small-scale societies are typically equated with for-
agers or human populations that in the last few hundred years lived as nomadic foragers in small
groups of about 150 people or fewer.However, many populations were identied as foragers owing
to Eurocentric (and later US) ideologies of cultural evolution that did not recognize the varieties
of agricultural practices and economic systems central to their societies. Given how the few ac-
tual forager populations have been oppressed, driven out of or denied access to their traditional
lands, or otherwise marginalized, it may no longer be appropriate to call all of them nomadic or
foragers. Therefore, it is not possible nor particularly desirable to better operationalize this term;
those who live in communities frequented by biological anthropologists, while certainly living
in conditions different from white WEIRD people, are themselves both incredibly variable and
rapidly changing.
Most anthropologists are aware of our discipline’s history as one that applies colonizing prin-
ciples to people who are not white Western European, yet we conduct an awful lot of ahis-
torical eldwork (Marks 2018). We also, in conference presentations, symposia, proposal and
manuscript reviews, and other scientic spaces, applaud those who endure difcult eldwork con-
ditions and/or work with small-scale societies, without much reection on how access to these
spaces may vary. This work is often necessary to career success, is a core practice of biological
anthropology,and is very nearly inaccessible to large swaths of interested scientists. As Lynn et al.
(2018) point out,
Fieldwork is a critical practice that thickens and binds anthropology and renders it relevant for
explaining human complexity. In training and experience, anthropologists are uniquely situated to
compare culture and identify social injustice in the world. Yet struggles with intersectionality among
anthropologists make our expertise suspect. Only by addressing the access and socialization within
anthropology and other eld based disciplines will it begin to reect those it claims to represent. (p. 23)
The original purpose of Henrich et al. (2010) was to problematize the overuse of US undergradu-
ate students in psychological research and offer the study of exotic small-scale societies as part of
the solution. This proposal inserts one problem in place of the other, one to which, in some ways,
biological anthropology has contributed for much of its history as we moved from terms such as
living fossil and primitive to EEA and ancestral, even as these binaries continue to do the same
work (Smith & Archer 2019, TallBear 2019). We have made worthy efforts to understand the full
range of human biological variation, often rejecting the psychological or clinical paradigms that
seek to universalize and homogenize the human experience. But again, without interrogating the
roles of privilege and whiteness in the practice of our science, we continue to place value on cer-
tain measures of scientic rigor that continue to diminish variation and erase race and other axes
of exclusion. Because of our position within anthropology, we are part of a long history of white
scholars othering nonwhite research participants. Because of our position within physical anthro-
pology, we are also part of a history that sought to nd scientic rationale for the oppression of
nonwhite people. By putting research on non-WEIRD societies on a pedestal, we unreexively
continue to follow these problematic traditions which other branches of anthropology have long
sought to change.
While the positionality of white WEIRD scientists who do research on white WEIRD popula-
tions is largely invisible and uncritiqued, the positionality of nonwhite, non-WEIRD researchers
who also do research within communities with whom they share some or all aspects of their iden-
tity has a history of being dismissed as unrigorous and nonobjective. This research position was
so marked within anthropology that anthropologists conducting this type of research were once
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categorized separately, as “native anthropologists,” and their methods within linguistic and cul-
tural anthropology were referred to as “native ethnography” (see Jacobs-Huey 2002, Medicine &
Jacobs 2001, Narayan 1993 for discussions). The hypocrisy of demands by white WEIRD scien-
tists for native anthropologists to defend their work against the “canon” of anthropological re-
search and methods while leaving their own positionalities unexamined was a central component
of subsequent calls for reexivity in the eld.
Biological anthropology has immense potential, as a discipline positioned between psychology
and cultural anthropology, to take the best of these practices and uncover the full spectrum of
human variation in its quest to understand human evolution. As Mukhopadhyay & Moses (1997)
have also pointed out, biological anthropologists have made important contributions to our under-
standing of race as a social rather than a biological construction (Barbujani et al. 1997; Bardill et al.
2018; Gravlee 2009; Gravlee et al. 2005, 2009; Ousley et al. 2009; Raff 2014; Roseman 2014). We
have been able to show that, whether using genes, craniometry, or some other metric, biological
categorization is not meaningful to our understanding of race. With some analyses, racial groups
overlap too signicantly to be meaningful (Barbujani et al. 1997). Other analyses have led to a
conclusion that there are a nearly innite number of biological “races,” suggesting that there is
distinctiveness in geographic origins so specic as to be meaningless (Ousley et al. 2009). Biologi-
cal anthropologists have also demonstrated that social constructions of race are quite meaningful.
Several studies from a Puerto Rican sample have shown that participants’ self-identity in a par-
ticular racial group is more strongly correlated with hypertension risk than is their degree of skin
pigmentation (Gravlee et al. 2005) or percentage of African ancestry (Gravlee et al. 2009). Recent
work in biological anthropology has also pointed out our colonial/imperial origins (Athreya &
Ackermann 2019), our othering of research participants (Clancy et al. 2017), and some theoretical
and methodological ways forward (Bader et al. 2018, Bardill et al. 2018).
The main challenge is that, even as we try to adopt our own values around the social construc-
tion of race and the importance of understanding variation, we are held back by the additional
values we hold around the importance of white Western notions of scientic rigor. Biological an-
thropology is constantly on the move to quantify and biologize the lived experience, measuring
humans in increasingly molecular ways. To perform these types of studies with what is perceived as
adequate rigor, we must design our studies to have adequate statistical power and to be replicable.
These goals may begin to cause harm in the ways in which they require a return to those methods
and sampling procedures that homogenize humans. To have adequate power, we prioritize work-
ing with large enough, dominant populations that have the resources to be able to consent and
be involved in intensive human subjects research. We risk excluding underrepresented groups or
identities within potential research subject pools and, as such, are increasingly likely to exclude
participants with multiple axes of difference (e.g., Indigenous, queer, and female). To have repli-
cability, we must sample from groups with tightly dened lived experiences. And so the values of
white Western science are, in some ways, in direct conict with the values that biological anthro-
pologists seem to hold around variation and the importance of understanding adaptations of the
lived experience. The demand for expediency in the development, implementation, and dissem-
ination of research also lends itself to easily and immediately available participants (i.e., students
at our own universities) with whom we share common language(s) and cultural norms.
There is value in studying all people, and studying the range of human variation for the sake of
better understanding how lived experience affects culture, behavior, and physiology; this is,in fact,
one of the nal points of Henrich et al. (2010). The major contribution of documenting how over-
sampled white WEIRD people are is how underrepresented many other populations are; however,
it does not follow that the Other—however they are dened—should be privileged over the study
of many other populations. Rather, research questions and problem denitions should be used to
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motivate researchers to nd populations best suited for study. Prioritizing the best populations
for our research will allow us to enter into partnerships that are mutually benecial to the science
and research populations so that scientists’ work best represents participants’ lived experiences,
perspectives, and needs. Therefore, we suggest that, with the introduction of frameworks such
as grounded theory, ethnography, Indigenous methods, or participatory action research, biologi-
cal anthropologists reevaluate the values they hold regarding what constitutes the ideal scientic
project. There may be times—perhaps even the majority of the time—where goals of replicability,
statistical power, and rigor are in direct conict with our goal of understanding human evolution,
variation, and adaptation. What kind of work does the discipline of biological anthropology need
to do to better dene its place in social science in order to reconcile this conict and meet this
goal?
As a cornerstone of ethnographic methods in cultural and linguistic anthropology,reexivity is
one small piece of the available strategies to enrich and deepen our research beyond the WEIRD.
Many of these encourage greater involvement with the individuals and communities who con-
stitute the data sets we analyze (e.g., Indigenous methods, collaborative/engaged anthropology,
community-based participatory research). These strategies also open up opportunities for more
ethical methods, as well as the possibility for deeper and longer-term scientic collaboration, and
may be successful in increasing the number of future scientists from those demographics. The
incorporation of on-the-ground observation into the contexts shaping research development and
analysis via grounded theory, ethnography, and/or participatory action research also offers ways
to shake up the ideologies and biases inherent in current anthropological work by, for example,
providing insight into which and what categories and variables might be meaningful (statistically
or otherwise) in a given study.
MOVING FORWARD
In some ways, the writing of this article has felt to us like a professional moment of shouting,
“Soylent is people!” Surely the colonial history, white ignorance, and problematic contrast to
small-scale societies was already noted somewhere in the literature. Surely some of us already
knew what we were consuming. But, and please forgive us if we missed similar critiques, we ap-
pear to be the rst to integrate critical discussions of race and subjectivity into our understanding
of the WEIRD. As such, the rst goal of our article was to shout “WEIRD is white” and use our
observations to guide readers toward the work we scientists need to do to improve our scholarship.
To this end, we invite our colleagues to introduce more reexive practices in their research. Re-
exive research practices should lead, at times, to an acknowledgment of our own theoretical or
methodological limitations, which can invite opportunities for cross-disciplinary collaborations.
Biological anthropologists have an enormous breadth of knowledge on the biological and bio-
cultural body as a whole, but our subdisciplinary divisions mean we often have more specialized
expertise on genetic, hormonal, behavioral, or paleontological approaches. Most of us are still
ensconced in four-eld departments and have colleagues only doors away (or, in the case of this
article’s authors, two oors apart) who can offer subject matter expertise to help us interrogate our
practices as much as our participant pools.
Part of being reexive also means being willing to use grounded approaches to developing
projects, rather than always having a priori hypotheses motivate research. Grounded approaches
start from the assumption that our research participants can help generate knowledge about their
own lives and bodies. These methods address long-standing biases within scientic research and
anthropology and increase a broader and more diverse participation in our elds, but they also
provide avenues through which to generate knowledge and produce more accurate analysis of
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research data. For example, Atalay (2012) calls for community-based participatory research “to
value information and ways of knowing contributed from diverse knowledge systems” and “com-
bines knowledge that has been arrived at through different traditions and experiences” (p. 4).This
approach then creates “braided knowledge” (Atalay 2012, p. 27) whereby community knowledge
is intertwined with anthropological data. Leonard (2017) has demonstrated that such approaches
can allow our elds to avoid reproducing their colonial legacies. His study demonstrated that the
denitions and implications of even core terms such as “language” differ signicantly between
non-Indigenous researchers and the Indigenous individuals and cultures who were represented in
their research, thereby inevitably producing research that “gets it wrong” (Leonard 2017, p. 17).
This starting point is very different from the one more commonly taught across the sciences. As
in color-blind ideology, scientists are often encouraged to be objective in a way that is not reexive
but ignorant, inherently privileging the perspectives and biases of the researcher. Yet we are taught
that participants’ own beliefs, experiences, and ideologies are suspect and thought to inuence
their responses in research. Starting from the point where scientists assume participants cannot
be unbiased justies methodologies intended to avoid priming, obscure the purpose of the project,
or even deceive the participant. Even in their most benign or well-meaning forms, these methods
imply that white WEIRD researchers have the knowledge and objectivity that those they study
lack. The reality is that all people are equally susceptible to behaving in ways that reinforce their
own beliefs, researcher and researched alike. Therefore, we call on social science researchers to
consider rst the ways in which engaging with research participants can help generate knowledge,
theory,and new insight, before assuming their own knowledge to be an impediment to objectivity.
Biological anthropology is a discipline that sits somewhere between the quantied biological
sciences and the mixed-methods and qualitative work across the social sciences. This position of-
fers signicant problems because we run the risk of unreexively quantifying Others if we combine
the dominant belief systems of the disciplines that sit to either side of us. However, our positional-
ity also offers signicant promise, as a space where we can think about the embodiment not only of
oppression but also of privilege; of the effects not only of weathering but also of whiteness. Biolog-
ical anthropologists have enormous potential to advance our understanding of race, but only if we
are brave enough to shed our color-blind ideologies, our romanticization of small-scale societies,
and to confront the ways in which whiteness, not WEIRDness, limits the practices and advance-
ment of our science. Therefore, we recommend that biological anthropologists move away from
the sanitized protection of a term like WEIRD and toward the messier acknowledgment of the
ways in which their own history, values, and current practices are informed by whiteness so that
we can push for a more inclusive and scientically rigorous future.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
The authors are not aware of any afliations, memberships, funding, or nancial holdings that
might be perceived as affecting the objectivity of this review.
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