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

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