Operationalizing a Structural Vulnerability Profile for forensic anthropology: Skeletal and dental biomarkers of embodied inequity

Abstract

Human societies create and maintain structures in which individuals and groups experience varying degrees of inequity and suffering that may be skeletally and dentally embodied. It is necessary to foreground these social and structural impacts for forensic anthropologists to eschew biologically deterministic interpretations of human variation and overly individualistic interpretations of health and disease. We thus propose a ‘Structural Vulnerability Profile’ (SVP), akin to the Structural Vulnerability Assessment Tool of medical anthropology [1], to be considered along with the traditional ‘biological’ profile estimated by forensic anthropologists. Assembling an SVP would involve examining and assessing skeletal/dental biomarkers indicative of embodied social inequity—the lived experiences of social marginalization that can get ‘under the skin’ to leave hard-tissue traces. Shifting our emphasis from presumably hereditary variation to focus on embodied social marginalization, the SVP will allow forensic anthropologists to sensitively reconstruct the lived experiences of the people we examine.

Keywords

• Social inequity
• Marginalization
• Embodiment
• Social and structural determinants of health