5.1.3: Capital All the Way Down

I have two reasons for describing the specimen in this manner. First, I want to speak to why something as obviously horrible as stolen human remains can be so staunchly defended by academics and their institutions.¹ This dissertation is surrounded by questions of value—cultural value, monetary value, epistemic value (0.1.4). The latter of these could be conceived in the context of its origination: how the specimen was leveraged for a specific claim and then became historical as it was interlocked with a historical moment. But often these objects have epistemic value that extends beyond their original use: they can be used to make different claims in a variety of fields (5.1.2). They cannot be discarded because their potential value is infinite. If they were discarded, what would happen if a scholar develops a new method to extract information from them and is unable to glean it for their arguments? As long as knowledge work is viewed in a capitalistic, all-consuming conquest of the knowable, then every research object is undeniably worth clinging to.²

The second reason I write about this is in direct opposition to the academic system within which I work. Universities are expected to grow their student populations, their research output, their grant income, their donations, their campuses.³ Much has been written about the blight that is the neoliberal university, but these critiques never seem to be critical of the knowledge systems themselves.⁴ We can blame Regan and Clinton and Bush junior and Bush senior and Obama and Trump and Biden for all of the awful systems, but we cannot seem to reflect upon how our epistemic assumptions are also built on ideologies of infinite growth.

Why do universities need so many graduate students, when only the lucky few will get jobs in their fields? Why are scholars so susceptible to for profit publication farms? Why do journal citation metrics matter? Why do we shelter high publishing scholars who abuse their students? Why is it that we create aesthetic categories over what constitutes ‘good’ research? Why do we need more journals to publish more essays which no one has time to read?⁵

The western university is a knowledge factory⁶ and its raw materials are usually the materials taken from outside itself, from people unaffiliated with the university and people who will not benefit from the knowledge gained. The colonialist extractivism which I have delineated in this project is a result of the infinite appetite of the current, global knowledge system, a system indebted to the west’s colonialist roots.