Decolonial Perspectives on Fieldwork and Collections in Mexican Palaeontology

Abstract. The ways in which we produce scientific knowledge are not objective and are subject to systemic biases with colonial roots. Here, we evaluate the different dimensions of colonialism in Mexican academia, reviewing two historical cases (in Biology and Archaeology) and a recent one (in Palaeontology) through a review of grey literature. Epistemic colonialism occurs when a hegemonic power validates knowledge produced only by certain institutions. Internal colonialism refers to a nation formerly subjected to a foreign power replicating colonial structures. In Mexico, epistemic colonialism manifests itself in the ways we talk about palaeontology by focusing only on the knowledge produced by Eurocentric institutions that were part of a eugenic project that stemmed from the need to build a national identity in the early 20th century. These two types of colonialism are alive in the present and generate asymmetric collaborations that perpetuate the system. However, we conclude here that current mechanisms put in place by journals and palaeontologists could have identified and prevented colonial practices. The cases discussed in this paper show that because colonialism means violence, decolonisation means justice; scientists need to consider the socioeconomic and political contexts of their subjects of study in order to identify and prevent violence.