Then and Now: Josh Snodgrass Reshapes the Ethics of Biological Anthropology

Josh Snodgrass: Advancing Biological Anthropology through Indigenous Collaboration and Data Sovereignty

Biological anthropologist Josh Snodgrass has combined a range of methods, including minimally invasive biomarkers, to study the effects of homelessness on health and physiology.

Image credit:© JAY EADS, Josh Snodgrass, Modified by Janette Lee-Latour

When The Scientist first profiled biological anthropologist Josh Snodgrass, he was intent on understanding how human populations adapt to changing conditions. Snodgrass was performing intensive fieldwork in remote areas, such as Siberia, to study how the shift away from traditional lifestyles negatively affected health in the indigenous Yakut populations. “If we want to understand human evolution, we need a better grasp of the adaptive dimensions of human biology in living populations, and we need more data on that,” he said at the time.

Thirteen years later, human evolution and adaptation still fascinate Snodgrass. His research has continued to advance the field of biological anthropology. For The Scientist’s 40th Anniversary, we spoke to Snodgrass again about his work with Indigenous communities and how he combines qualitative and quantitative data to study health and homelessness. “I’m as fascinated now as the day in 1992 when I took my first anthropology class and started thinking about these things,” he said.

Working with Indigenous Communities and Ensuring Data Sovereignty

This year marked a major career milestone for Snodgrass: 20 years of the Shuar Health and Life History Project, a collaborative research project that integrates biology, behavioral ecology, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary medicine, and global health to study the indigenous Shuar people of Amazonian Ecuador. The American Journal of Human Biology celebrated the project with a special issue.1 “It’s really cool to see all the things that we dreamed of when we set this up, now come true,” Snodgrass added.

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Snodgrass has also recently spent a lot of time considering the issue of data sovereignty; the growing emphasis on open data sharing in science poses some major ethical challenges for researchers working with indigenous peoples and other marginalized communities. The Shuar people, for example, should have control of and access to their data, Snodgrass said—something that hasn’t always been the case in a field with a long history of power imbalances that are rooted in colonial legacies. “I and several of my colleagues across biological anthropology have been talking about this in terms of how [we can] do this in a better way,” said Snodgrass.

In collaboration with researchers including Navajo geneticist, bioethicist, and genomic data systems architect Krystal Tsosie of Arizona State University; evolutionary biologist Benjamin Auerbach of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville; and Snodgrass’s former PhD student, biological anthropologist Felicia Madimenos of the University of Oregon, he aims to explore and combat inequalities in data sovereignty. After co-organizing a symposium at the American Association of Biological Anthropologists (AABA) conference on the topic, the team decided to write a follow-up paper, which will be published in an upcoming special issue of the AABA’s flagship journal. “This partnership is really fascinating,” Snodgrass said.

Measuring Stress and Resilience in People Experiencing Homelessness

For the last four years, a large part of Snodgrass’s research has focused on the health of people experiencing homelessness, right in his own town of Eugene, Oregon. “We have actually the highest per capita homelessness in the entire country, which is just stunning, and not a lot of understanding about who these people are,” he explained. With funding from the National Science Foundation, Snodgrass has combined tools from the fields of anthropology, sociology, epidemiology, and public health to gain an understanding of how homelessness directly affects health outcomes.

A key component of the toolkit, and one of Snodgrass’s main areas of expertise, is the use of minimally invasive biomarkers. These include physiological markers, such as inflammation, which he and his team can obtain from easily accessible biological samples such as blood spot cards, saliva, or hair. By combining this biological information with qualitative tools, such as surveys, Snodgrass and his colleagues piece together the puzzle of the homeless experience with the aim of providing a scientific basis for better policy decisions. When individuals who have been homeless finally gain access to supportive housing, the restrictions to their living conditions mean disrupting their support network, which provides protection and resilience. “That’s been a big part of this study,” Snodgrass said. “It plays out in our statistical analyses as super important.”

Looking back at his original profile, Snodgrass said that while he feels uncomfortable in the spotlight, it helped him gain more positive momentum in his career, and he was honored to showcase a field he is passionate about. Today, he continues to forge ahead, reshaping the ethics of biological anthropology and centering community engagement.2 “[There’s] lots of work to be done in lots of different realms, but I’m always looking at the glass half full,” he said.

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