Research in Social Sciences must come from a place of self-reflection (Bourdieu, 1990; Foucault, 2002; Schubert, 1995). It is by questioning our methods, our ways of interaction with the concepts with which we work and the issues we face, that we can engage with, and communicate actively, with the reader. By questioning our practices and knowledge production processes, we can document, in a way, how our own life experiences influence said processes and the results of our research. There is solid justification for the argument that it is not only possible but necessary for social scientists to recognize that there are many interpretations for a single phenomenon, and that knowledge can be read and un- derstood from different perspectives (Clifford, 1988; Schubert, 1995).
This research comes precisely from such an exercise of self-reflection. For a social scientist from Latin America, who has been involved in research with human remains in museum collections both at home and in Europe, it was inevitable to end up questioning not only my personal involvement with these collections but also how I was reproducing and following in the steps of hundreds of others who, in their own way, had taken an inter- est before me on these contested pieces of the past.