The "Present Referent": Nonhuman Animal Sacrifice and the Constitution of Dominant Albertan Identity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the summer of 2012, “meat” themed posters were hung throughout the city of Edmonton, Alberta. A textual analysis of three of the posters from this collection revels that the concept of sacrifice (Derrida, The Animal) is more appropriate to describe “meat”-eating in Alberta than the concept of the absent referent (Adams, Sexual Politics of Meat). These posters celebrate the consumption of “meat” and unabashedly make evident the living animal origins of “meat.” I argue that that the prominence of the cattle industry relative to Alberta’s economy, and its ties to the production and reproduction of dominant Albertan identity negate the requirement of the absent referent. The consumption of “beef” is largely considered an expression of loyalty to the region, and as a means to preserve Alberta’s (imagined) heritage (Blue, “If it ain’t Alberta”; Korniek). The noncriminal putting to death of nonhuman animals can instead be understood as symbolic and literal sacrifices in the constitution of dominant Albertan identity and economy (Derrida, The Animal). As such, this paper makes an intervention into ecofeminist literature as well as vegan literature written for mainstream populations that employ the absent referent in the aim of countering “meat”-eating practices (Adams, Sexual Politics of Meat, Pornography of Meat; Foer; Freedman and Barnounin; Joy; Robbins; Singer).
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.053 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".