A Polluting Concept of Culture: Native Artefacts Contaminated with Toxic Preservatives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This research examines the practical and theoretical fallout of the toxic methods used by museum conservators to preserve native artefacts and regalia. These conservation practices, dating to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, were undertaken before the age of museum professionalisation and within a larger context of cultural assimilation. Many of these chemical preservatives produce the same harmful effects in humans as they do in the organisms they were designed to eradicate. As these contaminated artefacts are repatriated, members of native communities who attempt to reintegrate them into ceremonial and daily practice are put at significant health risk. Not only do these pollutants undermine the stated goals of repatriation but they also stand as a literal instance of the way in which a hegemonic and interpreting culture has metaphorically contaminated the culture it has purported to preserve and display.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.053 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".