Perceptions of Decline: Inuit Shamanism in the Canadian Arctic
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries most explorers, whalers, and ethnographers perceived Inuit traditions, especially shamanism, to be in a state of decline. The assumption that Inuit culture was on the brink of disappearance constituted a classic topos in anthropology obscuring the dynamics of Inuit culture and society. This perspective was enhanced by focusing too much on the person of the shaman and underestimated the importance and strength of the ideological system and values involved. Qallunaat (white people) perspectives of decline contrast with Inuit perspectives valorizing the integration and incorporation of qallunaat culture. We compare classic descriptions of shamanism with recent testimonies of elders and demonstrate that, even today, shamanism is for many Inuit part of a wider cosmology that is dynamic, open to innovation, and marked by strong continuity.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.028 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| 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".