"East" as "West" : place, state and the institutionalization of myth in Vancouver's Chinatown, 1880-1980
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over the century 1880-1980, settlers of Chinese origin in Vancouver, British Columbia have been perceived primarily through the nexus of a racial category that defines them as pre-eminently "Chinese" or "Oriental." Similarly, their place in the urban landscape, "Chinatown," has in one sense been a product of host-society categories and institutional practices that have acted to single Chinatown out, and to render it continuously a place apart. The point of departure for this thesis is the view that "race" is not an objectively given biological trait, but an idea, defined by the significance people attach to it. It is an idiom around which have been erected epistemological distinctions of insider and outsider, "we" and "they." In view of the problematic nature of race, it is argued that one of the tasks of the social science of race relations is to uncover the socio-historical process by which racial categories are themselves constructed and institutionalized over time and in certain contexts. In developing this argument, the thesis demonstrates the role played by place and the state in the continuous making of a racial category, the "Chinese." The significance of place is identified for its role as the historically evolving nexus through which the racial category is structured. It is argued that "Chinatown" - like race - is an idea, a representation that belongs to the white European cultural tradition and the intention of the thesis is to trace the career of its social definition over the course of a century. In so doing, the claim is made that Chinatown reveals as much of the "West" as it does of the "East." Ideas of place and identity would not be so enduring or effective, however, but for the fact that they have been repeatedly inscribed in the practices of those with the power of definition. It is argued that the three levels of the Canadian state, as the legislative arms of a hegemonic "white" European historical bloc, have granted legitimacy to, and reproduced the race definition process through their national, provincial and neighbourhood practices. This process continues through the long period when "Chinatown" was reviled as a public nuisance, promoted as a "Little Corner of the Far East," reconstructed as a "slum" and finally under the aegis of multiculturalism, courted in the 1970s by the Canadian state precisely for its perceived "Chineseness." Underlying these changing definitions of Chinatown, it is argued, is a deeper racial frame of reference that has been continuously re-created through discriminatory and more subtle ways as part of the exercise of white European cultural domination. Lying behind the career of the racial category, therefore, is the history of the relationship between place, racial discourse, power and institutional practice in a British settler society. The study is undertaken with a view to uncovering those relationships and by way of a contribution to the recent rediscovery of place in human geography.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".