The Sense of a Better Ending: Legal Pluralism and Performative Jurisprudence in <i>Atanarjuat the Fast Runner</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article argues that Igloolik Isuma’s first feature length film, Atanarjuat the Fast Runner, performs a meaningful reading of traditional Inuit legal systems, and puts time-honoured notions of customary law and Inuit social governance into practice. The process of conflict resolution is carefully depicted in the film, which is attentive to the processes of jurisprudence and to a range of possible outcomes. The movement toward a communal justice is shown in an elaborate, carefully detailed, step-by-step process (that still remains unobtrusive, and can be “missed” by some viewers). The film is formal and deliberate, and proceeds at a pace that enables the clear articulation of a specifically Inuit legal culture; it shows Inuit legal practitioners operating in ways that reveal Inuit legal principles in action. In restaging and recontextualizing a well-known narrative from Inuit oral tradition, Atanarjuat makes these local traditions of jurisprudence visible and accessible by relating them in modern form. The film does not leave these traditions and performative systems intact and in the past, however, but updates them for a contemporary audience and in dialogical relation to broader systems of contemporary justice in Canada. In this way Atanarjuat demonstrates Inuit legal systems, in practice, as being flexible, adaptable, and capable of being updated; it shows them struggling to maintain order and continuity in the face of violence and dispossession. This article suggests that Atanarjuat the Fast Runner effectively models performative jurisprudence and the interpretive nature of dialogical governance, and provides one situated, appropriate, culturally sensitive resource and model for contemporary conflict resolution and community governance in Inuit communities today.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.052 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".