Cultural Impairment and the Genocidal Potential of Intoxicants: Alcohol Use in Colonial North America
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As a number of scholars have noted in recent critical genocide studies, Raphael Lemkin’s formulation of the “genocide” concept was much broader than the definition later enshrined in the UN Convention. Various facets of settler colonialism framed his conception, including the widespread distribution of intoxicants among subjugated peoples. In Lemkin’s view, culture was the force undergirding human collectivities and intoxicants disrupted social functioning in a number of ways -- through creating internal strife and violence, upsetting previous authority structures, causing premature deaths and eroding pre-existing cultural practices. This article draws upon Lemkin’s unfinished works to examine his case for the distribution of alcohol among Native Americans as a method of genocidal conquest. It finds that while his work on the subject remains important as it highlights the multiple ways in which colonial oppression can operate, it fails to prove genocidal intent and relies on historical materials that at times fall into the trap of “intellectual colonialism” (Quintero 2001).
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 distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".