A Change of Subject: Perspectivism and Multinaturalism in Inuit Depictions of Interspecies Transformation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A recurring theme within the complex cosmopolitics of pre-Christian Inuit is the transformation of persons—typically, but not exclusively, shamans (both human and nonhuman animal) and spirit beings—from one physical form, or “species,” to another. The motif is common in contemporary Inuit visual art and recent historic oral tradition, and less frequent (or less apparent) in precontact material culture. In this paper, I examine how interspecies relationships among Inuit may have been influenced by an ancient cosmology rooted in multinaturalism, which can be informed upon in an heuristic sense by Amerindian perspectivism, as described and developed by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (1998, 2004). Within this framework, I suggest a multinatural worldview is reflected in rare depictions of interspecies transformation on two precontact Inuit artifacts recovered from the large winter village site Pingiqqalik (NgHd-1), located near Igloolik, Nunavut.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".