Faith and Reason: Biopolitical Pastoralism and the Making of the Modern Paleolithic Subject
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Dietary advice is produced and circulated through a variety of sites that include, but are not limited to, nutritional guidelines produced by governmental organizations, such as Canada’s Food Guide, or books written by proponents of popular diets, such as the Atkins diet. Through these various forms of dietary advice, individuals engage not only with instructions on what (and what not) to eat but also with ideas about health and the body. In the context of contemporary health politics, these instructions largely render individuals responsible for maintaining or enhancing their health. My research examines dietary advice as a biopedagogical mechanism through which individual and population health is governed. I use Foucauldian informed critical discourse analysis to examine a website promoting the Paleo Diet® (www.thepaleodiet.com); a site produced by a self-proclaimed ‘leading expert’ of the modern Paleo movement, Dr. Loren Cordain. My findings suggest that there are three prevailing discursive constructions mediating the Paleo Diet® website: i) how the website is constructed as an authoritative text and how Dr. Cordain is positioned as the leading expert in service of legitimizing this text; ii) how the Paleo diet is constructed as the “ideal” way of eating and living; and, iii) how the body is constructed as a site of personal redemption and transformation. Through an analysis of these findings, I argue that as a biopedagogical site, the website relies on practices of truth telling, biopastoral relations, and virtual confession to instruct an “evolutionary” and “genetic” regime of truth about the individual and species body. Further, the body is rendered a pedagogical site that dieters can form a disciplinary alliance in governing health and constituting themselves as modern-Paleolithic biocitizens.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.100 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| 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".