Indigenous Self-Determination and Applied Anthropology in Canada: Finding a Place to Stand
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The discipline of anthropology has been undergoing a period of self-reflection and self-doubt. Current wisdom suggests that anthropologists do best when we act to provide context and space for the voices of others and eschew our own voices and agency. I agree wholeheartedly with aspects of this wisdom. We are at our worst when we impose our voices on others, such as by speaking for them or speaking about them as though they were not there. However, withdrawing agency does not resolve the matter. Our agency, our voice is present in all choices, even the choice not to assert it. In this paper, I discuss an approach to asserting our agency in a manner I believe to be just and justifiable. It is based on the view, following Buber and Levinas, that appropriate agency is fostered when we treat others in an I-Thou rather than an I-It relationship. I indicate, following from the work of Little Bear among others, that the notion of treaty as developed in one strain of Indigenous thought provides an articulation of the I-Thou relationship in the political realm. It fosters a political relationship based on what I term Self and Relational Other rather than Self and Oppositional Other. This form of framing promotes active agency on the part of all participants, including anthropologists.
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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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.031 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 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".