<i>La critique est aisée, mais l’art est difficile</i> . A critical anthropology put to the test of decolonization: Lessons from New Caledonia
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article focuses on anthropologists’ analyses of decolonization struggles in relationship to past and present movements for self-determination. We begin by highlighting the relevance of Georges Balandier's model of the “colonial situation” for the understanding of these struggles. Next, we show that, as Pierre Bourdieu, following Balandier, suggested, the analysis of these struggles cannot forego an analysis of the position of the researchers themselves in the situation. This brings to light the difficulty of constructing one's “atopic position” as a researcher in decolonization processes. We aim to show that the theoretical precepts which anthropologists adopt (and the precepts’ moral underpinnings) lead them to minimize or overlook the political aspects of decolonization processes. This involves a certain blindness to the concrete conditions—economic, social, and political—that have led to the situation in question. We explore in detail the example of “critical” analyses of the “Kanak People's School System” (École populaire kanak, EPK)—a nationalist Kanak project, aimed at decolonizing the New Caledonia school system in the mid-1980s. We also briefly look at “critical” interpretations of a recent initiative undertaken by a segment of the Kanak population involving the establishment of a written “customary law” in civil (and potentially criminal) matters, which tends to distance itself from the nationalist strategy.
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.
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 | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.019 | 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 it