The Foot and the Spear: Enlightenment Natural Law, Translation, and Indigenous Sovereignty in Australia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article argues that translation is essential to the theory of occupation found in the European natural law texts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and that translation is complicit in colonialist occupation. The translation of Samuel Pufendorf’s De jure naturae et gentium ( On The Law of Nature and Nations, 1672) from Latin into English by Basil Kennett and into French by Jean Barbeyrac involved a language politics that linked these languages to forms of political sovereignty that were imagined as universal. To critique this concept of universal sovereign untranslatability, the article considers The Uluru Statement from the Heart (2017) by the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples of Australia, which posits a practice of translation that does not rely on sovereign untranslatability, but which brings distinct idioms into conversation with each other. This theory and practice of translation can be the basis for a reworking of settler colonialism.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 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".