Anthropology and Settler Nationalisms in the Art of Emily Carr, Irma Stern, and Margaret Preston
Bibliographic record
Abstract
South African Irma Stern (1894–1966), Canadian Emily Carr (1871–1945), and Australian Margaret Preston (1875–1963) all attained iconic status as artists in their respective countries. Early appraisers commended their incorporation of Indigenous and Black peoples in a national modernist canon through the use of post-impressionistic sensibilities. Despite notable similarities in biography, vision and oeuvre, these three artists have yet to be considered together in a comparative and connected mode. This article links their careers, ideas and concomitant emergence by focusing on their common and concurrent engagement with the science of Anthropology. All three absorbed and shared anthropologically-inflected conceptions of the ‘Other’. By distilling Anthropology’s discourses for popular audiences, they served as transmission belts between science and the public. They spread theories of racial typologies, of degeneration, of culture and of Indigenous disappearance. Modern art, via Anthropology, thus served as an interface through which Indigenous populations were appropriated and incorporated within nationalisms across Britain’s empire of settlement.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".