Book Review: Joseph Pugliese's Biopolitics of the More-than-Human and Indigenous Subversion in the Canadian State
Bibliographic record
Abstract
How does a new approach to biopolitics, the biopolitics of the more-than-human, help our understanding of Canada's relations with Indigenous peoples? This paper will review Joseph Pugliese’s book, Biopolitics of the More-than-Human (2020). Pugliese connects the practice of Western biopolitics, a power derived from making life and letting die, with the operation of speciesism, settler-colonialism, racism and environmental degradation in the Western state. After exploring his theory, this paper will draw on points raised by Paul Nadasdy in his earlier anthropological study, Hunters and Bureaucrats (2003), which characterizes the Canadian state as attempting to exert biopolitical power over the Kluane First Nation. Comparing these works expands on Pugliese’s theory of biopolitics of the more-than-human and his corollary argument that outside this form of Western power, Indigenous cosmo- epistemologies have existed and remained radically untouched by the biopower. Pugliese’s claim is richly showcased in Nadasdy’s book, suggesting that the Kluane worldview and practices are ways of resistance that defy a simpler theorization of biopolitics. Reading these books together helps illustrate the complex relationship between the environment, Indigenous nations and the Canadian government while also fleshing out biopolitical ecology theorizations.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.029 | 0.010 |
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".