Being in the Field: Reflections on a Mi’kmaq Kekunit Ceremony
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article has a threefold purpose. First, it seeks to show how modern rituals among Mi'kmaq traditionalists in eastern Canada are anchored in and derive their rationale from modern reserve existence. Two rituals are described, a kekunit godparent ceremony for a 14-year-old girl and a sweat lodge ceremony later the same evening. Second, the article also provides an example of the paradoxes of "participant observation" by showing how engagement in fieldwork may turn the fieldworker's preconceived beliefs and attitudes on their head. The effect of some words from a young girl illustrates how being-in-the-field in an instant can shatter the most comfortable distinctions between a rational Self and a superstitious Other. Being-in-the-field entails a continuous oscillation between close engagement in people's lifeworlds and distanced observations of human behavior. In the third part of the article, I reinterpret the ritual—a painful process for me, albeit necessary. As for the participants themselves, their pain is as diffuse and enduring as their lives.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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".