Review of <i>Defamiliarizing the Aboriginal: Cultural Practices\nand Decolonization in Canada.</i> By Julia V.\nEmberley.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This book examines how "representational technologies," including photography and archival material, were used to establish colonial control over Aboriginal families in Canada. Case studies include a critique of photographer Mary Schaffer's images of Aboriginal people in the Rocky Mountains, an analysis of an RCMP file concerning the disappearance of an Inuit woman and children, and a discussion of prairie writer Rudy Wiebe's retelling of Yvonne Johnson's life. Defamiliarizing the Aboriginal is a subtle addition to literature on the mechanisms of cultural representation and their dynamics within colonialism, placing these issues especially well within the framework of postcolonial and feminist politics.\nThat said, it's a frustrating book: challengingly written ("There are three key features of representational violence operating spatially in the semiotics of subjugation ... ") and refusing to engage with deeper aspects of the material explored. In the chapter on photography, for instance, while the analysis of Schaffer's thought itself is thorough, her work is not placed in the broader context of visual representations of Aboriginal peoples, nor are recent critiques of such imagery cited. The observation that "How subjects are categorized and organized ... constitutes spatial modes of epistemic violence" is not a new thought in regard to photography and indigenous peoples, and recent analyses have critiqued sweeping theory, looking instead for local meanings, specificities of production, "fractures" in colonial mindsets, and indigenous agency (e.g., Elizabeth Edwards's Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropology and Museums, 2001). This work, by contrast, seems determined to find total hegemony within the technologies examined.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".