Eurocentrism in Aboriginal Studies: A Review of Issues and Conceptual Problems
Bibliographic record
Abstract
AbstractThis paper is a discussion of portrayal of First Nations people in terms of what has been termed Eurocentrism. Anthropology has long been a lightning rod for such charges; however, legal system has attracted similar criticism. The controversial issue of culture tests that were involved in Supreme Court of Canada decision in Van der Peet case (1996) as presented by Chief Justice Antonio Larmer, as well as Delgamuukw (1997) decision of Chief Justice Allan McEachern, have also been subjected to widespread disparagement. These decisions bring to forefront contentious aspects of academic perspectives regarding portrayal of First Nations people and possibility of inaccurate stereotypes. Similarly, Tri-Council Policy Statement (2009) points to ethical issues involved in manner in which Aboriginal communities are portrayed in academic research. It is evident from discussion in this paper that much more dialogue is needed among both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal scholars regarding representation of First Nations people. Unfortunately, such a dialogue has not taken place in a very systematic manner in literature of Aboriginal Studies.ResumeCet article examine la representation des individus issus des Premieres Nations en terme d'eurocentrisme. De telles accusations ont longtemps ete monnaie courante en anthropologie, mais elles ont aussi ete dirigees envers le systeme judiciaire. La question litigieuse de test de culture distinctive touchant la decision du juge en chef Antonio Lamer de la Cour supreme du Canada dans le jugement Van der Peet de 1996, ainsi que la decision en 1997 du juge en chef Allan McEachem dans l'affaire Delgamuukw, a egalement fait l'objet de vives critiques. Ces decisions mettent a l'avant-plan des aspects litigieux de visions universitaires portant sur l'image des Premieres Nations et sur des stereotypes peut-etre sans fondement. De la meme facon, l'Enonce de politique des trois conseils de 2009 attire l'attention sur les questions ethiques qui se rattachent a l'image des communautes autochtones dans la recherche academique. A la lumiere de la discussion dans cet article il va sans dire que la representation des autochtones est une question qui requiert beaucoup plus de discussions chez les autochtones comme chez les non-autochtones. Il est malheureux qu'une telle discussion ne se soit pas faite de facon plus systematique dans les travaux sur les etudes autochtones.IntroductionEurocentrism has been described as the imaginative and institutional context that informs contemporary scholarship, opinion, and law. As a theory, it postulates superiority of Europeans over nonEuropeans. It is built on a set of assumptions and beliefs that educated and usually unprejudiced Europeans and North Americans habitually accept as true, as supported by 'the facts', or as 'reality' (Battiste and Henderson 2011: 11). Not surprisingly, anthropology has taken brunt of this sort of criticism, although other areas of study such as history and legal studies have also been seen as culpable in this regard. The goal of this paper is therefore to examine issue of in such manner as to widen dialogue concerning impact of this issue in Aboriginal studies.Eurocentric PerspectivesThe problem with Eurocentrism pertains to issues of perspective in terms of manner in which Indigenous societies are portrayed in anthropology and Western social sciences more generally. This problem is attributable, as Alfred (2011: 3) suggests, to Euroamerican arrogance. Eurocentrism, according to Battiste and Henderson (2011: 12-18), has its roots in a belief in European superiority, in idea of progress, which has made modern scholarship unable to grasp crisis of understanding and perceptions of natural world. Anthropology has been a focus of criticism for biases and weaknesses of Eurocentric thought: Contemporary anthropologists have focussed on developing a critique of ethnocentrism in both academic theory and popular culture. …
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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 | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 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".