The Ethnograph: Journal of Anthropological Studies

Indigenous Women in a Colonial Legal Framework: An Intersectional Analysis of the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal

Maeve McAllister — 2023-09-30

The British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal is a space to heal and assign reparations for discriminatory action. But before the reparations can occur, the harm must be verified. To do this, the onus is on the potential victim of discrimination, the complainant, to prove a correlation between their ‘characteristics’ and the occurrence of discrimination. The format of the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal (BC HRT), which operates on specific lines of discrimination and tackles instances of discrimination based on parcelled out categories, does not have a framework that allows for an intersectional analysis. As a result of this framework, the BC HRT cannot look at the whole picture and must instead fit narratives into the framework of colonial law, in which the whole experience is parcelled and judged. Looking at 21 cases brought to the BC HRT by Indigenous women complainants since 2015, I examine how intersecting lines of oppression are managed and approached by the BC HRT. I find that the format of the BC HRT is not conceptualizing discrimination as experienced by people with complex intersectional identities. Instead the HRT is forcing the complainants to parcel their experience into clear lines which serves to destabilize and make illegitimate the argument brought by the complainant.

Virus et Cetera: Examining Local Reception and Response to Global HIV/AIDS Discourses in Papua New Guinea

Alexander Wu — 2023-09-30

In this paper, I explore the multitude of meaning-making processes and ideologies that are at play in the contested field of HIV prevention and care in Papua New Guinea. First, I will explain how the biomedical frameworks of HIV/AIDS knowledge-making discursively enter the locale and contest the local etiology of health and sickness. I will consider a variety of ethnographies and theoretical works that contemplate the intersectionality and contestation between the biomedical framework and local peoples’ context and perception. Through comparative case studies of local practices, I contemplate how current biomedical models of HIV prevention and care succeed and fail in effectively addressing the epidemic in Papua New Guinea. In the end, I validate the biological framework’s great potential in HIV/AIDS prevention after modulation in a way that is suitable to the local context.

Understanding The Early Middle Ages: From Life Stories to Grave Goods

Ciara Albrecht — 2023-09-30

For the early Middle Ages, there are few primary sources dealing with the lives of everyday people, as the existing ones tend to focus on rich landowners or nobility. In these situations, it has been proposed that all aspects of a person’s identity (occupation, ethnicity, biological sex, etc.) can be determined solely from items and belongings buried alongside them. This viewpoint has most recently been upheld by the historian Heinrich Härke, who has used his grave goods analysis as the sole basis for numerous studies. However, grave goods analysis can project modern understandings and biases onto the past instead of accurately representing the nuances of individuals, communities, and their understandings of the world. This paper will explore the disadvantages to relying solely on grave goods analysis and the importance of employing methods in tandem, while being aware of how modern understandings and assumptions can be projected onto archaeological material.

Reconstituting Space: The Transformation of Non-Places through the Covid-19 Pandemic

Maeve McAllister — 2023-09-30

Using the theoretic framework of supermodernity as it applies to late-stage capitalist spaces of transience and consumerism, I examine the way the COVID-19 pandemic has shifted our physical and mental experience of shared space. Marc Augé’s (1995) text explores the concept of liminal, substance-less, isolating shared spaces in which identity and community are absent. Looking at the way our mentalities shift while reckoning with a global pandemic, I find the spaces Augé constructs are now areas of fear, apprehension, and have/embody a focus on physical monitoring. “Non-places” take the shape of supermarkets, shopping malls, airports, buses, railways, and similar locations which you move through as a nobody. The fear of transmission has permeated our day-to-day, re-constituting these places. The lines in the grocery store guiding your movements and the sanitized card readers all reaffirm your location in the pandemic world. In this paper I explore the functions of this transition with reflection on how it shifts our sense of self and anxieties operating in the world, how the self is constructed in relation to the other, and how COVID-19 shifts this worldview. Recognizing this film of anxiety over previously devoid spaces deepens a recognition of COVID-19 as impacting our way of moving in the world at a fundamental level and questions its impact on future ways of moving through these spaces.

(Mis)interpreting the Commerce Clause: A Critical Look At Corpus Linguistics As A Solution to the Question of Originalism.

Yuval Kehila — 2023-09-30

In recent years the use of corpus linguistics as a remedy to the problem of linguistic drift and United States legal language interpretation has proliferated, especially in the field of constitutional originalism of United States constitutional language. This paper investigates the Commerce Clause of the United States constitution as a case study for looking at the effects of legal language misinterpretation, through the Corpus of Founding Era American English (COFEA). This paper will then take a critical look at a modern case of legal language in order to question critical assumptions made by linguists about the employment of corpora for originalist analysis. This paper argues for the necessity of scepticism around the idea that ‘original intention’ behind written law can somehow be revealed by the syntax-oriented public-usage frequency analysis achieved through corpus analysis. Using corpus analysis to reveal intention assumes not only that legal language likely conforms to original public meanings of words, but more critically that these laws were intended to conform to one such interpretation. Rather, this paper will demonstrate that legal language is consistently written in a way which lends itself to multiple interpretations, and perhaps done so purposefully. By employing corpus linguistics to tackle the problem of original legal meaning, this paper argues, linguists could be ignoring this as a significant feature of legal language culture.