The Captive and the Gift: Cultural Histories of Sovereignty in Russia and the Caucasus
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Bruce Grant. The Captive and the Gift: Cultural Histories of Sovereignty in Russia and the Caucasus. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2009. xviii, 188 pp. Glossary. References. Index. $65.00, cloth. $21.95, paper.In this gem of book, Bruce Grant explicates Russia's complex involvement with the Caucasus through the seemingly simple metaphor of the of empire. As he writes in the introduction, [claiming over another entails the burdens of (p. x), and Grant digs deep through the layers of giving s and takings that have shaped relations in the region. Shifting focus away from the usual state level of analysis, Grant investigates discursive and real-life tales of captivity in the mountains. His rich material reveals how and why Russia's gift of civilization to the people of the Caucasus, as well as their conquest, has never been fully received, nor resolved. Ultimately, Grant argues that the boundaries between Russia and the Caucasus are extremely porous, fostering evolving codes of engagement that expose the open and comparative nature of colonial (p. xvii).Grant leads the reader through various facets of the gift. He begins with the myth of Prometheus, who was banned to the top of Mount Caucasus for stealing fire from the Gods. Grant portrays Prometheus as the archetypal suffering captive (p. 2), whose exile provided model for localized forms of sovereignty (p. 8). Subsequent exchanges of hostages that happened locally, as well as between Russians and Caucasians, show the porous nature of sovereign practices, bodies move across established social lines and where languages of gift and sacrifice very much narrate the making of new systems of power and authority (p. 9).Since the gift establishes relationship between the giver and receiver, Grant approaches the history of Caucasian conquest as an example of how mutual appropriations transformed each side's political and military strategies (p. 21). Grant argues that Russians adopted indigenous practices of theft to develop the myth of the good Russian prisoner. By exploring this narrative, rather than focusing on the over- analyzed victor/colonizer dichotomy, Grant provides new take on why captive stories have been so popular in the Russian imagination. He advocates that we should see this myth as generating a powerful symbolic economy of belonging in highly charged setting that has naturalized violence and enabled diverse Russian publics to frame their government's military actions there as persuasive (p. 17). The Russian prisoner became the ultimate gift of empire that substantiated Russia's expensive expansion as force of enlightenment in the region. …
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 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".