Durkheim, Development and the Devil: A Cultural Sociology of Community Conflict
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life provides a theory of the eminently social processes by which people, places, times and things come to be seen as sacred or profane. He demonstrates how the sacred is a locus of collectivization essential to the formation of the solidaristic bonds that characterize a moral community. Recent work in cultural sociology suggests that the mobilization of the binary discourse of civil society—the sacred/profane—is key to democratic deliberation in the public sphere (Alexander 2006). Drawing on participant observation, local media resources, and printed and online materials, this paper examines the deployment of this binary discourse in a conflict around the rezoning of agricultural land in rural Nova Scotia (2009-2011). Substantively, this case demonstrates how the symbolic coding of rural/agricultural space as sacred played a significant role in the rejection of the proposed rezoning. At a theoretical level, this paper reaffirms that the Durkheimian vision of the symbolic power of the sacred remains a core cultural resource in social organization and political mobilization, and a vital conceptual resource in sociological analysis.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.046 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| 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 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".