“The animal out of the desert”: The Nomadic Metaphysics of Michael Ondaatje’s <i>In the Skin of a Lion</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In In the Skin of a Lion , Michael Ondaatje explores mobile figures through the trope of nomadism. Linking a series of the novel's mobile figures together and suggesting their equivalence as migrants, Ondaatje dissolves the distinction between native and foreign workers. He thus attempts to resist the essentialist links between people and place that are prevalent in the arborescent metaphors of belonging that poststructuralists like Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari critique. Instead of what Liisa Malkki calls sedentarist metaphysics, the novel subscribes to what Tim Cresswell refers to as nomadic metaphysics - an interest in the routes of travel and a concomitant dismissal of the fixity of rooted identity. Ondaatje's strategy of nomadic metaphysics obscures the material history of, and important differences among, specific migrations, routes, and/or patterns of mobility that his novel identifies. The novel seems to assert a citizenship that exceeds the nation-state and challenges the class hierarchies of liberal conceptions of citizenship; however, because of Ondaatje's use of patterns of equivalence, the cosmopolitan citizenship he gestures to is not realized.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".