Tradition and innovation: woodcarvers at the confluence of the Umzinyathi and Umngeni rivers, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper is a review of a collection of 185 items now housed in the Natal Museum, Pietermaritzburg. It consists of the principal wooden objects found in Zulu households: headrests, platters for serving meat, milking pails and spoons of various descriptions. The period covered is from the beginning of the twentieth century through to the 1990s - three generations of carvers. For each item, the owner was established and the item attributed as far as possible to its carver. Where feasible, the carvers or their descendants were interviewed, and their biographical background, opinions about their trade, assessment of their colleagues' work and other pertinent information were recorded. In spite of the limited area and the fact that many of the carvers knew of each other's work there was a surprising variation in styles of headrests and meat platters (but not milking pails). Within the array of styles the Umzinyathi River seemed to serve as a boundary, even though it is easily fordable. As a result it is possible to trace the formation of autonomous regional styles on each side of the river: for meat platters on the eastern, and for headrests on the western side. The information supplied by the owners and the carvers allows certain conclusions to be drawn about the political and social circumstances that brought about a florescence of traditional carving in the first three quarters of the twentieth century, before it entered its terminal decline in the final quarter. To cite this paper: Jolles, F. 2001. Tradition and innovation: woodcarvers at the confluence of the Umzinyathi and Umngeni rivers, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa . Southern African Humanities 13 : 97-124.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".