“A Thread that Connects the Worlds”: Ovoid Logics and the Contradictory Lines of Force of Brazilian Improvisations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
From sports to politics, from architecture to economics, from the arts to pedagogy, the social and cultural spheres of Brazil have often been characterized as having decidedly improvisative valences. The importance of improvisation to the enactment of brasilidade (Brazilianness) would seem to be borne out by the sheer abundance of common words and phrases used in everyday Brazilian speech that highlight extemporaneous action: jeitinho, malandragem, ginga, jogo de cintura, malícia, gambiarra, esperteza, axé, manha, suingue, astúcia, drible, malabarismo, balanço, equilibrista, pirataria, arranjar-se, molejo, cordialidade, and so on. This essay points to a few “complex tendencies” and “contradictory lines of force,” that emerge out of this lexicon, providing snapshots of three key loci within and around which one can examine and critique the stories people—Brazilians and non-Brazilians alike—tell about what is often taken to be the zygotic relationship between improvisation and brasilidade (Brazilianness). Each of these snapshots—of the jeitinho brasileiro, of the gambiarra aesthetics of the global favela, of futebol brasileiro (Brazilian soccer)—reveal, I hope, that the concept of improvisation (rendered directly and in its many other lexical guises) performs a vital function in Brazil. It’s a nexus around which deliberations over matters of national import take place, a ready-to-hand theoretical apparatus for peering into the “inert vectoring” that characterizes the varied performances of citizenship that take place within Brazilian communities. I’m careful, however, to let the discussions contained in this essay play out within a global frame, working under the assumption that Brazil is not (and never has been) coterminous with itself, and showing that Brazil is constantly being reborn—infranationally, nationally, and globally—under the contradictory forces of appraisals of the improvisative.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.057 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| 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".