An Anatomy of the Canonization of Asadian Genealogy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The critique of dominant discourses in the study of religion now stands at the forefront of discussions about theory and method. But we have come to a point where this challenge to orthodoxy “has assumed an increasingly rigid and canonical shape.” Ironically, this has resulted in the ossification of the object of critique, “the modern conception of religion.” The consequence has been multiple reiterations of the claim that there was no such thing as religion before moderns invented it, and the surveillance of scholarship of the ancient world to purge it of the use of religion as a descriptive category. Brent Nongbri’s Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept is an example of this process and it is used in this article as a case study that examines the anatomy of the rise of a new normativity. The article challenges both Nongbri’s essentialized dichotomy between ancient and modern and his near canonization of recent theory (especially that of Asad) in the study of religion. Instead, it is proposed that fostering critical awareness within the discipline is achieved by moving beyond today’s deconstructivist trends.
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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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.060 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
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".