“Dying is dying, that's all”: Structural violence and cultural projects in Malawian AIDS proverbs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines three Malawian proverbs about AIDS: "AIDS came for people", "Dying is dying, that's all" and "It's in the flour". Proverbs permit Malawians to discuss the otherwise taboo topic of AIDS because they offer a special register and perform a footing shift, a rhetorical manoeuvre that allows the speaker to attribute problematic speech to someone else. The proverbs under consideration convey a sense of powerless in the face of the AIDS epidemic, which is an indicator of the effects of structural violence on the everyday lives of most Malawians. Despite the aura of timeless tradition generally conveyed by proverbs, the author argues that individual Malawians are actually using AIDS proverbs to align themselves with the pursuit of gendered cultural projects, such as multiple concurrent partner sex and transactional sex, which are not traditional at all.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| 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".