Radical Recreation: Non-Iconic Movements of Tradition in Keralite Classical Dance
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Many studies assume that dance develops as a bearer of tradition through iconic continuity (Downey 2005; Hahn 2007; Meduri 1996, 2004; Srinivasan 2007, 2011, Zarrilli 2000). In some such studies, lapses in Iconic continuity are highlighted to demonstrate how “tradition” is “constructed”, lacking substantive historical character or continuity (Meduri 1996; Srinivasan 2007, 2012). In the case of Mohiniyattam – a classical dance of Kerala, India – understanding the form’s tradition as built on Iconic transfers of semiotic content does not account for the overarching trajectory of the forms’ history. Iconic replication of the form as it passed from teacher to student was largely absent in its recreation in the early 20th century. Simply, there were very few dancers available to teach the older practice to new dancers in the 1960s. And yet, Mohiniyattam dance is certainly considered to be a “traditional” style to its practitioners. Throughout this paper I argue that the use of Peircean categories to understand the semiotic processes of Mohiniyattam’s reinvention in the 20th century allows us to reconsider tradition as a matter of Iconic continuity. In particular, an examination of transfers of repertoire in the early 20th century demonstrates that the “traditional” and “authentic” character of this dance style resides in semeiotic processes beyond Iconic reiteration; specifically, the “traditional” character of Mohiniyattam is Indexical and Symbolic in nature.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it