<i>Big Brother</i>, Pilgrimage and the Ndembu of Zambia: Examining the Big Brother Phenomenon through the Anthropology of Religion
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article will examine the Big Brother television series through the prism of the anthropology of religion. It will examine the ways in which Big Brother is comparable to a pilgrimage on the one hand and a tribal initiation ceremony on the other. In this regard, Victor Turner’s research on these subjects, and related criticisms, will be discussed in detail. It will argue that one possible reason for the popularity of Big Brother is that it is a modern liminal phase in which contestants undergo suffering to attain the status of celebrity. This, it will argue, is pertinent because modern society prizes celebrity so highly. Thus, it will argue that the Big Brother programme appeals not only to voyeurism but to a kind of religious or tribal structure–that those who endure suffering have their status raised.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".