Conversion as a Thematic Site: Academic Representations of Ambedkar’s Buddhist Turn
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Many scholars have written on the conversion of Bhimrao Ambedkar from Hinduism to Buddhism, trying to explain it. In this paper, I argue that a hermeneutics of conversion is needed to understand what this transition means in the larger academic community. Through using the concept of the ‘thematic site’, a narrative trope that draws on the Lacanian idea of the ‘point de capiton’ (also known as the ‘nodal point’ or ‘quilting point’), to investigate how the invisible is evoked in the visible of these scholarly accounts of Ambedkar’s Buddhism, this paper argues that academic accounts of this conversion rearticulate colonial dichotomies of modern/traditional, mapping them onto the binary of West/East. That is, by tracing common academic representations of Ambedkar’s conversion, this paper posits that there is an obfuscated relation that is articulated in the depiction of this event, a connection that invisibly connects Ambedkar’s act to colonial constructions of knowledge.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.046 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".