The ‘Most Splendid Pageant Ever Seen’: Grandeur, the Domestic, and Condescension in Lord Durham’s Political Theatre
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article offers a thematic analysis of the performance of grandeur and the workings of the domestic domain in the Durham mission, framed by literatures on manners, morals, and symbolic politics. During his governor-generalship, Lord Durham brought a regal grandeur to bear on British North American politics that was sustained by a large entourage and performed at dinners, balls, banquets, receptions, and through public addresses, as well as in Durham’s own domestic circle. In his relations with colonists, Durham frequently adopted a strategy of comportment – condescension – available only to the great. This same strategy appeared in the analyses of colonial cultural and political conditions that were offered by him and by members of his entourage. Drawing on the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, and taking up the emphasis on the importance of the domestic in post-colonial studies, the author seeks to elucidate some neglected aspects of the Durham Mission. Cet article analyse la mise en scène du grandiose et le fonctionnement de l’espace domestique lors de la mission de Lord Durham. Il s’inscrit dans les travaux sur les moeurs et manières, la moralité et la symbolique du pouvoir. Au cours de son mandat comme gouverneur général, Lord Durham fait rayonner sur la vie politique de l’Amérique du Nord britannique une sorte de grandeur royale qui s’appuie sur un entourage nombreux et qu’il déploie à l’occasion de dîners, de bals, de banquets et de réceptions, comme au sein de sa propre suite. Dans ses rapports avec les colons, Durham adopte souvent un comportement réservé aux grands : la condescendance. La même stratégie apparaît dans les analyses des conditions politiques et culturelles coloniales proposées par Durham et par des membres de son entourage. L’auteur s’inspire de la sociologie de Pierre Bourdieu et reprend à son compte l’intérêt des études post-coloniales pour le domaine domestique afin d’éclairer des facettes négligées de la mission Durham.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 |
| 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 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".