Animal spirits and mimetic affinities: The semiotics of intimacy in African human/animal identities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Human identities are often conceived in counter-position to objects outside the individual or the collective self with which lines of affinity or opposition, or the blurring together of both, run. Selfhood itself is forged out of the experience of “alterity” through encounters with diverse “others” with whom we identify or differentiate ourselves. With reference to the experience of East African pastoralists, this paper examines the meshing of human and animal identities, where both wild and domestic animals represent human partners and counterparts. Semiotic theories propose that there are two opposed sign functions, based on relations of contiguity and similarity. Domestic animals are “part of,” but often serve as metaphors for, pastoralist societies. Both functions describe forms of human/animal “similitudes,” via large affinities as people are seen as like, as or together with domestic animals, or via small and intimate affinities, built up through sensual experience. Sacrifice creates the ultimate intimacy, as the sacrificed animal becomes a key signifier of personal and social identities. Here, the two semiotic functions are blended to form especially powerful semiotic objects, with metonymical sources elevated to analogies identities. Livestock, then, are human metonyms that serve as especially convincing metaphors and allegories for society and personal identity. It is through relations of intimate affinity between herding peoples and their stock that the sense of what an animal is and the qualities it sensually shares with people are built up through experience and affect into memories and anticipations. Then, the nature of the beast as a set of forms, properties, ideas, and associations is elevated into indexical images of special similitude that can assume the full weight of signifying people as individuals and collectivities and in so doing brings identities within society into being.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".