Pots and political economy: enamel‐wealth, gender, and patriarchy in Mali
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines how the consumption of domestic vessels allows women from the Inland Niger Delta of Mali to negotiate the political economies they enter following their marriage. Enamel serving vessels are the centrepieces of wedding trousseaus that decorate women's houses during the early years of their marriage. I suggest that these objects display a bride's social and economic power in a way that shelters her from exploitation within patriarchal households. Enamel consumption provides an example of how the ‘materiality’ of commodities may be enlisted to construct new senses of selfhood during periods of social liminality. More generally, my case study shows how women employ the ambiguities embodied in commodity consumption to confront patriarchal control of their labour and income. Résumé Le présent article examine la manière dont la consommation de récipients domestiques permet aux femmes du Delta intérieur du Niger, au Mali, de négocier les économies politiques dans lesquelles elles entrent en se mariant. Pièces maîtresses du trousseau, les plats de service émaillés ornent la maison des femmes pendant les premières années de leur mariage. L'auteur suggère que ces objets affichent le pouvoir social et économique de l'épouse d'une manière qui la protège de l'exploitation dans un foyer patriarcal. La consommation d'émail est un exemple de la façon dont la « matérialité» des biens peut être mise à profit pour créer de nouveaux sens de soi dans les phases de liminalité sociale. Plus généralement, cette étude de cas montre comment les femmes profitent des ambiguïtés inhérentes à la consommation de marchandises pour s'opposer au contrôle patriarcal de leur travail et de leur revenu.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".