Early Afrikaner Missionaries and the Central African Natural Ecology: A History of Ambiguous Interactions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: This article assesses the role of late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century Afrikaner missionaries in their ecological positioning in Nyasaland. As envoys of South Africa's Dutch Reformed Church, they were predisposed to self-identify with the dominant colonial culture as representative of “European civilization.” However, their own environmental sensibilities were also shaped by the rural agricultural background from which many of them had come. This article considers their role in the ecological values they directly or indirectly propagated. The theme of “hunting” is especially emphasized here, as well as the planting of trees. A following section concerns indigenous environmental concerns, especially dealing with the theme of rain, and the missionary response. The argument is made that the missionary discourse was implicitly infiltrated by the indigenous point of view, to the point that missionaries were occasionally convinced to go along with the indigenous perspective in order to get their message across. In the final analysis the suggestion is made that the missionary discourse effectively became hybridized, and that this historical example might in fact serve as an analogy for the kind of methodological conversion that this article suggests as something that might helpfully challenge dominant contemporary globalization norms that threaten the environment.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".