Paolo Israel.<i>In Step with the Times: Mapiko Masquerades of Mozambique</i>.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The jacket copy of In Step with the Times: Mapiko Masquerades of Mozambique describes it as a “dense history” and “the most radical attempt to date to historicize an African performative tradition.” This is no mere marketer’s boast. Paolo Israel charts a century of history on and around the Makonde plateau in northern Mozambique, following the emergence, florescence, evolution, fading, and resurrection of successive genres of masquerading dance known as mapiko. The book reconstructs a history that has gone largely unwritten, achieving a panoramic vision of the simultaneously embedded and independent trajectory of mapiko, showing how dynamics within Makonde communities drive mapiko practice, even as such practice also reflects broader processes of historical change in the region. In the opening part, Israel explores the concepts and methods used to study masked dancing. Subsequent parts follow five decades of performance from the World War I years to the later colonial period, an era marked by a cosmopolitanism that continually integrated new elements—poetic, kinetic and otherwise; mapiko’s engagement with and shaping by the nationalist challenge to colonial rule and the politics of socialism from the 1960s through the 1980s; and the new directions, never completely unmoored from older practices, that masked dancing has taken in the climate of multi-party democratic politics since the early 1990s. Israel shows how social and gender-based rivalry and an associated impulse to innovate, combined with a cosmopolitan tendency to embrace the unfamiliar, have formed the motor for change. The internal dynamic linked with the mechanism for integrating foreign elements keeps mapiko practice in constant motion.
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 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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.027 | 0.003 |
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".