Metissage and the Establishment of Orphanages for Abandoned Children in Early Twentieth Century Senegal
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1912, French anthropologists put pressure on the Ministry of Colonies to deal with the problem of abandoned illegitimate children in French colonies. The fear of a growing population of metis who suffered alienation from French society and their natal land became a cause cA©lA¨bre for colonial observers and garnered the attention of colonial officials. Between 1912 and 1918, the French administration in West Africa established a series of orphanages aimed at providing for the material needs of indigent children and the training required to make an honest living. This paper examines the creation of an orphanage at the agricultural station called Richard Toll in colonial Senegal. Organized as a hospice and boarding school for abandoned mulattos and indigenes seeking apprenticeship. Based on administrative documents from the Senegal National Archives and the French Overseas Archives, this paper takes a close look at how the administration identified abandoned children and why colonial officials designated certain metis children as prime candidates for the orphanage. In considering critical race and gender theory, this paper explores the implications that this institution held for shaping ideas about respectable motherhood, illegitimate birth, interracial sexuality, and mA©tis identity in early-twentieth century Senegal.
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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.012 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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".