Group Identity, Scarification, and Poro among Liberated Africans in Sierra Leone, 1808–1819
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In this article, identity is complicated by considering examples of marks that denoted membership in the Poro society of the upper Guinea coast among the so-called Liberated Africans freed in Sierra Leone in the nineteenth century. As opposed to a correlation of ethnicity with scarification, this article demonstrates that scarification as an identifier may be understood in far more nuanced and complex ways. The article further shows the familiarity that British clerks in Freetown had concerning the Poro society. Their use of the term “purrah,” specifically to indicate body markings among Liberated Africans removed from seized vessels with no further explanation, indicates that familiarity. The article considers how scarification may continue to be used to understand origins and identity within documents originating along the upper Guinea coast, while underscoring the meanings of such body marking.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".