The Sole Mbira: An Ecomusicological Critique of Singularity and North American Zimbabwean Music
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Ethnomusicological institutions transform traditional Zimbabwean musics into what is practiced in North America and understood by thousands as “Shona music.” This process produces a false narrative within North America of endangered and scarce traditional Zimbabwean musical practices, and these ends serve neocolonial imaginings of the need and right for white stewardship over and charity towards traditional Zimbabwean music(ians). Such a history strikingly reflects dominant and reductive North American settler conceptions of the wilderness, national parks and Indigenous peoples as ecologically vulnerable and in need of protection. Though this process has also fostered a worthy musical bond between Africans and North Americans, it has come at the expense of unfettered economic, artistic and political agency for Zimbabwean musicians and instrument builders who transact their traditional musics internationally. Working towards an anti-oppressive, ethnographic, ecocritical and ecomusicological approach to interpreting the phenomenon of North American Zimbabwean music, this article addresses the proposal that North America could be an archive for scarce authentic traditional Zimbabwean musics.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".