The Matter of Materiality: An Ethnographic Approach to New Trends in the Disposal of Human Cremated Remains
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A quarter of a million sets of cremated ashes are now removed annually from crematoria in the uk, involving survivors of the deceased in a series of decision-making processes for these remains. This change in practice has escalated over the past decade within a legislative regime that places few, if any, restrictions on the movement and placement of ashes. Issues concerning new ritual practice in a secular society have been the focus of ethnographic research among professionals and bereaved individuals and families, in four regional uk locations. Consideration is given here to what may be « optional rites » marking the emergence of new ritual processes. We argue that in imaginatively re-inventing the sites of ash disposal, survivors have sought to establish « lived spaces » which transcend institutional conceptions of spatial allocations for the dead. The emergence of individual – often private – practices around ashes suggests materially-engaged desires to connect with these remains and to transform institutional conceptions of spaces and places for the dead into « lived » spaces that can engender environments for memorialisation.
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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 | 0.014 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| 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".