The Delectable and Dangerous: Durian and the Odors of Empire in Southeast Asia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The durian, for turn of the twentieth century Euro-American travelers in Southeast Asia, seemed a strange fruit – exotic, but unattainable in metropolitan centers. Durian was different than the banana, for example. Colonial companies never grew them in plantations. Even if durians crowded marketplaces from Singapore to Sumatra, the business remained in the hands of native peoples. The fruit matters because the peoples and animals who lived in Malaya and the rest of Southeast Asia loved the durian, enough that tourists – visitors, not colonizers – all noticed it. When Euro-Americans first encountered durians, they were not disgusted; they developed that disgust as the lines of empire hardened. The durian became a spiny site where indigenous tastes and the American and European distaste and suspicion that they brought with them to the colonies clashed. The encounter around durian, the explanation for the fruit’s aromas, the experience of westerners as they forced themselves to overcome its stench, and the way natives openly enjoyed watching the stranger’s first taste of strange fruit all encapsulated in the sensorium the experience of empire: conquest, the articulation of difference, and the careful hidden ways colonized peoples talked back.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".