Seductive Atmospheres, Conflicting Symbols: Religious Landmark Buildings in Diverse Societies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Informed by the sociology of knowledge, this paper understands buildings as “material objectivations” that continuously “act back” upon their users. It examines the following question: Why are the discussions about constructing new (religious) landmark buildings, or the rebuilding of historical ones, so emotionally charged? Using the debate about a proposed golden cross on top of the reconstruction of the Prussian City Palace in Berlin as a starting point, this article studies buildings on two levels: the level of bodily experience, on which they unfold their seductive features, and the level of – often conflicting – symbolic inscription. The analysis shows that religious landmark buildings, such as churches or mosques, use specific means of expression to stimulate the experience of the “numinous.” As a result, they are often loaded with strong emotions and feelings of belonging or dis-belonging. As religious communities increasingly become fragmented in diverse societies, symbolic recognition in landmark projects appears to be a deeply political concern.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.033 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.012 |
| 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".