Review of Nanette R. Spina, Women’s Authority And Leadership In A Hindu Goddess Tradition, Palgrave Macmillan US, 2017, xiv + 327 pp., 22 tables, 1 figure, £80.00 hardcover, ISBN 978-1-137-58908-8
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This book builds upon her ethnographic fieldwork among Hindu Tamil immigrants in Toronto, Canada, and investigates how female devotees express and negotiate ritual authority in the transnational tradition of goddess Adhiparisakthi.Focussing on the intersection between religion and migration, the study's primary aim is to analyse how the Adhiparisakthi tradition is shaped and reconstructed in a diasporic setting.Through an analysis of qualitative and quantitative data, Spina traces how the global and the local converge in worshippers' experiences, giving expression to a truly transnational movement: while maintaining ties with the tradition's headquarters in Melmaruvathur, Tamil Nadu, India, and with Sri Lanka, country of origin of most of the Tamil migrants, it also adapts to the demands of its Canadian setting.The confluence of such specific conditions brings the Toronto Adhiparisakthi movement 'to reconfigure paradigms of gendered religious leadership and democratize ritual participation' (p.2).This translates into the replacement of traditional gender-and castebased worship restrictions with, on the one side, the promotion of women's ritual authority and leadership and, on the other side, an ethics of 'inclusivity' that manifests as a collective style of ritual service in substitution of traditional priest-mediation.One of the main contributions of the book is the detailed record of the structural and epistemological transformations that a contemporary Hindu tradition undergoes when reproduced in a diasporic setting.The author achieves this by providing descriptions of rituals and behaviours as they unfold in the Toronto temple (mandram) (Chapters 5-7), often juxtaposing them to corresponding performances in the mother temple (Chapter 7) or to expectations characteristic of the larger pan-Indian setting (Chapters 8 and 9).An exhaustive number of
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 0.009 |
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".