‘A Conference That Didn’t’: African Diaspora Studies and an episode in anthropology’s identity politics of representation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1968, the Social Science Research Council of the United States established the Committee on Afro-American Societies and Cultures which lasted until 1975 and which was initially chaired by the anthropologist Sidney W Mintz. In April, 1970, the committee held a conference on ‘Continuities and Discontinuities in Afro-American Societies and Culture’ at the University of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica. The conference occurred in the context of civil rights struggles and the prominence of the Black Power movement in the United States, the near-simultaneous rise of the Black Power movement in Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, and elsewhere in the Caribbean, and on the heels of protests by black and African scholars and students at the African Studies Association meetings in Montreal in 1969, and similar protests at other scholarly venues. A number of prominent white Caribbeanist anthropologists and other social scientists were invited to present papers at the Social Science Research Council conference. When black academics, such as the anthropologist St Clair Drake and the sociologist Joyce A Ladner, were invited, seemingly as an afterthought, they refused to participate, citing the lack of representation of scholars of colour on the committee and in the conference program. And at the conference itself, there were subtle conflicts and misunderstandings over styles of presentation and argumentation. This article develops a theoretical model appropriate for the history of science to illustrate anthropology’s contested identity politics of representation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".