Bibliographic record
Abstract
Numerous authors have noted cyclical interest in the subject of witchcraft in Africa with a “revitalized” rise emerging in the 1990s that has been sustained by innovative research and continued popular interest in news media and activism (Ciekawy & Geschiere 1998: 1). Closing in on a century of research, it is difficult to determine whether our understanding of witchcraft has deepened since the canonical work of Evans-Pritchard among the Zande in 1937. The following review summarizes twenty works on witchcraft that have been published in English in the past twenty some years and demonstrates how our understanding of witchcraft has broadened to incorporate new expressions and experiences. At the same time, this article considers whether increasing conceptual complexity is drawing us closer to a clear definition of what witchcraft is, as a concept or phenomenon, or providing greater certainty as to whether it even exists in the ways that we study it.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.013 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.012 | 0.015 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.099 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.019 | 0.026 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| 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".