No such thing as <i>a</i> concept: A radical tradition from Malinowski to Asad and Strathern
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In light of renewed questions about the relationship between anthropology’s past and future, two radicalizations of the British tradition are particularly worth exploring: those of Talal Asad and Marilyn Strathern, arguably the most widely read anthropologists beyond the discipline, and the most regularly misunderstood. Asad and Strathern are rarely engaged together because the anthropologies that their works have inspired operate quite separately, their mutual implications left unexplored. And yet, tracing the development of Asad’s and Strathern’s respective work reveals a deep resonance, beginning with their training in the concern with translation, which owes more to Malinowski than anthropologists today are generally aware. The paper argues that reading Asad and Strathern together can help mitigate the over-cultivation of the “concept” in recent anthropology, multiply insights into the constitutive relations among anthropology, science and the secular, and refine perspectives on the legacy of British anthropology and on anthropology’s future politics.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.055 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
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".