Re-engaging the “International”: A Social History of the Trans-Himalayan Borderlands
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The paper critically interrogates a central paradox in India’s emerging border discourse. Although a feel-good narrative of rethinking borders as bridges, it has been curiously resistant to step away from the reductionist logic of borders as barriers. The paper argues that this dualism can be traced to conflicting geopolitical and sociological notions of the international that have resulted in a range of contradictions and distortions at the borders. The paper will engage with the puzzle as to why the trans-Himalayan trader, historically the central protagonist has today become a rather forlorn metaphor of a conflicted discourse. It will draw inferences based on field observations in Dharchula, an ancient trading town in northern India located on the trans-Himalayan trading routes with Nepal and China. These offer interesting insights on how state power and regulation as well as new border alignments have affected everyday lives at the borders. The paper concludes by arguing for discursive cross-fertilizations as first steps towards recognizing the borderlands as the agentive sites that they are.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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".