The spirit of the gift, the price of potency: a Maussian model of the Southeast Asian state of Luwu
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This rereading of Mauss's The gift shifts the focus of discussion from the Maori hau to another example: tanoana (potency) among the Toraja (To Pamona) of Central Sulawesi. This potency animates an exchange with (human) gods that is at once gift and purchase ( maoli ). By tracing the intersection of this Maussian literature with that on the animist foundation of the Southeast Asian state, I analyse the nature of potent gifts that serve as a form of social currency in a ‘spiritual economy’ tying centre with (Toraja) periphery in the kingdom of Luwu. This ‘money’, imbued with royal potency, is a medium for the payment of debt only and not a medium of exchange, which gives ‘purchases’ made with it the characteristics of a ‘gift’ and also an opportunity to extract tribute. The Maussian analysis of the blurring of person and thing, and of persons and spirits, thus offers new insight into the nature of political power in the Southeast Asian state.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".