(Not So Much) Dancing by the Book: Mapping a New Religious Discourse around the Practice of Indian Classical Dance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper seeks to problematize the current state of Indian classical dance and its relation to religion in the Canada-based Indian diaspora, with a special focus on Toronto and Montreal. Using data from the early stages of my PhD ethnographic research, this essay contrasts text and practice to demonstrate that the current state of dance in the diaspora has evolved: while the “classical” norms of aesthetics and ideas about religion/spirituality that have been mobilized in the discourse about and practice of Bharatanātyam since the late 19th century still have some salience to this day, a new discourse and approach are emerging from this “ideal” state of dance, allowing performers not only to redefine their own practice in their changing socio-cultural environment, but also to decide for themselves whether their practice is spiritual/religious or not.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".