Negotiating Place, Memory, and Identity in M. G. Vassanji’s The Assassin’s Song: A Humanistic Geographical Perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The paper explores the concepts of place, memory, and identity in M G Vassanji’s The Assassin’s Song in the light of humanistic geography which arose as a reaction to spatial sciences in the 1950s and the 1960s. As far as the basic meaning of the word “place” is concerned, it involves location, an area, or a specific direction. In the realm of humanistic geography, place is endowed with meaning, memory, and experience, and it provides a base to carry out the sociocultural practices associated with daily life. Karsan’s life in Pirbaag as an adolescent and as an aspiring student at Boston-Harvard, his married life with Marge Thompson in Canada, his new identity as Krishna Fazl while working as a professor in a college in British Columbia, his familial life and tragedy in the form of his only son’s death, his return to India, his research period at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, and finally his getting back to his roots and assuming the role of the Saheb (spiritual leader) of Pirbaag are a testament to the view that place determines one’s experiences and thereby plays a decisive role in the shaping of identity.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".