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 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 | 0.003 | 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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| 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".