Gazing into the World of Tattoos: An Invitation to Reconsider how we Conceptualize Religious Practices
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Debates around the visibility of religious symbols – including whether and how to regulate them—have been quite vivid in recent years in Canada, and particularly in the province of Quebec. These discussions often focus on minority religious symbols and are based on the premise that symbols can be removed or modified. In fact, Saba Mahmood (2006, 2009) argues that using the term “symbol” precludes de-facto our ability to entertain the possibility that these symbols cannot be removed or modified. Drawing on 15 interviews with religiously tattooed individuals and tattoo artists in Montreal and Toronto, this article explores the practice of religious tattooing. Interestingly, this practice has been overlooked in debates on the regulation of religious symbols, as well as in the scholarly literature covering those debates. In this article, we are interested in thinking about why this is. We also argue that looking at the practice of religious tattooing helps give further credence to Mahmood’s criticism. It broadens our understanding of religious practices, including alerting us to the importance of the idea of ‘lived religion’ in comprehending how these practices can be an essential part of who someone is. While religious tattoos have largely escaped legal regulation, we conclude with a discussion of how they nonetheless remain the object of a regulatory gaze.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.002 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 it