Notes on an archipelagic ethnography: Ships, seas, and islands of relation in the Indian Ocean
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
This paper explores a mobile anthropological method, or what I call an archipelagic ethnography. This archipelagic ethnography focuses on relationality to think through not only islandness and archipelagoes—land, ship, and sea—but also considers relationality as a starting point for examining connections across space. Based on over ten years of ethnographic research among dhow sailors in the Indian Ocean, I argue that navigation, social interactions, notions of patronage, and protection alongside memories and histories of mobility draw together these multiple spaces across the Indian Ocean. Moving between dhows docked in port, on islands, and at sea, I elaborate on an archipelagic ethnographic method that is a mode of thinking relationally about different kinds of spaces and places. Taking relationality as a central point in thinking through relations between ship, land, and sea, I hope to think about the notion of society in relational terms as a starting point for an anthropological method that is attuned to both difference and connection.
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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.000 |
| 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