“Hey there, Brian”: Voicing Mormon Cosmopolitanism in a College Apartment
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this paper, I discuss a humorous form of voicing called Brian Voice (BV) used by myself and my former roommates, all of whom are students at Brigham Young University and members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Bringing the tools and methods of linguistic anthropology together with the anthropology of morality (especially ordinary ethics), I demonstrate the ways in which my roommates and I use this voicing to simultaneously inhabit the two seemingly contradictory identities of, on the one hand, a reverent Mormon and, on the other, a modern cosmopolitan. BV facilitates this identity by enabling speakers to voice both irreverence and anti- cosmopolitanism without incurring the normal social consequences associated with those stances. I contend that BV accomplishes this mitigation of negative consequences through indexing ridiculousness and absurdity. By situating BV within its Mormon context, I demonstrate that in distancing speakers from both hyper-reverence and irreverence, BV entails a practical engagement with the ethics, principles, and ideals of both Mormon morality and cosmopolitan morality, thus allowing speakers to inhabit a simultaneously Mormon and cosmopolitan self.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 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".