Escaping the Other: Postmodernism, Academics and Africa in the New World Order
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recently an increasing number of anthropologists have turned away from Africa as an area of research.This corresponds disturbingly with other developments globally, in Africa, and in academia.The end of the cold war has brought about shifts in power relations that have left Africa in a difficult situation.'Aid', increasingly tied to political as well as economic conditionality, has been withheld from African states and redirected to other, more profitable, areas of the globe.In Africa, instability has increased while economies have collapsed.Postcolonial academics and governments have introduced challenges to 'Western' academic discourses relating them to imperialist agendas.In the 'West' postmodern and critical discourses have problematized the anthropological 'other', yet many anthropologists engaged in these discourses have concentrated on studies 'at home' (be that North America or Europe) rather than attempting to work abroad without exoticizing their research.This paper explores certain relationships between these recent occurrences.
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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 | 0.014 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.032 | 0.087 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.022 | 0.016 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".