The Stranger at the Feast: Prohibition and Mediation in an Ethiopian Orthodox Christian Community
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Stranger at the Feast is a pathbreaking ethnographic study of one of the world’s oldest and least-understood religious traditions. Based on long-term ethnographic research on the Zege peninsula in northern Ethiopia, Tom Boylston tells the story of how people have understood large-scale religious change by following local transformations in hospitality, ritual prohibition, and feeding practices. Ethiopia has undergone radical upheaval in the transition from the imperial era of Haile Selassie to the modern secular state, but the secularization of the state has been met with the widespread revival of popular religious practice. For Orthodox Christians in Zege, everything that matters about religion comes back to how one eats and fasts with others. Boylston shows how practices of feeding and avoidance have remained central even as their meaning and purpose have dramatically changed from a means of marking class distinctions within Orthodox society to a marker of the difference between Orthodox Christians and other religions within the contemporary Ethiopian state. “Tom Boylston demonstrates the power of ethnography at its best: engaging, challenging, with a superb sense of history and place. He uses close observations of the rhythms of life and of ritual among Ethiopian Orthodox Christians to make illuminating points about mediation, boundaries, systems of knowledge, and trajectories of change.” SIMON COLEMAN, Chancellor Jackman Professor, University of Toronto “Offers unique insights into themes of fasting and feasting, of ritual prohibition, mediation, and hierarchy in Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity. For the first time, the Ethiopian case is placed within the wider anthropology of Christianity. A major achievement.” DONALD L. DONHAM, author of Marxist Modern: An Ethnographic History of the Ethiopian Revolution TOM BOYLSTON is a lecturer in the Department of Social Anthropology in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Edinburgh.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.042 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".