Humanizing the Musical Savage: Orientalism and Racism in the History of British Ethnomusicology
Bibliographic record
Abstract
At its territorial peak, just after the end of World War I, the British Empire consisted of “naval stations and military bases extending from Gibraltar to Hong Kong, the four great dominions of settlement [Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa], the Indian empire that occupied an entire subcontinent, the crown colonies in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean and the League of Nations Mandates, especially in the Middle East.” This included “self-governing colonies with predominantly white populations, Crown Colonies and Protectorates with non-European subjects, and the British Raj in India as an Empire in its own right.” Inevitably, as British expansion increased, as a seemingly ineluctable force, into remote areas of the world, the impact of its foreign acquisitions would impact on the way it saw itself and the way it saw others. David Cannadine argues that “as with all such transoceanic realms, the British Empire was not only a geopolitical entity: it was also a culturally created and imaginatively constructed artifact.” Edward Said argues the point more broadly: “So vast and yet so detailed is imperialism as an experience with crucial cultural dimensions, that we must speak of overlapping territories, intertwined histories common to men and women, whites and non-whites, dwellers in the metropolis and on the peripheries, past as well as present and future.” Part of this intertwining is bound up, inevitably, with what John MacKenzie refers to as the “debate about the relationship between metropolitan cultures and empire,” in other words issues concerning the influence that imperialholdings had on high literary and artistic culture as it filtered down to more British popular entertainments. Within this he refers to art, music, theater, dance, and literature (both popular and academic), showing how “they both reflected and sometimes actively shaped the instruments” of domestic inheritances of empire. From the standpoint of music, as the work of Jeffrey Richards, among many others, shows, this could not be more certain: “In view of the ubiquity of imperialism in fiction, painting, poetry and theatre, it would seem intrinsically likely that it has left its traces in music.”
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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 | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.046 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".