Powers of religion: an Interview with Simon Coleman
Bibliographic record
Abstract
You're never seeing me again!' Added to that, I went to University College School in London, which was associated in its foundation with Jeremy Bentham.Because of that utilitarian heritage, you were not allowed to discuss religion.So I came from this rather complex background, and in any case began my undergraduate career wanting to be an archaeologist.But actually, through anthropology, I came to rediscover religion, and here's my 'conversion' story.I'm in a final year lecture, and I know that the person sitting next to me is becoming a missionary.It's quite a boring lecture, and she writes me a note saying, 'Do you want to come to church with me this weekend?'I was actually thinking around this time in my final undergraduate year: what am I going to do for graduate work?So she takes me not just to any church, but to a House Church, based in a school in Cambridge, and here's my real point: I feel no sense of what anybody in theological terms might call belief.What I feel is a particular kind of aesthetic engagement with what's going on.I remember the preaching.I remember there's a particular point when this visiting preacher comes in, somebody's playing the piano, but he shoves the person away from the piano and starts playing a kind of jazz tune.So you can see already these shifts in register, in levels of intensity, the shock of going into this place, and what I think of as a kind of aesthetic resonance, which I still feel when I go to Pentecostal services.I've talked a little about this before, this kind of participant aestheticization.It's not participant observation in an obvious sense, but there's a kind of engagement with what Birgit Meyer (2008) might call sensational forms.You can rather characterize it as a kind of resonance.Bjørn: Was that the moment you realized you wanted to engage with the anthropology of religion?Is that why you call it a conversion experience?Simon: I call it a conversion experience with a certain degree of irony, but of course the point again is: these points of crystallization, which is actually how I also got into pilgrimage, these are the results of relationships, long periods of thought, long periods of wondering -of course this is a very Pentecostal way of describing the process!I'm thinking, 'What's my Ph.D. going to be on?I don't know' .I know that I have an interest in religion, but I don't quite know how to articulate it.
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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 | 0.008 | 0.024 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.014 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
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".