Everybody Jumping on the Savannah Grass: How Carnival Became a Symbol of Trinidad and Tobago’s National Culture
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper focuses on the history of Carnival in Trinidad and Tobago and how the country molded the event to become a staple of nationalism following independence in the 20th century. It explores the historical beginnings of Carnival, from slavery to indentured servitude to modern-day Trinidad. It looks at how becoming a mascot of Trinidadian culture was achieved in two ways—the representation and rhetoric of the event and how it became a commodity that politicians could use to prove a robust national culture to the world. It takes on central themes of unification, regardless of race, class, or culture, and how the event tells the history of this island, even with the costumes and enthralling music. It touches on how Carnival reflects cultural and political movements throughout the country's history, how it became significant for social changes after independence, and how it could withstand the infiltration of global capitalism and still present a story about Trinidad's culture and resilience. It is built around the argument that after independence in 1962, Trinidad needed a way to present itself as a nationalist country now that it does not have a metropole. This was achieved through the propping up of Carnival and allowing it to reflect various movements of the past. The goal is to add to the conversation that Carnival is not just a boisterous party on the island but also reflects the colonial history and diverse peoples and how it was able to modernize itself while sticking to these core values.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".