Nahu-kparilim (cattle caretakership): understanding the persistence of unfree Fulani labour and the (non)violent renegotiation of power relations in agrarian economies in northern Ghana
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT This article focuses on how Fulani outsider status, often maintained through several generations, constitutes the basis for unequal labour, land and associated relations. It discusses how static forms of ‘fixed’ citizenship and socioeconomic immobility both maintain and intensify labour precarity, rendering the Fulani more vulnerable to the whims, caprices and avarice of their native ‘overlords’, as evidenced by the practice of nahu-kparilim in Ghana. The article’s main interest is thus land and labour injustice rather than pastoral production and related livelihood activities. Integrating the theories of unfreedom, social reproduction and subalternity, the article contributes to unfree labour studies by demonstrating that despite being constrained in complex ways, unfree labourers have the agency to renegotiate power relations. This advances the idea of unfree labourers’ agency which, in comparison to their immiseration, receives less attention in scholarship on unfreedom.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".