Sensational Ensembles
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Drawing on posthumanist and sensory archaeology, this paper explores ensemble practices as an alternative to Eurocentric conceptions of ritual as a heuristic of cross-cultural comparison. We identify ensemble practices as the gathering of assemblages that create meaning for participants through their comingling with evocative juxtapositions of bodies, objects, comestibles, built spaces, landscapes, and environmental forces. The sensorial intensity and allusive capacity of these ensembles heighten human perceptions of relationality, providing opportunities to reflect on relationships to other beings, materials, and forces. To illustrate the utility of this approach, we examine historic, ethnographic, folkloric, and archaeological evidence for open-air food and drink consumption—picnicking—in historic and contemporary Ireland (ca. AD 1650–present). Analysis of ceramic and glass finds associated with annual celebrations of Saint Leo’s Day on Inishark Island indicates how food, drink, and household wares featured in ensemble practices that fostered memorable and commemorative experiences of shared heritage, devotion, and commensality. This study highlights how human practices create meaning through sensorially rich and evocative ensembles that often eschew traditional dichotomies associated with ritual.
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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 | 0.003 |
| 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 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 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".