Lalami’s Anomic World: (Dis)Engagement with Normlessness and Attempts at Recovery
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article exposes the multi- faceted dimensions of anomie, Emile Durkheim’s highly controversial theory, and the way it applies to Laila Lalami’s novel Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits (2005). This paper draws on Durkheim’s theory and aims at exploring the anomic world Lalami creates in her representation of Morocco during the postcolonial period and the impact of a state of normlessness on her characters’ experiences. Social norms have been blurred and common values and meanings have lost their significance and power to unite individuals due to economic difficulties, globalization, and colonization. The resulting instability and breakdown of ideals has left Lalami’s characters psychologically paralyzed and unsettled by emergent feelings of alienation, confusion, and an inability to deal with a period of cultural and social upheavals and a debilitated community. Eventually, they are forced to face a fractured society that lacks a sense of direction, a purpose in life, and the social cohesion that previously reinforced a collective conscience. The discussion mainly focuses on the disintegration of family and loss of a moral system that regulates society, and various attempts at recovery from such anomic conditions infiltrating Moroccan culture in Lalami’s novel.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".