The Elasticity Of Caste In The Sikh Diaspora: Jat Cool and Caste Masculinities in the Pacific Northwest
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: This article examines the transnational dimensions of caste and gender in the Punjabi Sikh diaspora of the Pacific Northwest. I explore how Jats (a landowning caste from Punjab, India) have positioned themselves at times as superior to Chamars (Punjabi Dalits or caste oppressed peoples) in the US-Canada borderland diaspora. Though Sikhism is a religion founded on anti-caste origins, the simultaneous repudiation of caste and celebration of Jat pride paradoxically illustrates structures of caste within the religion. The article unsettles the ways in which Jat men in the diaspora can be implicated in Jat pride and Jat cool: a social currency intertwined with popular culture and social media that reveals a particular caste masculinity. While not all Jats engage with Jat pride, and in fact many are involved in anti-caste praxis, it is important to situate the pervasiveness of these hierarchical ideologies within intra-Sikh communities to understand the permutations and stickiness of caste within the diaspora. I build on Asian American approaches to theorizing caste, youth cultures, and notions of “cool” to ultimately reveal how caste, rather than fixed or natural, is an elastic concept that is contingent upon how it is deployed within Sikh diasporic geographies and temporalities.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".