The inconspicuous power of border festivals: insights from the Chad-Cameroon border
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Held every two years and alternating venues between Yagoua (Cameroon) and Bongor (Chad), the Tokna Massana border festival celebrates the identity and culture of the partitioned Masa peoples. This article explores how border festivals like Tokna Massana can complement and innovate the study of borders and borderlands. Building on participant observation, semi-structured interviews and archival research, we analyze how exacting cross-border festival planning and preparation in the Masa homeland and the diaspora make each new edition possible. We argue that border festivals are worth our attention because their repertoires illuminate underrepresented knowledge production and transmission choices. Moreover, the expectation of festive commemorations underlines processual and performative modes of engagement and management of identity and historical memory. They draw our attention to unexpected use, counter use, and repurposing of border spaces and infrastructures. Finally, the study of border festivals can reveal unacknowledged histories of practical governance.
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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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".