Orating Origins: the Formation of Pakistan in Contemporary Urdu Shi’i Khitabat in Karachi
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Urdu-speaking Shiʿa khatibs (orators) in Karachi regularly speak on the origins of Pakistan, seeking to recuperate Shiʿi contributions to the foundation of the nation-state. In this article, I argue that such claims do not resist, subvert, or undermine statist historical narratives. Instead, the claims mimic, in structure and teleology, the very statist historical narratives that they attempt to challenge. I draw upon twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork in Karachi and demonstrate how thoroughly circumscribed such claims are. I read this minority rhetoric as an attempt to appropriate the majoritarian discourse, rather than as an attempt to challenge the dominant historiography of the origins of Pakistan. I turn to the domain of Shiʿi khitabat (oratory), a ubiquitous and public performance, and identify the important role played by such mass and physical gatherings in the articulation of historical claims. My works emerges from, and contributes back to, scholarship on South Asian Shiʿism, oratory, and the public sphere.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".