Love and anger in Amazonia and in academia: a disciple’s account of Joanna Overing’s oeuvre and teachings
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the Caquetá, Colombia, in 1995, I asked an Englishman who was doing fieldwork for his Ph.D. at Oxford for advice about graduate studies in the UK. “Maybe consider going to Joanna Overing,” he recommended. He thought that she and her students were doing the most exciting research in Amazonianist anthropology at the time. Meeting him was the first in a chain of fortunate events that led to my doing a Ph.D. under Joanna’s supervision and witnessing a golden but embattled era in her career. This is my personal account of her loves and peeves, her generous supervisory style, her theories, and her place in the history of our discipline and regional specialization, as I now see these. Regarding the latter, I focus especially on her brilliant writing on how contingent associations of Western anthropologists’ analytical terms hinder proper understanding of others’ political philosophies and ways of life; I attend as well to her attention to the centrality of moral understandings in social life, and to her participation in debates about Amazonian engagements with alterity, consanguinity, and conviviality.
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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 | 0.008 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.046 | 0.051 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.015 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".