The flamboyance of things: Handmade material culture in new-wave carnival in New Orleans
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Carnival in New Orleans is a complex, vibrant field of cultural production that generates a wealth of material culture. In the small-scale, countercultural 'new wave' of carnival 'krewes' or clubs that have proliferated since Hurricane Katrina, that material culture is often handmade. Framed by Daniel Miller's dialectical theory of material culture and drawing on ethnographic fieldwork spanning several carnival seasons, this paper unpacks what is at stake in new-wave carnival's costumes, throws, and floats. We argue that making these objects makes carnival itself: the handmade things shape people's experiences of carnival, generating vivid, memorable interactions and encounters, which they later encapsulate as mementos. In their handmade-ness, carnival-makers not only recognize the effort that people put into the events, but also carnival's sociality and relationality. While Miller emphasizes 'the humility of things,' these things are loud and flamboyant. They nonetheless help illustrate how culture unfolds with and through stuff.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 it