Semiotics, Habitus and Music in the Transmission of Tibetan Culture in Toronto
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This ethnographic study explores the role of music in cultural transmission in the Tibetan community of Toronto, Canada. Beginning with an integration of Peircian semiotics, Bourdieu's habitus and musical semiosis, I then identify certain non-Tibetan cultural elements being encountered by those in the Toronto community which are potentially creating cognitive structures foreign to those which have their generative principles in pre-exile Tibetan past, and the ways in which Tibetans are transmitting (to varying degrees) cognitive schemata which identify these non-Tibetan elements and protect against their appropriation. After exploring elements which are not Tibetan, I turn to those which are: a unified narrative of Tibetan history, an attachment to the physical land of Tibet, community, language, Tibetan Buddhism, family life and traditional music. It is argued that these Tibetan elements together constitute the conceptual core of Tibetan culture, perceived requisite for the entirety of authentic Tibetan cultural transmission to take place. Each element is examined as a representation of Tibetan culture, with the process of musical semiosis shown to correlate all elements into a conceptual whole. Following this, the study looks at the transmission and appropriation of Tibetan music in a Tibetan student performing arts troupe. I argue that as students attend music lessons, they are in the process embodying the cultural structures of Tibet past. With the correlations produced through musical semiosis, every lesson (for the students) and every performance (for the audience) has the potential to create and reinforce Tibetan structures, and fuse together any and all of the core Tibetan cultural elements in deeply personal ways. When the same performances are framed in the Tibetan Community Cultural Centre, a space permeated by Tibetan stimuli operationalizing all five senses, they provide a mirror in which the Tibetan community might see their cultural preservation efforts reflected; and when the performance agrees with the communal sense of naturalness felt through the habitus, when the performance is deemed authentic, it provides the community tangible evidence that their preservation goals have been achieved.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".