To Kill or not to Kill? Helambu valley as a no kill zone: the issue of blood sacrifice and the transformation of ritual patterns in Hyolmo shamanism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Narratives related to a rivality between lamas and shamans are very common throughout the Himalayas and the Hyolmo are no exception to this. The rule seems, generally, the establishment of a unified spiritual field originating from a division of religious labour characterized by hierarchization, opposition and complementarity at the same time. The resulting (asymmetric) religious field is not fixed once and for all: its boundaries are constantly shifting due to practical needs of the people and, to a larger extent, they are also tied to discourses about ethnic identity and "traditional" heritage. With this paper I want to highlight patterns of change affecting hyolmo shamanic rituals, and especially the ongoing debate surrounding the practice of ritual sacrifice. The blood offering, in fact, is seen more and more as a despicable action and many shamans, influenced by Buddhist ideas and/or due to a certain degree of social pressure, are transforming and adapting their rituals in order to cope with this very relevant change at the very core of every transaction with the spirit world.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".