Foiba: Genealogy of an Untranslatable Word
Bibliographic record
Abstract
After the Fascist regime collapsed on 5 July 1943, the new Italian Government signed an armistice on 8 September 1943. Soon the Italian Eastern-Adriatic territories became a battlefield between the Nazis and the Yugoslav Partisans led by marshal Josip Broz “Tito”. During the advance of the Yugoslav Partisans, fierce retaliations against the Italian population were carried out. What in the beginning appeared as a spontaneous form of revenge against those Italians linked to the Fascist regime, soon revealed itself to be a wider political strategy of the leaders of the Yugoslav Partisans to eliminate the Italian presence in the territories that were being taken over by Tito.\nOn 10 February 1947, in Paris, a treaty was signed among the winners of WWII and Italy: Italy had to cede most of Istria, including the provinces of Fiume (Rijeka), Zara (Zadar), and most of Gorizia and Pola (Pula) to Yugoslavia. These events led to one of the most important diasporas of the XX Century in the Mediterranean, and, at the same time, to one of the most understudied and untold stories. Almost 350.000 people left their home crossing the Mediterranean to reach various Regions of Italy and countries such as Australia, U.S.A, Canada, Argentina and South Africa.\nDue to many factors, this dramatic history of persecution rapidly was forced into a spiral of silence that left this part of history almost totally unstudied for decades. Starting in 2004, a new political effort was made in Italy to break this “discourse of silence”. This new political phase was driven by the re-emergence and use of the word-concept “foiba”. The “foiba” is a type of deep natural sinkhole widely spread over the Venezia-Giulia region. These sinkholes became dramatically famous because they were used by the Yugoslav Communists to hide the bodies of thousands of people of Italian ethnicity, who were murdered to force all Italians to leave those areas. The aim of my essay is to trace a genealogy of the concept of “foiba”, describing how it has gone under a re-signification during the last two decades. Furthermore, I claim that the word “foiba” has become a concept that symbolizes the pain and suffering of all the Italian exiles from Venezia-Giulia and Dalmazia. “Foiba” bears, therefore, the specificity of this collective trauma, which is, at the same time, the untranslatability inherent to all collective traumas.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.016 | 0.003 |
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".