"Most of them, they just want someone to under them:" Gender, Generation, and Personhood among the Xhosa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Drawing on seventeen months of ethnographic fieldwork, this dissertation focuses on gendered and generational conflicts about social reproduction in a rural Xhosa community in the Eastern Cape, South Africa. By exploring locally-contentious topics such as human rights, gender equality, love marriage, bridewealth, bride abduction, and the deployment of sexuality, I make several related arguments about personhood, the deployment of tradition, and the experience of modernity. The forms of personhood, tradition, and modernity that I discuss are all vernacular concepts, and are not overarching analytic tools. Firstly, I show that local people interpret these contests in generational, gendered, and also temporal terms, framing rural life and the will of elders as timeless tradition, in contrast with modern city life, and with the habits and aspirations of youth. The predilections of elders thus bear the moral authority of both imagined history, and ancestral will. Secondly, I show various ways in in which experiences of and aspirations about tradition and modernity are themselves deeply gendered, and that these divergent aspirations are sources of considerable interpersonal conflict. Thirdly, I demonstrate that inequality is intrinsic to the subject positions through which people understand their identity. Accordingly, idioms such as gender equality and (egalitarian) human rights render the meaning of these subject positions unclear. Accordingly, sociality between genders and generations is often characterized by antagonism and uncertainty. Finally, I identify a deep, ironic contradiction at the core of domestic life: worsening economic austerity means that people of all ages and genders are becoming more interdependent. However, this increasing interdependency, which has historically been central to local forms of personhood, is concurrent with the rising prominence of an ideological system which privileges autonomous, independent, choice-oriented forms of personhood as the cornerstone of a worthy self. Thus, South Africa's economic crisis is also a crisis of meaning about equality, gender, age, sexuality, and spirituality, played out through the messy intimacy of social reproduction and rural domestic life.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".