Regional Culture and Urban Agriculturalists of Mexico City
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Keywords: rural economy, urban economy, urbanization, Mexico, agriculture, technology, labour IntroductionThe need for innovative and coherent research centered on the relationship between human activity and environment has increased as ecological problems intensify worldwide. Particularly, the processes that occur dynamically in modern societies are testing the vulnerability of social groups to respond to economic, environmental and cultural changes. Anthropologists have used the spatial dimension of cultural processes in studying developmental transitions in societies. The construction of theoretical schemes for regional studies has been useful to elucidate relationships among cultural systems, economic changes and ecological processes (Altamirano and Hirabayashi, 1991; Halperin, 1989; Hilhorst, 1990; Orlove, 1980).The theoretical and practical issues of regional studies may illuminate the economic and ecological variations which allow us to evaluate particular hypotheses concerning sociocultural change, space and time in local populations (Ellen, 1979; Van Young, 1992). An examination of cultural systems must include the overlapping of the infinite number of continually generating cultural systems and the constantly changing hierarchical relationships between them, which result from differential access to a wide variety of regional resources. Regional territory is the space of discourse that serves as a domain and an object of economic relationships, political practices and cultural systems, where the systems of interconnections are thought of as a hierarchy (Lomnitz-Adler, 1991). Thus, this interdependent system itself has been based on systems of unequal exchange of goods, labour, resources and capital.It is common to think of Mexico City only as a macro urban settlement with monumental problems pushing its population toward major environmental and economic crisis. However, if one approaches this ancient city from the south, patches of rural landscapes can be seen within its urban hinterland. This is notable in the vegetable and ornamental flower growing area of Xochimilco and the corn-cactus belt of Milpa Alta, which still convey a classic rural environment. The social reality of these regions is demonstrated in the interplay between the segments of rural society that are connected to both the family-based agrarian system and the urban wage economy.Agricultural production in both Xochimilco and Milpa Alta face essentially the same problem in maintaining agronomic and economic strategies near or within urban concentrations. Today, urban agriculturalists can earn wages in factories, work for governmental institutions, sell agricultural products at urban markets or cultivate ancient agricultural land as typical peasants. Urban agriculturalists' understanding of the regional landscape, the dynamics of Mexico City, the state, national and international economics and politics, religion, community, family, friends and self is mediated by cultural systems, which are reproduced by agricultural practices and urban routines, knowledge, language and identities of a particular regional setting.Urban agriculturalists of Mexico City are principally sojourners who traverse regional frontiers as easily as they traverse the conceptual boundaries fabricated by social scientists. The cultural orientation of these urban-rural scenarios and their social structure is ambiguous and contradictory from the perspective of most theoretical frameworks. To study the nature of the urban agriculture framework of Mexico City requires the depiction of distinctive types of social organization and cultural systems. This requires an elucidation of the regional realm more thoroughly than other studies of contemporary urban agriculture contexts (Mougeot, 2000; Smit et al., 1996), which have originated from either the perspective of urban studies or that of agricultural technology. Perhaps because conventional sociohistorical analysis depends on a clear demarcation of agrarian and industrial societies, few studies have been able to capture the dynamic interplay and complex characteristics of the urban agriculturalists' social 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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".