Bibliographic record
Abstract
Erica Cusi Wortham, Media in Mexico: Culture, Community, and the State. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013. 288 pages. ISBN 9878-0-8223-5500-7. $24.95 USD paperback.Based on extensive ethnographic research, Media in Mexico examines video production in southern Mexico. Studying the evolution of community media, from something state-designed to a form of expression controlled by local activists, the narrative is rich with astute observations and personal stories about communities expressing their culture in the face of decades of Mexican nationalism and an increasingly globalized world. Wortham writes in her introduction that matters because through we witness - and indigenous people themselves witness - their survival and the fact that they have managed to maintain a degree of 'lived' autonomy despite the constant assaults on their ways of life, assaults from poverty, assimilation programs, military brutality, globalization and economic reforms, to mention just the most recent offenses (2). Portraying video as expressed self-determination, her words exude a sense of honesty and a passion for her topic.In addition to emphasizing the importance of video for community-building projects, Wortham provides a number of insightful arguments. Most significantly, she contends that members of the Instituto Nacional Indigenista (INI), especially rebellious intellectuals within the Centro de Video Indigena (CVI), were essential to the decline of longtime government assimilationist indigenismo policies in the 1990s. She also demonstrates that these early film making teachers wielded (and many still wield) tremendous influence on the shape of production in Indian communities in the states of Oaxaca and Chiapas.Other arguments are more specific to the individual chapters that make up the three sections of the book: Global and National Contexts of Video Indigena, Indigenous Media Organization in Oaxaca, and Points of Comparison. In the first section she provides a broad, and at times tedious, discussion of the scholarly debates about the meaning of autonomy, before launching into a smoother history of Mexican anthropology and the INI which concludes with an examination of that institution's role in promoting a pluralistic society during the presidential administration of Carlos Salinas de Gortari. Interestingly, the move by director Arturo Warman to decentralize parts of the INI and place more power into the hands of groups appears to have meshed well with Salinas's neoliberal policies, a correlation that Wortham could have explored in even greater detail. But Wortham does a commendable job of showing how members of the INI involved with video broke with past precedents and genuinely supported the growth of indigenous-controlled outlets, which they saw as a democratic imperative to correct the asymmetrical, single direction of mass media in Mexico (63).The title is slightly misleading. Media in Mexico is more about video than generally (though it does make passing mention of radio and television), and more about the state of Oaxaca than all of Mexico. …
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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 | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".