Bibliographic record
Abstract
Curandero: A Life in Mexican Folk Healing. By Eliseo Cheo Torres, with Timothy L. Sawyer, Jr. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005. Pp. x + 170, acknowledgments, introduction, photographs, illustration, notes, bibliography, index. $14.95 paper). Eliseo Cheo Torres and Timothy L. Sawyer offer an introduction to the folk healing practice known as curanderismo as it is used by Mexicans in Mexico, South Texas, and other areas of the Southwest. Written in an accessible style, it is enriched with photographs and personal-experience narratives, an academic interweaving of history, anthropology, and folklore-and, on occasion, the unembarrassed use of composite characters (A couple of the personages I have employed in these pages are actually composites of a number of people I knew, or have read about, but they are no less real or true to life, despite this poetic license [4]). The book is meant to establish, document, and preserve links between formal medicine and curanderismo as an alternative healing practice. The authors are academically trained, yet both have direct knowledge of curanderismo. Torres, the principal author, grew up with the practice (see below), and each author has done several internships with curanderos. Throughout, their book provides insight into the historical and present role of curanderos and curanderas in Mexican and Mexican-American culture. Through thirteen chapters, the narrative follows a path of personal discovery, history, and revival. Torres offers a clear-eyed account of his spiritual awakening, describing the events in his life that led him to a realization of the strength of curanderismo while visiting the Northern Mexico home of the folk saint and healer, El Nino Fidencio (1898-1938). He describes in detail several healing rituals he witnessed during that trip, including Camino de Penitencia (walking the Road of Penance) and El Charquito (entering a pool of water containing a special mud that has healing properties). We later learn that Torres had actually grown up in an active folk healing tradition and had been himself a passive bearer of folk-medicine traditions. From an early age he had acquired insider knowledge that later helped him to understand the academic history of folk healing. He recounts how his mother introduced him to the vast knowledge found in their garden's flowers and plants along with a rich ethnography of the house garden, strategies for growing certain herbs in full sunlight, or partial shade or full shade, the medical and culinary qualities found in these plants, especially the cactus plant nopal. Torres also describes folk psychological illnesses and treatment rituals associated with them-bilis (anger), muina (rage), latido (anorexia). He provides a description of the steps involved in curing the mal de ojo (evil eye). In addressing other folk illnesses, he explains the objects, herbs, prayers, and rituals that were used to cure him personally from susto (fright), desasombro (severe fright), and espanto (wandering spirit, separation of spirit from body due to severe psychological trauma). …
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| 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".