The gendered politics of fieldwork and state medicine in the Altos of Chiapas, 1940–1960
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines how an expanding Mexican state sought the insights of ethnographic theory and practice between the 1940s and 1950s. Focusing on the Instituto Nacional Indigenista Coordinating Center in los Altos de Chiapas and its relationship with national and foreign researchers active in the same area, I show how ideas about gender affected the organization of health services, the hiring of indigenous promotores, and the differential treatment of women and men traditional medicine healers as well as anthropology graduate students and researchers. The article is organized around two conceptually distinct though, in reality, overlapping spaces: (1) the anthropologist’s fieldwork site and relations between informants, professors, and students and (2) the Mexican state's provision of health services. Even if gender was not an automatic category of exclusion or inclusion of the researcher into a local community, ethnographic insights were formed through fieldwork practices that were determined in part by gender difference and relations among researchers and their subjects. Ultimately, both anthropologists and the Mexican state indigenous agency grew to rely informally on gender as a category of expertise for gaining access to indigenous women in particular, even if the "gender intermediaries" who helped achieve this access were frequently unpaid and received little formal recognition or reward.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".