Performing Symmetry in Andean Weather Forecasting: The Practice of Cabañuelas, Beyond Divination and Suffering
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This paper analyzes a practice known as Cabañuelas—an Indigenous way of anticipating the next year’s rainfall by interpreting a series of signs in the current year. The knowledge and gestures associated with this practice have traditionally been understood according to the classical division between pragmatic techniques and magic rituals, an approach that I set aside in favor of considering Cabañuelas as a hybrid practice involving multiple kinds of beings and agents. It can also be understood as part of a complex of practice together with the offerings to the earth in August, and in addition to the reading of the coca leaf and the molten lead—all of these being practices that share an observational, prospecting, and performative character. Based on this, I put forward the idea of empowered agents, challenging the view of suffering Andean actors hopelessly subjected to super/natural forces or idiosyncratic conditions they cannot control.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".