<i>Since Time Immemorial: Native Custom and Law in Colonial Mexico</i> Yanna Yannakakis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Indigenous custom in colonial Mexico, we learn from Yanna Yannakakis’s superb new study, was not, as sometimes romantically conceived, rooted in “oral tradition, grounded in popular memory,” and uniformly signifying “the will of the community” (200). Nor is it accurate to conceive of the legal concept and social practice of custom in sixteenth- to eighteenth-century Mexico as suspended in an (immemorial) pre-contact time capsule that operated in isolation from the legal codes of Spanish colonists. Custom, which Yannakakis defines as “a social practice that over time takes on the normative power of law within a territorially based community” (2) was not immobilized at the moment of Spanish contact. Instead, the author shows how indigenous actors constantly reformulated the meanings and applications of custom in New Spain’s courts and in dialogue with European thinking, tradition, and models. Innovating from earlier understandings of custom, Yannakakis’s reading is aligned with Bianca Premo’s recent formulation of indigenous communities’ eighteenth-century judicial articulations of “custom today,” claims of custom that evolved in response to changing conditions and that sometimes defended wider community rights, but also might be mobilized in support of individual or group interests instead.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 0.001 |
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".