“God Gives the Poor Herbs and Fungi to Mend the Ailments”: Traditional Medicine, Indigenous Care, and the Fungal Novel
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article I establish that there is a nascent interest in Latin American writers to represent the versatility of fungi. I conduct an in-depth analysis of the Mexican novel Brujas [Witches] (2020) by Brenda Lozano from a feminist political ecology viewpoint (Arriagada Oyarzún and Zambra Álvarez, 2019), focusing on the representation of the role of fungi in Indigenous medicine and care within Mexico. My theoretical framework is informed by feminist theorizations on care (Tronto 1993; Puig de la Bellcasa 2017; The Care Collective 2020), decolonial perspectives of climate degradation (Svampa and Viale 2014; Gudynas 2011, 2015, 2016), and Indigenous systems of knowledge and medicine. After introducing the history of Indigenous biomedical history in Latin America, I examine the crucial role of fungi in the novel as agents of gender, race, socio-political resistance, and resilience. I conclude by proposing the categories of mycophilic (fungus-loving) and mycophobic (fungus-fearing) fungal novels.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.033 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".