I, Robot. Make Omelet

Seattle, WA. The Wednesday edition of the nation's presumed newspaper of record, The New York Times, includes a "Dining" section that I try to read weekly. This week's NYT Dining section includes an article on "Mombots" that addresses a rather peculiar bit of applied technological and engineering research.

It seems that a group of engineering faculty and graduate students at Carnegie-Mellon University, an applied research group known as the Human Robot Interface Group (HRIG), has invented a robot, or "Mombot" as some group members call it in a gendered version of an automaton that cooks.

It turns out that the robot chef [sic] does not have a gentle enough touch to crack an egg, but it can make an omelet once the human helping hand has dealt with the perplexing crack-the-egg problem.

Now, I love an omelet as much as most anyone else that is not a vegan, and the classic three-egg recipe is a delight, especially when you make it with Manchego cheese, a bit of parsley, some serrano peppers, and perhaps a naughty pan-scorched sea scallop or two or three for good measure. Now how would a robot know that?

The issue here is not about robots replacing human cooks and chefs any time soon. Indeed, a restaurant in Japan tried this recently. Once the novelty of seeing a robot prepare a meal wore off, the eatery found itself with very sparse return customers; the robotic soup just did not cut it.

The issue is really a different one and not at all about fear of robots taking over yet more of the ever-shrinking human domain of practice and skill. I can understand the roots of this fear; just ask any former UAW worker about what happened to their job security, skills, and union pay after massive robotics and automation hit the assembly lines.

My concern is that this sort of research illustrates the continuing profundity of the perennial ethical question posed to engineers by ethicists and social scientists: Just because you can do it, does it mean you should?

In a time of limited resources, actually any time in my mind, it just seems wasteful to design robotic systems that will never really function as designed or as planned by their human inventors. These folks are not serious about replacing human chefs with robotic ones.

Now, I am certain some will object and declare that what we learn from the Mombots may help us solve other engineering problems down the road. My sense is that DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency) has already spent billions on robotic and remotely-controlled telecommunications systems for military applications, the only uses of this cutting-edge technology that are even distantly profitable bets for roboticists.

The real problem is that this illustrates a perverse sense of distorted priorities in the funding of research across the entire spectrum of "kept universities" that today function largely as R&D directorates of corporate America. The fields of robotics, nanotechnology, genomics, and agricultural biotechnology have been enjoying boom times for the past two or three decades and remain largely shielded from the "Great Recession" we are in the middle of. Ever hungry for more subsidies, the scientists and engineers in these fields seem to embody a truly arrogant sense of entitlement that breeds greed, perfunctory public accountability, and wasted creativity and intellect.

How many creative ideas and proposals for applied research that is also socially responsible,  ethically grounded,  and focused on promoting the public good have been shoved aside to make room for these fanciful prosthetic technologies and engineering feats that mainly serve to pad the inventors' resumes or assist the military develop more efficient killing machines? How many social problem-solving investments have been discarded so a small and largely insular group of faculty and students could spend millions on an activity that serves no socially useful or purposeful activity?

I am all for the defense of academic freedom. But when university administrations blindly institutionalize a 10,000:1 ratio of funding for top-down technical fixes and engineering fancies as against bottom-up participatory social action research that reduces hunger, rebuilds just and resilient agrifood systems, promotes health and well-being for all regardless of race, class, gender, legal status, or sexual orientation, or solves climate change and other ecological crises, then the time to object and denounce this as a form of structural violence is well past due.

Anatomy of the Disappeared, Part 2

by Devon G. Peña

The Myth of Inefficiency

Few contemporary social scientists and historians use the ethnocentric language of Steinel, but many continue to view Hispana/o agriculture in a less than favorable light.  In a recent study of the San Luis Valley appearing in the Journal of Ethnic Studies, Kenneth Weber argues that the pace of economic and technological change is rapidly leading traditional Hispana/o family farms down the road to extinction.  These farms are casualties of "modernization" which drives "inefficiencies" out of the market.  The unfortunate but inevitable result of this process is a displaced, unproductive, and welfare-dependent population of unemployed rural landholders.

Responding to earlier research by F. Lee Brown and Helen Ingram (Water and Poverty in the Southwest), Weber emphasizes "truck farming" in his policy analysis of Hispana/o agriculture.  From this point of view, Hispana/o rural landholders lack a sufficient land base to support even modest economies of scale.  Traditional Hispana/o agriculture will therefore play an insignificant and greatly reduced role in future regional development, especially when compared to the rapid growth of mining, timber, tourism, real estate, and service industries. 

According to this view, Hispana/o farming communities must accept the inevitability of capitalist development.  This view uncritically endorses the triumph of a predatory rural industrialization governed by the rules of a modern scientifically-managed market economy.  But this obviously involves a conflict between extractive and regenerative philosophies of land use.  Weber fails to acknowledge that the conflict between competing land-use values has not been legally or politically resolved. In his quest to tell the story of mechanical efficiency he ignores the complex political and cultural history of Hispana/o agriculture.  Generations of local ethnoscientific knowledge and land rights struggles are made to disappear.

The myth of "inefficiency" fails to recognize the ecologically-integrated character of Hispana/o agriculture.  In its traditional form, Hispana/o agropastoralism involves the integration of row crop farming with livestock raising.  This pattern of land use involves a symbiotic relationship between farming and ranching in a cultural landscape characterized by multiple life zones. 

For example, every ranch traditionally has land on mesa tops, upland prairies, and river bottoms.  This cultural geography provides access to different types of terrains and makes for an "innately" high level of biodiversity.  But the biological diversity of these farming and ranching landscapes is not of interest to Weber who seems to be searching for evidence of more "efficient" monocultures.  That such monocultures might be completely alien to and inappropriate in the biogeographical context of the Upper Río Grande is a problem which eludes this perspective.

The concepts of efficiency and productivity are themselves problematic.  Much of the sustainable agriculture debate has focused on redefining these concepts.  Again, the issue involves the opposition between mechanical and biological perspectives.  Shiva makes the following relevant commentary in a study of the conflict between scientific and social (or locally self-managed) forestry in northern India:

The displacement of local forest knowledge by 'scientific' forestry was simultaneously a displacement of the forest diversity and its substitution by uniform monocultures.  Since the biological productivity of the forest is ecologically based on its diversity, the destruction of local knowledge, and with it of plant diversity, leads to a degradation of the forest and an undermining of its sustainability.  The increase in productivity from the commercial point of view destroys productivity from the perspective of local communities.  The uniformity of the managed forest is meant to generate 'sustained yields.'  However, uniformity destroys the conditions of renewability of forest eco-systems, and is ecologically non-sustainable.

Commercial and biological productivity are often at odds.  What is good for business may not be so good for the land or the local communities. 

Productivity should not be reduced to measurements of economic output derived from rigid formulas that deify mechanical efficiencies.  This approach, in practice, homogenizes the land organism because economies of scale are not compatible with polycultures and their innate biodiversity. 

Agroecologists have long recognized that productivity must be measured in terms of the land's capacity to renew its biological diversity (its resilience) and thus to support long-range sustainability of mixed communities of humans and non-humans.  It may very well be that Hispana/o agroecosystems , if measured by their biodiversity, habitat integrity, renewable energy, and long-term place-based economic sustainability, are much more "efficient", "productive", and "resilient" compared to agroindustrial monocultures. 

NOTE: This excerpt is from the original and unedited version of a chapter first written in 1994. The only changes in this entry include additions to place this in the context of the blog series. A revised, fully referenced, and more detailed version of this chapter will appear in the forthcoming book, The Last Commons: Endangered Landscapes and Disappeared People in the Politics of Place (Arizona, 2011).

Food Justice in the City

Overcoming the Violences of Injustice


Pancho McFarland and Kourtney Craigmiles McFarland

During the months following the violent murder of Darrion Albert at Fenger High School in Chicago last September, debates in the national and local media focused our attention on the causes of youth violence.  The local Chicago media played video of the beating over and over again.  Groups of young men ran about swinging at each other with fists and whatever else they could find.  Chicagoans were horrified to see Darrion pummeled by boys who resembled our own children.

The youths who stomped Albert to death live in a food desert and within a decaying environment where dilapidated and abandoned houses are visual evidence of the violence of poverty.  Economic and governmental violence besiege the communities near Fenger High School were the beating takes place.  The communities of Roseland (where Fenger is located), Washington Heights (our home community which is adjacent to Roseland), and Altgeld Gardens (from where many students were relocated to Fenger after their neighborhood school was closed and turned into a military academy) have more liquor than food stores.  Small, family-owned corner stores and one or two cut-rate grocery stores provide the food for residents.  Those with means shop in other communities especially Near South suburbs.  A small number of backyard gardens and some community gardens such as The Roseland Community Garden, located only blocks from Fenger High School, show how some are struggling to live surrounded by beauty and life. 

The questions for us in this essay are: What if the boys and young men who commit most of the interpersonal violent crime like that at Fenger had a more highly developed life-centered ethic? What if the communities around them practiced and taught to their children ubuntu (I am because you are) or in lak ech (you are my other me)?  What if those in control of the economy and the polity learned from the Lakota mitakuye oyasin (all my relations) or the Iroqouis practice of making decisions based on how their actions would affect their children and communities seven generations in the future?  If the elite decision-makers had an ethic of biocentrism, would the food deserts exist and would youth violence be an issue?  What role can the development of a local food system based on biocentric principles have on interpersonal violence, the violence of poverty and inequality, and political violence?

Biocentrism versus Economic Violence

The capitalist economy is based on expanding profit.  Under the capitalist ethic of competition and ownership only a few can dominate and own the means to securing ever more profit.  The rest, of course, must work for this small minority of owners.  Inequality is a built-in feature of the capitalist economy.  Under capitalism profits must continually increase.  This means that it is an always colonizing economy searching for markets and resources.  The modern-day multinational corporation seeks the cheapest labor, most valuable resources and lucrative markets.  Working people are reduced to a malleable workforce or consumer market. 

This control of the economy is inherently undemocratic and violent as corporate and pro-corporate government decisions sacrifice entire populations by the actions they take and policies they initiate (the list of such decisions is many times too long for this essay).  These include wars, laws that benefit elites such as the recent Supreme Court decision allowing corporations to have even more influence over the political process through lowering restrictions on campaign contributions, and establishing extra-governmental institutions such as the World Trade Organization and international banks.

In the United States Black neighborhoods and other communities of color like those on the Southside of Chicago are economic and food deserts.  The members of these communities suffer disproportionately from poverty, hunger and diseases of poverty.  These descendants of people from Africa, the Americas and Asia had viable food self-sufficient traditions but through enslavement and colonialism they have been denied the power to determine their own economic lives.  People of color and the working classes lack the power of self-determination under a capitalist economic system.

A parallel economy based on biocentric principles can develop alternative institutions and democratic organizational strategies that would empower communities of color.  A biocentric economy is radically local and democratic.  Those who live in a given community make decisions about land usage.  Their decisions are guided by the principles of mitakuye oyasin, in lak ech, ubuntu and seven generations.  Economic activity would slow so that every community members’ primary needs of food, clothing and shelter would be cared for first before leisure and other commodities are produced.  In this way, also, the violence of inequality would be checked as the gaps in wealth would be largely eliminated. 

Inequality, envy and greed, the economic sources of anger, frustration and violence, that are largely responsible for youth interpersonal violence would be combatted through biocentrism.  Biocentric economic activity would be in opposition to consumerism and waste as these activities are the engine for elite profit making.  We wouldn’t consume as much and thus grease the rails of capitalism because using our biocentric principles we would see that massive consumption requires massive exploitation of people, nature and fossil fuels.  Thus, reducing, reusing and recycling would be the natural practices of the biocentric economy.

This lack of consumer ethic will lower youth violence since the desire for leisure goods and status symbols drives much violent youth behavior.  Veteran Probation Officer Purdy in an interview on the local radio show, “848” (1/26/10, WBEZ), points out that poverty and desire for leisure items were major driving forces in the decisions for youth who commit violent crimes.  Youth he has supervised over more than twenty years have been motivated to rob, burglarize and assault others by hunger or the lack of desired clothes, jewelry or electronics.  He replayed a conversation with one in which he asks, “Why did you rob the pizza delivery man?” He says the youth responded, “Cuz we were hungry.”

A biocentric economy would eliminate violence in the city through providing economic and political self-determination for the working classes and people of color and through eliminating the sources of greed and envy.  The violence of inequality and interpersonal violence would be reduced to the degree that our economic and political activity resulted from biocentrism.

The Violence of Capitalist Manhood

An additional problem with violence in contemporary US society results from our understanding of manhood under capitalism.  The dominant form of manhood (or hegemonic masculinity) in the capitalist US is based on an ethic of power over others and self.  It is highly competitive and violent mirroring capitalism’s nature.  Since one’s identity including gender identity is always in flux a man must exhibit or perform (see Judith Butler’s work) his masculinity through actions that illustrate power; physical, financial, sexual.  Thus, a capitalist masculinity requires men to dominate others. 

Some well-placed men (elites and the upper middle class) have financial power usually acquired through economic domination of others that they use to acquire other forms of power.  Less financially powerful men of the working classes must perform their masculinity through physical or sexual power.  Each is violent.  Each is undemocratic and the opposite of a biocentric orientation.  This ethic and practice of violence permeates our understanding of manhood and male gender socialization that tells boys that being a man equates to domination and the acquisition of economic power and symbols of that power.

As Officer Purdy explained this concern leads to much of youth interpersonal violence.  Our youth learn this ethic through our cultural, economic, and social fields.  Everywhere they turn they can witness some form of violence and/or domination.  Radio waves, television images and Hollywood blockbusters teach that the violent man is rewarded.  Rarely do we teach the biocentric, loving and nurturing man.  Could a biocentric gender socialization have prevented the murder of Darrion Albert at Fenger High?

Community Food Systems and Biocentric Education

Many in the food and environmental justice movement recognize that hunger and starvation, ecological damage and youth violence result from capitalist and patriarchal ethics.  People in the food justice movement see the development of community food systems as a way to overcome these ills.  Some such as The Green Lots Project show that the work and play of community gardens can teach a biocentric ethic and the importance of community through connecting people across generations and introducing youth to nature.

The Green Lots Project explains that its mission and values include the following:

“Education
We value learning through the teaching of curriculum that focuses on the development of Community Food Systems. Community members will learn how to grow, process, market and distribute food in a sustainable manner. This is a process rooted in observation, reflection, and participation that deepens the overall understanding of the communities and world around us; as well as skill building for employment opportunities in urban farming. 

“Governance
We value operating and self-governance structures and processes that are guided by transparency, honesty, diversity, mutual respect, openness, on-going evaluation, celebration, and a commitment to stakeholder participation.

“Community
We believe that when people work together to grow food, reconnecting with the land, rededicating ourselves to the earth; families and communities grow strong, hopeful, confident and healthy.

“Collaboration
We value local knowledge and experience, and community dialogue. We believe that through collaboration we will overcome barriers to sharing power and resources with community members and partner organizations to nurture healthy, powerful communities.”

In essence, the project of The Green Lots Project is based on a biocentric ethic.  Their biocentrism extends to decision-making about the production, distribution and consumption of their mutually cultivated products and the organization of their community; socializing and educating the children of the community; and the development of a biocentric understanding of their world.  The Green Lots Project “value[s] local knowledge and experience” as well as community power.  Thus, the governance and knowledge base informing “community food systems” is radically democratic and radically local.  The anti-democratic forces controlling the economic, educational and political institutions in working-class neighborhoods and communities of color are marginalized in favor of these parallel institutions (see Gandhi’s theorizing of this concept). 

The violences caused by the inherent inequality and dominance ethic of capitalism can only be mitigated and done away with in a society based on a biocentric ethic.  Otherwise, if the sacredness of life, all life, is not revered above things such as profit and consumer goods, the political, economic and cultural systems and institutions will produce violence.  Those in the weakest positions vis-à-vis capitalism will be the primary victims of violence of all sorts.  However, as biocentric community organizing of the kind that The Green Lots Project, Healthy Southeast Chicago, and Black Oaks Center for Sustainable Renewable Living (www.blackoakscenter.org) increases, the power of communities to determine their own livelihoods will also increase.  Community empowerment including youth empowerment (power to) is central to any project of violence reduction.
 
The care and concern for all our relations is taught to our young through intimate connections with multiple forms of life that one finds working the land and in mutually-satisfying and beneficial interaction with an intergenerational group of community members.  Teaching a life-centered ethic that uses multiple pedagogical strategies in the community gardens and community food systems will be an integral part of the transformation to a democratic, just and egalitarian post-capitalist society.

Anatomy of the Disappeared, Part 1

...this way of life will disappear rather quickly.

Alvar Ward Carlson, The Spanish-American Homeland (1990).


You have to change, but you don't have to die.
Joe Gallegos, San Luis, Colorado (June 1990).

The Disappeared

Since 1492, hundreds of languages around the world have disappeared.  The loss of ethnolinguistic diversity is an enduring legacy of the Columbian exchange.

The disappearance of languages is often accompanied by the even more profound loss of local knowledge.  This local or place-based knowledge of the Earth's animals, plants, water, soils and seasons is endangered.  The loss of local knowledge may limit our prospects for resilience and sustainable livelihoods in the future. 

Vandana Shiva, the renowned Indian physicist and ecologist, offers this insightful commentary on the disappearance of local knowledge:

In Argentina, when the dominant political system faces dissent, it responds by making the dissidents disappear.  The 'desaparacidos' or the disappeared dissidents share the fate of local knowledge systems throughout the world, which have been conquered through the politics of disappearance...
Vandana Shiva, Monocultures of the Mind: Perspectives on Biodiversity and Biotechnology, p. 9.

As a tactic used by states in the political repression of dissidents, disappearance is an act of measured physical brutality and calculated psychological terrorism.  As a tactic of intellectual discourse disappearance has traditionally been associated with the crime of silence and neglect, a more "civil" but no less pernicious form of discipline and punish.  When historians and social scientists remain silent about the experiences of people who are culturally different then the untold stories literally disappear.
 
But disappearance is not always constructed through silence.  If that were the case, then all that we need do is admit "more voices" into the story.  Instead, the disappearance of local knowledge more often stems from the construction of hegemonic myths and stereotypes: not from silence but from obfuscating and deceitful fabrication.

In the context of the politics of historical and anthropological discourse, dominant myths and stereotypes are problematic because they tend to privilege the vantage point of the more powerful social group(s).  Disappeared bodies of knowledge can also result when historians and social scientists reduce rich, ambiguous and contradictory cultural legacies to simplistic banal myths. 

Today, there are too many myths which render a people mute, as if they were incapable of discovering and confronting the limits of their own elusive agency.

My concern is actually focused on agriculture.  I am concerned with the "disappearance" of Hispana/o agroecology in historical, sociological, agricultural, and anthropological discourses.

Three Myths

To begin with, a critical reading of Southwestern agricultural studies reveals the existence of three influential myths about traditional Hispana/o farming and ranching practices. 

The first myth holds that, historically, Hispana/o agricultural practices were "primitive" and "unsophisticated" (qua unscientific).  The second myth states that these practices were (and are) "unproductive" and "inefficient." A third myth holds that Hispana/o agriculture is "maladaptive" in the context of a modern market economy. 

These three myths can be combined to create a fourth, more devastating myth: Hispana/o agriculture will soon disappear, to be swept into the dustbin of history by the progressive forces of the invisible hand.

In this series of blog entries, I will be presenting excerpts from a chapter in my forthcoming book, The Last Commons. The chapter, originally prepared in 1994 and so perhaps appearing a bit dated in tone, is entitled "Anatomy of the Disappeared," and it focuses on the critique of these three myths. This critique is primarily derived from 25 years of collaborative ethnographic research and agroecological practice in the acequia communities of the Upper Rio Grande watershed.

The Myth of Primitivism
 
Conventional wisdom holds that the advent of modern capitalist agriculture rendered traditional farming methods economically inefficient and technologically archaic.  In the annals of Colorado agricultural history, Hispana/o farming practices have long been portrayed as "primitive" and "unsophisticated." 

There is a recurring stereotype of a culturally-deficient "Other" which dates back at least to Alvin Steinel's classic 1926 text, History of Agriculture in Colorado.  Steinel argued that "farming did not advance under Spanish-American rule in the Southwest."  Hispana/o farmers were limited by "crude implements" and "primitive methods."  And they were saved from "stagnation....[only] through the cultural influences of the minority of the better class of Spanish-Americans...and a half century of contact with American educational influences."

This view of Hispana/o agriculture was also apparent in an important pioneering study conducted by the Soil Conservation Service during the 1930s.  The anonymous authors of the so-called Tewa Basin Study described Hispano agriculture as based on "unscientific methods" and the "inefficient utilization of the land."  The water-powered grinding mills of the region were described as "ancient and crude."

The idea that Hispanos practice a primitive, self-sufficient and ultimately self-destructive agriculture persists in some of the contemporary research literature. 

In a more recent journal article, two economic historians argue that Hispana/o farmers failed to make the transition to modern mechanized economies of scale.  The authors propose that the problem of the decline of Hispana/o agriculture was a consequence of the self-destructive practice of partible inheritance, in which landholdings were reduced to sizes so small as to be inadequate for a transition to large-scale mechanization supportive of modern agricultural productivity. 

According to this view, partible inheritance -- combined with population growth and persistent poverty -- spelled doom for many Hispana/o farmers who were too "inefficient" to compete with the advancing technologies of larger factory farms. [See: Gary D. Libecap and George Alter (1982) "Agricultural Productivity, Partible Inheritance, and the Demographic Response to Rural Poverty: An Examination of the Spanish Southwest," Explorations in Economic History 19(April): 184-200].

Technological considerations aside for now, the practice of partible inheritance was more likely only one factor in the transformation and apparent decline of Hispana/o agriculture.  Social anthropologists and geographers know it is not unusual for land-based extended families to function as individual economic "units" or local exchange networks.  Under conditions of family-centered work organization, the partitioning of long-lots and the regional dispersion of households may not necessarily divide cooperative land management and resource use practices into separate operations and economically independent units.

But partible inheritance did become more problematic after the enclosure of Hispana/o common lands like La Sierra, the 80 thousand acre Sangre de Cristo Land Grant commons.  Privatizing enclosure ended the traditional practice of rotational pasturing of livestock on common lands and so increased overgrazing pressures in the partitioned long-lots.  Additional pressures from a new system of land taxation eventually alienated some of the smaller landholdings.  Wealthy, absentee white owners increasingly came into control of these partitioned long-lots.

Partible inheritance was not always the preferred manner to deal with the inheritance of land.  Some families favored the tradition of primogeniture in which the eldest child (usually the oldest male) was the sole inheritor of the land.

In either case, as long as the family functioned as an integrated economic unit, then partible inheritance was not detrimental to the resilience of Hispana/o agricultural production.  Brothers, sisters, and other relatives could work the land as a single economic unit, even if each owned separate vara strips and occupied a special niche in the familial division of labor. Indeed, such practices of mutual aid and cooperation are extant today and experiencing a resurgence in places where they had atrophied.

Enclosure of the commons, alienation of ownership, and a transition to a market economy were the more significant factors and social forces that created serious change which eventually undermined the economic integrity of much of Hispana/o agriculture in upland acequia village communities of the Upper Río Grande. 

The fragmentation and alienation of land disrupted an agricultural landscape that was patterned on the life zones of the microbasin, and this undermined the ecological basis of many farming communities.  These changes were less the result of partible inheritance and more a consequence of intrusive political economic forces that transformed the nature of agriculture in all of the rural intermountain West and not just Hispana/o communities.
 
There were other important factors that affected Hispana/o agriculture.  Direct federal subsidies and extension services biased towards the needs of large-scale agribusiness were profoundly detrimental to smallholder intensive agriculture in the bioregion.

The agricultural extension service not only ignored Hispana/o (and Anglo) smallholders, it promoted policies that favored large-scale mechanization and industrialization of agriculture. 

Even if Hispana/os had integrated the partitioned long-lots as single economic units they would have still faced inequities in a market that privileged industrial monocultures.  The monocultures were, after all, consistent with the joint interests of scientific, technological and commercial elites who shared modernist and mechanistic values.

The myth of "primitivism" is particularly troublesome because it misrepresents the actual nature of conflicted and unequal interests in the history of technological change and scientific innovation in the Upper Río Grande.  Hispana/os have long been among the first in their respective microbasins to introduce tractors, plows, drills, grain threshers, harvesters, wind-rowers, rakes, combines, and other agricultural machinery.

They have also made important contributions to the conservation of the genetic diversity of crops, livestock, and wildlife.  But this is really a false issue.  The contributions of Hispana/os to agricultural science and technology are really not in question.

The most critical problems facing Hispana/os in the bioregion are not going to be resolved by adopting a revisionist or contributionist approach to the discourse.  A deeper level of criticism is necessary. 

Many of the conventional agrifood systems researchers have a narrowly-defined view of scientific and technological change.  The conventional perspective presents technology through the language of a "mechanical" paradigm.  It emphasizes changes in the scale and mechanical complexity of machine systems present on the farm.  Matheson, Oien and Kurki make the following point:

As an heir to the logical-positivist tradition, the conventional ag scientist will attempt to understand sustainable agriculture in terms of existing mechanistic models....Historically, we have viewed our farms as factories and applied the laws of efficiencies, economies of scale, and economics as if agriculture were an industrial process.

Nancy Matheson, David Oien, and Al Kurki (1991) "Still Learning to Farm: Agricultural Research and Extension in the 1980s," in: Charles V. Blatz (ed.), Ethics and Agriculture: An Anthology on Current Issues in World Context.  Moscow, ID: University of Idaho Press; 299-305; p. 301.

Science and technology do not have to be reduced to a one-dimensional mechanical aspect.  The study of agricultural science and technology must also involve more subtle and admittedly more difficult attempts to understand the techniques of a "biological" paradigm, one which views the farm as a living organism and ecological community instead of as a machine.

From a biological perspective, the innovations of Hispana/o farming practices are part of a rich agricultural heritage embodied by a complex legacy of ethnobotany and ethnoecology.  This does not mean that Hispana/o traditions are "primitive".

Farmers do not have to adopt large-scale mechanization in order to attain technical sophistication.  In ethnoscience, complexity is less a mechanical virtue and more a biological quality if one is viewing agriculture from the vantage point of ecosystems.

The myth of "primitivism" obscures the ethnoscientific traditions of local knowledge because it conflates intensive smallholder agriculture with unproductive and unsophisticated occupancy of the land.  In the absence of the machine, the farmer is presumed primitive and unproductive.  This establishes a link with the myth of "inefficiency" that I will examine in my next entry in this series.

NOTE: This excerpt is from the original and unedited version of a chapter first written in 1994. The only changes in this entry include additions to place this in the context of the blog series. A revised, fully referenced, and more detailed version of this chapter will appear in the forthcoming book, The Last Commons: Endangered Landscapes and Disappeared People in the Politics of Place (Arizona, 2011).