Paper short abstract:

Milpa system is being claimed and studied, especially by agronomists and biologists as a production system. In this paper, it is analyzed as a culture

Paper long abstract:

Milpa system is being claimed and studied, especially by agronomists and biologists as a production system. In this paper, it is analyzed as a culture that implies certain social relations, a kind of relation with nature, but especially a productive logic, different from capitalism. It is proposed that reproductive logic (Hinkelammert and Mora 2009) or extended social reproduction logic (Coraggio 2009) can set up a productive model that would coincide with the alterglobalists searches and the proposals of theories like post-development (Escobar 2005) degrowth (Latouche 2008) and political ecology (Martinez-Alier 2014). It also implies an opposite rationality, or at least different from Cartesian thought which prefers diversity and interdependence, to specialization and concentration.