'Tambo: Life in an Andean VillagePerhaps the best way to sharpen one's power's of observation is to be a stranger in a strange land. Julia Meyerson was one such stranger during a year in the village of 'Tambo, Peru, where her husband was conducting anthropological fieldwork. Though sometimes overwhelmed by the differences between Quechua and North American culture, she still sought eagerly to understand the lifeways of 'Tambo and to find her place in the village. Her vivid observations, recorded in this field journal, admirably follow Henry James's advice: "Try to be one of the people upon whom nothing is lost." With an artist's eye, Meyerson records the daily life of 'Tambo—the cycles of planting and harvest, the round of religious and cultural festivals, her tentative beginnings of friendship and understanding with the Tambinos. The journal charts her progress from tolerated outsider to accepted friend as she and her husband learn and earn, the roles of daughter and son in their adopted family. With its wealth of ethnographic detail, especially concerning the lives of Andean women, 'Tambo will have great value for students of Latin American anthropology. In addition, scholars preparing to do fieldwork anywhere will find it a realistic account of both the hardships and the rewards of such study. |
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... cooked in the coals of the fire and given to us later to eat . The entrails were cleaned , intestines and all ... cooking between the bodies and both forelegs of each . Everything was ready : tarwi ground on a stone and cooked ...
... cooking just after breakfast . I ground tarwi beans in the food mill , a bucketful , and Teresa cooked mot'e and potatoes and made uchukuta , a very hot sauce of ground dried ají pep- pers and onion and piquant herbs , and we peeled and ...
... cooked a meal , plentiful but not elaborate , and instead of cooking meat , she made fresh cheese from milk from the cow . This is clearly not one of the most ritually important agricultural tasks , evidenced by the lack of elaboration ...