'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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... lands which belong to the ayllus , by men of the ayllu . Some may also be planted independently as a cash crop on individually held land , if one has free land not planted in subsistence crops , such as land lying fallow after a crop of ...
... land still too high for most cultivation , around it on the hillsides only pasture and the grassy ridges of long unused potato fields , a vista all green and gray of the valley of Paruro beyond it : far below , the edge of the town of ...
... lands , purun yapuy , for the crops of corn and barley - purun is the word for land which is uncultivated or has lain fallow . In purun yapuy , the earth is simply turned randomly , not into the furrows and ridges which , in the high ...