'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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... looked forward to dancing with Andrés . One day I had helped Celestina begin the preparations for his birthday : we spent the whole day sitting in the sun in front of her house , breaking corn from the cobs for chicha , sipping chicha ...
... looked up , now frightened and angry , and again saw nothing . We went on quickly , tensely alert , like hunted animals , fugitive . When the third , bigger than the others , more than a foot in diameter , hurtled down the mountainside ...
... looked to Ricardo . He said , " But the assemblies are always in the morning . It's all over now , " a reason which I was convinced - rightly — that he had just invented for the purpose of the argument . I looked at them for a minute ...