'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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... rest and quench our thirst , to protect ourselves against mal aire with cigarette smoke and take mouthfuls of coca . We stopped once more to rest briefly at the top of the trail up the mountainside , then went on to the road into ...
... rest soon after we came , and we all ate and drank , the men talking and joking . I listened and contemplated the quiet mountainsides , the hacienda Wayninki , as still as if abandoned , the villages of Qoipa and Ayusbamba across the ...
... rest of the letters and photographs , es- corted by Alcides and Luisa's son Bonifacio , who must be five or six . With his help we found all of the houses , though one family wasn't at home and we had to stumble back there in the ...