'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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... wall of the compound just above , closely enclosed on one end by a wall and on the other by a sort of fence made of a tangle of branches - on the uphill side . Three small , separate houses stood below Baltazar's . We went into the yard ...
... wall and the side wall by the door and a bench along the front wall just inside . The truck driver sat on the bench drinking an Inca Cola from a bottle . Juana , a bit more reserved now , encountering us in public , said she thought ...
... wall in which at floor level are two square openings of maybe a foot . Pascuala crouched by one of these and began fishing around behind the wall with a stick . After a moment , a qowi ran out and darted along the wall and into the ...