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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... bottle of trago, or cane liquor, from her shop (a negocio — a "business deal" — he said, winking at us) and returned with another spindle and ball of purple thread. Gary and the men proceeded to drink an uncounted number of bottles of trago ...
... bottle of trago to offer them. They drank it and Juana refused the dye dealer another, saying, "No hay: se termino" ("There isn't any, it's gone"), so gradually everyone drifted away again, including the dye dealer and the man who had ...
... bottle of trago as a gesture of goodwill, a sort of house gift, and Teresa went to get it. Then while Gary and Baltazar talked, Teresa served us chicha and Baltazar trago, and it gradually grew dark and Baltazar lit a small, homemade ...
... bottle — a bottle of trago here costs the equivalent of about seventy cents. Trago is potent and vile and as essential, or more so, as chicha in the ceremonial and ritual life of the Quechua. Unlike chicha, people do not drink trago ...
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