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. |
From inside the book
Results 1-5 of 75
... brought along with me to keep me sane: no matter how much you like a language and enjoy hearing it spoken, after a while you think you'll go crazy if you hear one more person babbling something that isn't simply comfortable, isn't ...
... brought the right ones. How do you know what you should read for more than a year? You ask if you can send books. Well, I don't know: I would love it if you did, anything you like or think I might like; I'll need them! Maybe you could ...
... brought us some cloths to lie on and another ball of purple thread: my assignment. Though it was only eight, we were exhausted, having risen at three-thirty in the morning, and slept almost immediately, a full twelve hours. We took a ...
... brought and her spindle and then sat in front of the shop to wait for the truck, watching the people in the busy plaza: women carrying water jugs on their backs, men driving burros and horses with burdens of grain in huge sacks to be ...
... brought a woman with him this time, and invited us to come to his house to visit him during the festival. Juana's shop was open — a windowless cubicle in large part filled by a table which served as a counter and with shelves along the ...