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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... live there and, among those people, especially Baltazar Quispe and Teresa Sullca, in whose house we lived and who stood by us in the difficult times and have become very dear friends: the story told in this book, itself, will make clear ...
... live for a year in a Quechua village and finding it extraordinarily difficult to "prepare" for something of which I ... lives of the family who virtually adopted us, the life of the village. I set out to keep a journal, knowing that I ...
... lives by the needs of the crops. We arrived in 'Tambo in August, as the agricultural cycle was just beginning, and found a place to live with a family in which we quickly assumed the roles of a son and daughter: every hand in a ...
... lives which our presence in their home meant and also the challenge, monumental and trying, of teaching us how to be Quechua. Their understanding and their willingness and capacity to adapt were extraordinary, and they were, with few ...
... live as they always have for hundreds and hundreds of years, in thatched adobe huts and farming precarious fields on the mountainsides with simple wooden plows, the more I understand the grandeur and majesty that must have been Cusco ...