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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... Plaza de Armas, huge Spanish churches on two sides, and sit on a bench in the sun to read; and now I write at a table in an empty cafe where the music is sometimes classical, sometimes Spanish criolla, and they have an Italian espresso ...
... Plaza Regocijo, a couple of fine Bolivian textiles — a small old Taquile piece, traditional green and red and white, and one from Potolo, a rich black with a thin red and orange border and a double band of fantastic birds woven in deep ...
... plaza, where there are a few little shops in a row along one side. At the end of the plaza is the concejo (town hall), a large and impressive building of two stories with glass-paned windows and a red-tiled roof, painted, like most ...
... plaza; a white-washed board nailed to the wall of the storehouse across from Juana's shop read Calle San Juan — San Juan Street. The lane had been roughly paved at some time the way Inca roads were paved, with cobbles the size of small ...
... plaza: women carrying water jugs on their backs, men driving burros and horses with burdens of grain in huge sacks to be taken to Cusco on the truck, men with long wooden plows and sometimes a pair of bulls, children going to school ...