'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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... gave him the rest of our oranges ; in return , he gave Gary some llipta he had made . Llipta is a dried paste with which coca is chewed , made from the ashes of wheat or barley mixed with a little trago and sugar . At her shop we gave ...
... gave her ; and then for a bottle in which to carry kerosene : we gave her our plastic jug . Finally , she asked us to loan to Baltazar thirty thousand instead of the twenty thousand soles he had asked us for to help him pay for the ...
... gave it to her , she sat with the copita untouched in her hand while she cried . She did sleep after a while- Baltazar laid the sheepskins on the floor where he usually sleeps and cov- ered her with a blanket - and woke hardly more ...