'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 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 ...
... lives as they know them , as they have always lived them — for Baltazar and Teresa the experience of fifty - some years . And a year is a long time . For now , they seem to see us as a couple of unusual , possibly interesting , guests ...
... lives : we have no land for them to help us work in this system of cooperation and reciprocal labor , and these crops will feed their families next year , when we are gone . The concept of anthropology naturally doesn't make sense . We ...