'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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... weaving - by now it had also been revealed that I wanted to learn to weave a brightly colored piece in reds and greens and white on a backstrap loom : the warp of a piece of weaving can be rolled up around the wooden supports of the ...
... weaving : Baltazar had begun the new costal for the potato harvest and had spent one full day weaving al- ready . On days when he does not work in the fields , he has been making the wooden parts of a loom for me , one by one : two ...
Life in an Andean Village Julia Meyerson. 22. San Pedro , weaving altazar had sat me down , the morning after we stretched the warp of Balta my scarf , to show me how to begin the weaving . I'd wanted to start earlier in the day , but ...