'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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... young man who was going to dance with the younger boys as an ukuku , a highly stylized representa- tion of the Andean spectacled bear . And the boys , the dancers , began to arrive and were outfitted : two ukukus , Daniel and the young ...
... young man . I saw them from the doorway of the kitchen where Gary and I were eating breakfast and as- sumed it was a slightly inopportune social call or that they had come to request help for some task . When I went outside , I greeted ...
... young and tender , was growing again in the fields , affirmation of a cycle completed . On Tuesday , the altars were built in the plaza below the wall of the churchyard . There were three this time instead of two : one erected by the ...