Product Description

1995 Margaret Mead Award winner! This personal account by a biocultural anthropologist illuminates important, not-soon-forgotten messages involving the more sobering aspects of conducting fieldwork among malnourished children in West Africa. With nutritional anthropology at its core, Dancing Skeletons presents informal, engaging and oftentimes dramatic stories from the field that relate the author's experiences conducting research on infant feeding and health in Mali. Through fascinating vignettes and honest, vivid descriptions, Dettwyler explores such diverse topics as ethnocentrism, culture shock, population control, breastfeeding, child care, the meaning of disability and child death in different cultures, female circumcision, women's roles in patrilineal societies, the dangers of fieldwork, and the realities involved in researching emotionally draining topics. Readers will alternately laugh and cry as they meet the author's friends and informants, follow her through a series of encounters with both peri-urban and rural Bambara culture, and struggle with her as she attempts to reconcile her very different roles as objective ethnographer, subjective friend, and mother in the field.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #68186 in Books
• Published on: 1993-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 172 pages

Review
" . . . a sobering, painful look at problems of a still-poor developing country that will be particularly instructive to international public health workers, nutrition educators, planners and clinical nutritionists concerned with Third World problems. It is a recommended reading." -- ECOLOGY OF FOOD AND NUTRITION 1995

". . . this book has two main advantages. First, it engages the reader, because it is well written. Second, it offers a broad scope for discussion of academic and practical issues." -- JOURNAL OF BIOSOCIAL SCIENCES, Vol.27 1995

"Katherine Dettwyler has written an easily accessible and particularly vibrant description of life in modern Mali . . . It offers a vivid portrait of Malian people and places as well as thoughtful account of the issues and problems that face anthropologists in the field." -- AFRICAN STUDIES REVIEW, Vol. 38, No. 2 1995

"The ongoing critique of ethnography has, happily, changed the genre, and today real people walk the pages of the best ethnographies. Dettwyler's DANCING SKELETONS is surely one of the best. The text emerges as an extended meditation on applied fieldwork as a gradual melding of people and meaning." -- AMERICAN JOURNAL OF HUMAN BIOLOGY, Vol. 6, No. 5 1994

From the Publisher
Title of related interest also available from Waveland Press: Holloway, Monique and the Mango Rains: Two Years with a Midwife in Mali (ISBN 9781577664352).

From the Inside Flap
"Katherine Dettwyler has written an easily accessible and particularly vibrant description of life in modern Mali . . . It offers a vivid portrait of Malian people and places as well as a thoughtful account of the issues and problems that face anthropologists in the field." (African Studies Review, Vol. 38, No. 2, 1995)

". . . a sobering, painful look at problems of a still-poor developing country that will be particularly instructive to international public health workers, nutrition educators, planners and clinical nutritionists concerned with Third World problems. It is a recommended reading." (Ecology of Food and Nutrition, 1995)

"The ongoing critique of ethnography has, happily, changed the genre, and today real people walk the pages of the best ethnographies. Dettwyler's Dancing Skeletons is surely one of the best. The text emerges as an extended meditation on applied fieldwork as a gradual melding of people and meaning." (American Journal of Human Biology, Vol. 6, No. 5, 1994)

". . . this book has two main advantages. First, it engages the reader, because it is well written. Second, it offers a broad scope for discussion of academic and practical issues." (Journal of Biosocial Sciences, Vol. 27, 1995)

Customer Reviews

Cultural Anthropology
I read this book for a cultural anthopology class. It was a very easy read which I enjoyed. As far as cultural anthropology, I found this book very interesting. It is amazing hoe different the culture and the health of the people are. She did talk about herse;f a lot but it would be difficult just to focus on your subjects when you are so far from home.

Depressing view of the future
The other reviews give you the flavor of this book so I will bring up a few items they and the author ignore. First, it is a vivid illustration of the more general problem in the world of what constitutes "help". If what one does causes more misery in the long run then it is clearly not helpful and this is what nearly all of the "aid" to the third world does. Anything that prolongs lifespans, increases child survival or increases standard of living is eventually disastrous as prosperity is ultimately bought at the expense of the future. The whole world is going down the drain but Africa is the worst case and likely by mid-century, and certainly by it's end, there will be starvation, disease, social violence and war on a staggering scale and as a permanent state. The world has only one problem--too many people--and only one solution--decrease the population at any cost. Of course it's not politically correct to say anything about it and certainly not to do anything really effective and Dettwyler is in a delicate position. These people seem to average a dozen pregnancies and above all they need birth control.

Regarding her personal choices she tells how her young daughter almost died of malaria and it clearly was quite insane of her to take a young child with her for several years of constant exposure to this and other diseases when she knew that people died of it constantly in spite of medication. The last point that I could not forget was the fact that she produced three children of her own. If she does not know the dire situation the world is in due to overpopulation she ought to go back to school. Like virtually all parents, she is not a responsible member of society.

A Drop of Water in the Wide Ocean
This is a good insight into the malnutritional anthropology study of the women and children in Mali. At the very end, her work left me with the feeling that her work is just a drop of water in the wide ocean of the malnutrition dilemma worldwide. So much is needed to be done, yet the man power and the funding for this cause are very much lacking.

I read this book for my Human Diet class at UCB, and it took me a day to finish it. It is an easy read. The author however went overboard about her feelings and her financial situations, which weren't what I was expecting in an ethnographic work. She got a bit personal about her life too.

It is nothing new that Western countries' diplomats posted to the third world nations do live much well-off compared to the people in the countries that they are posted to. It just seems plain ironic to me in terms of the disparity of wealth among nations across the globe. It is just disheartening, but there is nothing we can do about it. We just hope that the situation improves as we progress => to alleviate poverty, hunger and disease.