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Dancing Skeletons

Life and Death in West Africa

Katherine A. Dettwyler

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.

$15.50 list, 172 pages

10-digit ISBN: 0-88133-748-X

13-digit ISBN: 978-0-88133-748-8

© 1994

Instructor’s Manual available

“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

“. . . 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

“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

“. . . 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

“I find that students are amazed that everyone in the world does not make the same associations of food and health that they do. To challenge our food fetishes, our worldview about the fundamental acts of eating, and the patterned deaths of children is a genuine contribution” —Martha C. Ward, American Anthropologist