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. (Not-for-sale instructor resource material available to college and university faculty only; contact the publisher directly.)
Kathy Dettwyler has been studying and/or teaching anthropology since 1973. She earned her BS in Anthropology from the University of California, Davis in 1977, her MA and PhD in Anthropology from Indiana University, Bloomington in 1980 and 1985, respectively. She taught at the University of Southern Mississippi from 1985 to 1987, and at Texas A&M from 1987 until 2000. Currently she teaches at the University of Delaware. In addition, she moonlights part-time at the Great Harvest Bread Company and also spends an inordinate amount of time at the local bark park with her two standard poodles (Truman and Ulysses), clearing invasive vines off the native trees in the woods. She is married to Steven Dettwyler (PhD in Cultural Anthropology) who is the Director of the Division of Substance Abuse and Mental Health for the State of Delaware. She has three children. Miranda -- whom many of you know from Dancing Skeletons -- is now 30 years old and lives in Wales with her husband Mark Hannam and their son Henry. After completing an MA in Gravitational Wave Physics, Miranda decided to become an architect, and is now completing a degree in architecture at the University of Cardiff, where her husband teaches physics and does computer simulation research on black holes colliding. Kathy's son Peter is 25, lives at home and spends his days at Easter Seals hanging out with friends. Her youngest, Alexander, is a student at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and recently changed his major from biochemistry/premed to . . . . . Anthropology!! Kathy's new introductory textbook, Cultural Anthropology and Human Experience, has just been published (April 2011) by Waveland Press. She continues to speak and advocate for breastfeeding mothers and children at conferences around the world. Her next project is a textbook on human variation.
