Download Return to Laughter: An Anthropological Novel (The Natural by Elenore Smith Bowen PDF
By Elenore Smith Bowen
This vintage of anthropological literature is a dramatic, revealing account of an Anthropologists first 12 months within the box with a distant African tribe. easily as a piece of ethnographic curiosity, go back to Laughter presents deep insights into the tradition of West Africa the sophisticated internet of STI tribal lifestyles and the facility of the establishment of witchcraft. besides the fact that, the author's fictional method the booklet STI supplies lasting attraction. She makes a speciality of the human size of anthropology, recounting her own Triumphs and screw ups and Documenting the profound alterations she undergoes. hence, her tale turns into right away universally employees and hugely recognizable. She has introduced` vividly to existence the vintage narrative of an intruder stuck up and deeply interested by an completely alien tradition.
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Additional resources for Return to Laughter: An Anthropological Novel (The Natural History Library)
Sample text
Finally, we would turn down a side path. My host, after a brief "'This is my homestead," would fall silent, and then, for the first time, I had a chance to look about in safety. Sometimes it was a homestead of only two or three families; sometimes almost a village with seventy to a hundred people. All of the homesteads, however, were alike in plan: a series Of circles concentric around the open yard 30 and the shade trees :in the middle. The outermost ring was formed by fruit trees, tobacco patches, and kitchen gardens for spices and sauce plants.
Perhaps • • • I tasted cautiously. It was no longer gin and onion or even onion in gin, but that mystic union of two flavors which makes the olive the better hal£ of the martini. I finished it, and tucked the mosquito net carefully in behind me. Just before I fell asleep, I reflected that whatever lessons Africa had to teach me they would, if gin and onion were any indication, be unexpected, not too easily learned, and perhaps in the long run more valuable as experience than as habits. Z Chapter Two the next morning, I sat contentedly on my veranda drinking coffee made just to my taste.
A girl tugged at my skirts to show me her castanets. A bent hag reached out to touch my hair. The noise, the smell of hot, excited bodies closed over me. A determined young woman shoved her way to the fore: broad-cheeked, a stubby pipe clenched between her teeth, her hair in a score of tight French braids close against the scalp. She put her hand on my arm. I moved to dash it away. She clasped my outstretched hand tightly by the thumb-the sign of friendship. She shouted her name: Atakpa. Then she turned her strong, straight back square upon me, like a shield against the mob.