Now
You are a Woman/Ahora Eres una Mejor, Maria-Barbara Watson-Franke Ediciones
Euroamericanas, 1983.
The main character of this book is Zoila, a Guajiro girl who lives in the Guajira Peninsula in Venezuela. This report describes what happens to her while she moves into adulthood.
The custom of removing the pubescent girls from the social community as it is described in this book is still practiced, but today a girl will rarely spend more than two years in seclusion while it was not unusual in the past, especially for girls of wealthy families, to remain secluded up to five years. It is a time of learning skills and finding oneself; it is a preparation for life as an adult woman with all the responsibilities women have in this culture.
El personaje principal de este libro es Zoila, una joven que habita en la peninsula guajira de Venezuela. En esta obra se describe lo que a ella le acontece durante el periodo que transcurre desde su adolescenia hasta la madurez.
Hoy dia, se tiene aun la costumbre entre los guajiros de apartar a las jovenes de su grupo social al llegar a la pubertad, tal como se describe en esta historia.
Actualmente, rara una joven
pasa mas de dos anos en reclusion, mientras que en el pasado era usual, particularmente
entre las jovenes provenientes de familias acomodadas, permanecer aisladas por
espacio de cinco anos. Es una epoca en la que no solo se practica el aprendizaje
de destrezas, sino tambien en la que se busca llegar al conocimiento de si mismo;
propiamente constitueye una preparacion para la vida como mujer adulta, con
todas las responsabilidades que ello implica en esta cultura.
Interpreting
Life Histories: An Anthropological Inquiry Lawrence C. Watson and Maria-Barbara
Watson-Franke, Rutgers University Press.
Life histories are retrospective personal accounts orally elicited and recorded as texts. This method has a long and noble tradition in anthropology and has been the basis for many classic studies. Lawrence Watson and Maria-Barbara Watson-Franke are convinced of the value of life histories, but are critical of the way these have been used. Most accounts of life histories, they argue, depend on constructs from the anthropologist's own world (the etic approach), and therefore do not emphasize the subjectivity of someone else's life in its own cultural context (the emic approach). Watson and Watson-Franke are most critical of the psychoanalytical and the structural-functional etic approaches. Whit each of these, the life history becomes an illustration of predetermined categories brought by the researcher to the field. The authors discuss how many well-known life histories, base on these approaches, failed to contribute as much as they should have to our understanding of individual experience in other cultures.
As an alternative to the etic approaches, Watson and Watson-Franke urge researchers to drop prior notions of personality and society and to five precedence to the subjective experience that an individual conveys in a life history. Researchers can accomplish this in part by reflecting upon the interpretive process that intervenes between themselves and their subjects, one that emphasizes a dialogue and dialectical engagement with the life history text. This approach draws upon hermeneutics, the philosophy of interpretation, as well as phenomenology and existentialism.
Watson and Watson-Franke also give special attention to the problems that are specific to interpreting the life histories of women. Since many anthropologists have considered women valuable only in supplementing data collected about men, women have been viewed as having no lives of their own. Researchers using life histories of women, the authors assert, must attempt to interpret the subjective meanings women themselves give to their world, apart from the world defined by men.
