Hungry Lightning: Notes of a Woman Anthropologist in Venezuela / Edition 1

by Pei-Lin Yu

Overview

A young student of anthropology receives an offer she can't refuse: the chance to live among the Pume, a South American hunting-and-gathering people who call the tropical Venezuelan savannah home. During their time in the village of Doro Ana, the author and the principal researcher study a vanishing way of life in which cash money, the written word, automobiles, and airplanes are rare and frightening intrusions.

Adopted into a Pume family, Yu's informal and personal accounts of events during her two years' stay sparkle with descriptive flourishes and turns of phrase as she describes the daily cycles of birth, growth, romance, sickness, healing, and death among the villagers. Enlivened with the author's own illustrations, Yu's journal entries seek to present through a young American's eyes a sketch of her Pume family, their heroic struggle to survive in a changing world, and the power and mystery of the Pume way of life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	2900826318076
Publisher:	University of New Mexico Press
Publication date:	09/01/1997
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	252
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.75(d)

About the Author

Pei-Lin Yu is an archaeologist at the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation's Pacific Northwest Regional Office in Boise, Idaho. She won the 1998 Goodbey Author's Award from Southern Methodist University, Dallas, for Hungry Lightning.

Editorial Reviews

"Pei-Lin Yu uses the first person with simplicity and native assurance. Hungry Lightning: Notes of a Woman Anthropologist in Venezuela is organized as a journal, and her private voice claims no authority other than what her gift for description creates. She builds credibility as the story progresses, not by engaging in self-examination, but by reporting what she sees and how she and her research partner Rusty Greaves appears to be seen...." The Women's Review of Books

Linda Niemann