Fieldwork In Mali Part 1: Counting The Days In Dinner By Abby Baker

For my article from the PopAnth website, I have chosen Fieldwork in Mali part 1, Counting the Days in Dinner, by Abby Baker. (http://popanth.com/article/fieldwork-notes-on-mali-part-1-counting-the-days-in-dinners) This is a wonderful example of cultural anthropology I have chosen to write my statement on Fieldwork in Mali part 1, Counting the Days in Dinner, by Abby Baker. This article is about how Abby spent four months in Mali as a study abroad student and how she kept track of days with very few clocks. She chose to do so by counting dinners or some week’s even breakfasts. Some meals were definitely Malian but others had an American flavor like when her host family fed her soggy pancakes and bananas, assuming that as an American she must

As in living in the oppressive heat, and dealing with being cautious about washing what you eat for fear of diseases as well as death. Abby tried her hardest to immerse herself in everything Malian and to emulate her host families’ ways from eating rice with green fish sauce to the way her host siblings washed their hands in the bucket before dinner. Even though Abby uses water bottles, dinners, sleep habits as a calendar of her time in Mali, she was also dropping some of her Western ways and replacing them with Malian practices giving her a much better understanding of her host families ‘lifestyle. Though there were times, she was tempted to sneak away and indulge in some western comforts, such as taking a taking a cab to the air-conditioned café to read for a while or when her and her host niece Nana would run off to the bakery for croissants and peas on dinnerless nights. Abby signed up for Mali because it was French speaking, hot and she had to write a petition to her university

I never realized how much languages touched every aspect of our lives, until I stopped to think about the different types of language, that there is body, written and spoken. Granted, Ms. Perez Baez is talking about the spoken and written form of language and we can tie that to many parts of the concepts in the textbook. For example, we could say that it is a representative of Darwin because language is always evolving and changing and sadly, even going extinct. Language is part of our socialization taught to us at an early age by our parents and family and later by our peers. Language is also part of our ethnicity and race. For Americans it is English, for the Chinese it is Chinese, but with one of many different dialects. Language is communication and for the most part goes back to the beginning of time. All lifeforms communicate in some way, whether it is with the spoken word as we do today, the painted hieroglyphics of ancient Egypt or the call of the Orca whale, they are all languages to be studied by the marine biologist or linguistic