Dancing Skeletons: Life and Death in West Africa – Book Review
This paper reviews Katherine A. Dettwyler's ethnographic memoir Dancing Skeletons: Life and Death in West Africa, which documents her 1989 fieldwork in Mali as a nutritional anthropologist. The review addresses key discussion questions covering her research objectives, field methods, and cultural observations. Topics include child malnutrition and its physical markers, female circumcision, traditional Bambara gender roles, food distribution practices, disease prevalence, and the logistics of conducting anthropological fieldwork abroad. The paper also examines cross-cultural contrasts between Mali and the United States in areas such as commerce, schooling, family size, and ideals of physical beauty.
- Research Questions and Fieldwork Background: Dettwyler's 1989 research goals and logistics
- Language, Identity, and Cultural Access: Role of Bambara language in fieldwork access
- Child Nutrition and Malnutrition in Mali: Malnutrition markers, diseases, and kwashiorkor
- Cultural Practices and Social Structures: Female circumcision, joking relationships, clan exogamy
- Daily Life, Gender Roles, and Education: Women's labor, schooling differences, and commerce
- Conclusion: Author's gender bias and admiration for Malian women
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What makes this paper effective
- It organizes its analysis clearly through focused discussion questions, each of which draws directly from the source text with supporting quotations.
- Direct quotes from Dettwyler are well integrated to ground claims in the primary source, lending credibility to the responses.
- The paper covers a wide range of anthropological topics — nutrition, disease, gender, commerce, and language — demonstrating comprehensive engagement with the book.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper models the use of a structured question-and-answer format as an analytical tool, which helps organize complex ethnographic content into discrete, digestible topics. Each response directly references the text, making the technique a form of close reading applied to a book-length ethnographic memoir.
Structure breakdown
The paper is organized as a series of discussion questions paired with answers drawn from Dettwyler's text. Topics move from research logistics (funding, language, household arrangements) to substantive cultural and medical observations (malnutrition markers, female circumcision, Bambara gender roles, schooling). The bibliography cites the single primary source throughout.
Research Questions and Fieldwork Background
This paper reviews Dancing Skeletons: Life and Death in West Africa by Katherine A. Dettwyler, a physical anthropologist who conducted fieldwork on child nutrition in Mali in 1989 while serving as an assistant professor of nutritional anthropology.
During 1989, Dettwyler's primary aim was to follow up on children from her earlier research conducted in 1981–1983, comparing their growth and nutritional status between the two study periods. Her research questions included: Did malnourished children catch up in growth, and did this occur in middle or late childhood? Were severely malnourished children permanently affected? Had any children from the first study died? Did the best-nourished children from the first study continue to be taller and heavier, and did they survive better than less well-nourished children, or did they become more malnourished in later childhood? Why, given that malnutrition and poor growth were common in childhood, were so many Malians tall and well built? Dettwyler also planned to visit new families, collect data on them, and conduct detailed interviews about infant feeding beliefs and practices. In the 1989 study, she examined for the first time whether intestinal parasites contributed to poor growth in Malian children.
Dettwyler left her husband and four-year-old son in the United States because her husband held a permanent full-time job and could not take six months off to accompany her. Her young son also has Down syndrome, which lowers immunity and would have made him too vulnerable to disease to survive safely in West Africa.
The author chose to identify research subjects by number rather than name for two reasons. The first was confidentiality. The second was the limited variety of names given to Malian children. As she explains, "Every family with many children will have boys named Moussa ('Moses'), Amadou, Muhammad... And Seytou, and girls named Aminata, Rookia, Oumou, and Fanta" (7). She also notes that approximately twenty Bambara lineages make up most family surnames, so identifying subjects by both first and family name would still cause confusion.
Dettwyler's path to Mali was itself circuitous. She had originally planned to conduct research in Sudan, but that plan collapsed when her family was stranded in Cairo during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan and could not secure transportation southwards. After returning to the United States, friends already working in Mali persuaded the family to redirect their research there. Dettwyler writes that she "fell in love" (17) with Mali, and her husband adapted their research accordingly.
Her 1989 fieldwork was financially supported by a six-month Fulbright Scholar Grant. She supplemented this income through odd jobs and work with other organizations to help cover living expenses. Upon arrival, she stayed in a guesthouse before finding a small house near the American International School. She hired a daytime childminder for her daughter, a night watchman, a field assistant, and someone to wash clothes twice a week. She shared the house with another researcher, both because it is not considered respectable for a woman and child to live alone in Mali, and because a male presence in the household deterred burglars.
Bibliography
Dettwyler, Katherine A. Dancing Skeletons: Life and Death in West Africa. Prospect Heights, Illinois: Waveland, 1994.
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