Dancing Skeletons Summary

Dancing Skeletons, written by the biological and nutritional anthropologist Katherine Dettwyler, is an ethnography about child nutrition and development in Mali. While conducting her ethnographic fieldwork, Dettwyler had to remain completely impartial and any avoid any ethnocentric feelings that she experienced, as well as practicing cultural relativism. Cultural relativism is the principle that people should not judge the behaviour of others using the standards of their own culture, and that each culture must be analyzed on its own terms. This ethnography assisted a reader in grasping this concept by studying a different culture from its own cultural perspective instead of examining it through a Western, ethnocentric point of view. Dettwyler assisted the reader in realizing that the
In her ethnography, Dettwyler recalls an encounter she had where “children who never grow up” (cite 85), more commonly referred to as disabled children, were discussed. These children were believed to have been possessed by evil spirits while their mothers were pregnant; consequently, these children were left in the bush where the people believed they would turn into snakes. To a person raised in a Western culture, this concept may seem absorb, but the parents of these children had no knowledge of the genetics behind their child’s disability and “had no resources to help them cope” (cite 89). Looking at this situation with a different cultural perspective is not reasonable since this specific society does not have the same access to information about chromosomal abnormalities as most Western cultures do. Throughout the ethnography Dancing Skeletons, Dettwyler assists the reader in acknowledging that the reality of one culture differs from that of another. Also, the ethnography expresses the importance of cultural anthropologists avoiding incorporating their own ethnocentric feelings into their work, as well as practicing cultural relativism, while conducting