Dancing Skeletons Chapter Summary: Culture, Controversy, and Conundrums

Dancing Skeletons: Balancing Cultural Insights with Ethnocentric Judgments

There is no denying that the author of “Dancing Skeletons: Life and Death in West Africa” embarks on a journey that consists of impossible tasks. On the one hand, she tries to show the right side of Mali and its rich cultural heritage, whereas on the other and she depicts the nation’s ways of life are responsible for the growing trends of poverty and the continued exploitation by the developed countries. In my opinion, I feel that both of these explanations are highly controversial.

That said, we cannot attach logos or logical considerations throughout the entire work.

In reality, it is not a normal thing to find an anthropologist wishing to push their agendas to write a relevant text. In many instances in the book, the author admits to being astonished when she sees people washing using a cow’s urine. Despite being shocked, she associates this shock with her own culture toward people of color (Dettwyler, 2013). Yet, when she is immersed in the real world and sees the children starving, she does not doubt that this is not supposed to be the case, and every measure should be directed towards stopping it. Not at any point does she stop to think that this child mortality rate in Africa is absolutely a normal occurrence among the natives. Primarily, Africans used their cheer numbers to compensate for their lack of quality. For example, despite the unending starvation, famine, and social unrest, Ethiopia’s population has tripled over the last 20 years.

Dancing Skeletons Cliff Notes: Dettwyler’s Dichotomy Between Cultural Curiosity and Political Agendas

In researching the Malian culture, I feel that Dettwyler has achieved a tremendous job as an anthropologist. However, her obsession with drawing social-political conclusions from the research undermines her effectiveness (Hall, 1995). This fact is evidenced by the fact that she was brainwashed by left-wing propaganda, which made her lose her focus. It is possible to attribute the author’s stay in West Africa to the subconscious attraction to poverty, death, or misery. For instance, throughout her writing, Dettwyler perceives death as an extended version of an illness, telling by the pathological undertones used by the author (Dettwyler, 2013).

Although she claims that her main intention in Africa is to learn about poverty and its causes, Dettwyler seems fascinated by aspects of African culture, such as female circumcision. She rightly highlights that human immunization of African kids will remain ineffective (Dettwyler, 2013). Essentially, in her book, the only unanswered question is why Western countries are obligated to get food for Africa’s starving children.

Dancing Skeletons Dissected: The Dichotomy of African Reality and Western Perceptions

Does the statement that, in a matter of time, countries of black ancestry will ultimately result in savagely like the case for Mali, South Africa, Haiti, and Zimbabwe make any logical sense? The book “Dancing Skeletons” also depicts women in Africa as severely abused with no form of human rights to protect them (Hall, 1995). In extreme cases like the Malian community, women are not classified as human beings by their traditions. Questionable behavior, such as a man chaining their wife to the bed when they are away, is passed as normal behavior. The author claims that the backward African customs of third-world countries are readily experienced in Western countries through accepting the diversity of their population (Dettwyler, 2013). The only section that lacks the sentiments of helping children in the book is the section that describes problems associated with fieldwork in Africa.

From the precedent, the book is structured like a fiction tale where elements like savages, strange diseases, unpredictable danger, and war are strategically used to solicit interest in the larger story. What is ironic is the fact that the call to stop hunger in Africa has been an old course that has persisted for decades, but there is barely any accomplishment. The facts are that the African population, despite the deplorable conditions cited by such authors, continues to rise steadily, whereas else the case in Western countries is that the larger part of their population is comprised of the elderly, creating a future crisis.

References

1. Dettwyler, K. A. (2013). Dancing skeletons: Life and death in West Africa. Waveland Press.
2. Hall, T. R. (1995). “Dancing Skeletons: Life and Death in West Africa’, by KA Dettwyler (Book Review). Human Biology, 67(2), 330.

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