Jordan Ducko
Contemporary Anthropology 110
Dancing Skeletons Homework
1) Steven and Katherine Dettwyler originally planned on doing the research for their
dissertations in the African country of Sudan. They were not able to go there because a
civil war broke out and it was not safe for them to go there and especially not to bring
their daughter with them so they ended up in Mali so they could still conduct research.
This goes to show that ethnographic research is unpredictable in nature and plans can
get spoiled easily because there is no way to control what is going on in the area to be
study such as civil war. This is different from research plans made by laboratory
