One Girl's Life

Surely it is difficult for any of us to understand how someone else experiences the world. Stuck in our own skins, limited to a given time and place in history, we are evolved to be healthily self-absorbed. To appreciate a life lived in another country (or next door, or even in the next room) requires empathic imagination and reason. We also need facts--as well as ideas to help us interpret those facts.

Textbooks, of course, have their limitations, which great works of art and literature help us transcend. Read Anna Karenina, and Tolstoy makes you learn--and feel--something of what happened to a woman if she stepped out of line in upper-class nineteenth-century Russian society. Read The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and you see the world through the prism of a forceful and specific individual mind, forged in a specific period of twentieth-century America. But the facts and truths of many other kinds of lives remain unexpressed, either in great novels or in autobiographies.

Enter Ligia Botero, a photographer who believed it was important to document the life of Rosa, an indigenous Ecuadorean girl. And enter Lynn A. Meisch, who, as a cultural anthropologist, can help us understand one another (and therefore ourselves) by teasing apart what is universal and what is particular in the innumerable lives being lived out on this planet.

In "Working Girl" (page 74), Botero and Meisch tell Rosa's story. Hers is the traditional life of any girl born poor in a poor country. But Rosa's life is also a very modern one, its broad contours shaped by global economic forces and its details modified by individual needs and personal enterprise.

Botero's beautiful, thought-provoking images and Meisch's seasoned observations allow us the privilege of traveling a short distance into the difficult life of Rosa--and, one hopes, into a more subtle understanding of the complex world we share with her.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Natural History Magazine, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning