Lucía, a young community health worker trained in Lima, knew that climate change had shifted weather patterns. She proposed a solution: dig wells. But the village elder, Don Hilario, refused. “Wells are for outsiders,” he said. “Only the apu mountain can give water. If we dig, the spirits will leave forever.”
Robbins, R. H., & et al. (2020). Cultural Anthropology: A Problem-Based Approach. Routledge.
Cultural Anthropology: A Problem-Based Approach by Richard H. Robbins is a widely used textbook that breaks away from traditional topic-based instruction in favor of an inquiry-driven model
By centering the text on problems rather than topics , Robbins forces the reader to become an active participant. You are not memorizing kinship charts; you are analyzing why arranged marriages persist, how they adapt, and what that tells us about human agency.
In the highlands of Chijnaya, a Quechua community had always asked the mountain spirits for rain through a ritual called pago . But this year, the rain didn’t come.