Tribal Wives Kitava

 Sweden is a relatively small country and as such they don't have that many native TV shows. They seem to fill in with some assorted American and British shows. It was there where I was exposed to British-style reality TV and I lost my Anglophilia. Instead of high tea and Jane Austen, there was "five ton mum" and "real life 40 year old virgin!" I guess one of the more interesting shows is Tribal Wives.  The premise of the show is that a British person goes and lives with a tribe. Some anthropologists have called it exploitative, but it's reality TV, not an ethnography. Some episodes do actually seem like they are exploiting hapless tribes from all over the world, but I noticed a Kitava one on Youtube yesterday(multiple parts, click the links in the sidebar). Not much about food, but it's kind of interesting. You might note that there are plenty of plump women around the village. Perhaps the diet has changed in the decade plus since the Kitavan study.

She said she didn't miss creature comforts, including electricity, as her life simplified. “The whole island revolves around yams, the islanders' staple diet,” she said. “I ate them boiled, chipped and roasted. The tribespeople spend a lot of time working out new ways to celebrate the yam.”
 

*by yam, she means true yam(Dioscorea), which the subtitles mistranslate as sweet potato

On this one, the British woman gets upset because she isn't allowed to wear pants. On the one about the Afar (a pastoral culture) the British woman gets upset because of child marriage and female circumcision. Pastoral societies are generally much harder on women than horticultural ones. In another episode the British woman is upset about a forced marriage in the pastoral Himba tribe. 

Much like the excellent book Nisa, this show puts a human face on the lives of women that professional ethnographies can't really approach. I think that between the two sources, it's clear that women in these cultures tend to be more socially constrained and threatened than some primitivists would like to think. Domestic violence, abandonment, and social persecution are real dangers. Like Price's search for vegan tribes, the search for matriarchal tribes has been in vain. But people who study these cultures often say these women are happier than most women in our society. Whether that is true remains to be seen.