Paul Stoller

Cheryl Olkes

A Memoir of Apprenticeship among the Songhay of Niger

In Sorcery's Shadow

A Story of Africans in America

Jaguar

This text attempts to reawaken the scholar's body by demonstrating how the fusion of the intellect and the sensible can be applied to scholarly practices and representations. Discusses how taste and sound constitute important aspects of the epistemology of Songhay-speaking peoples in West Africa, how memory and history are embodied phenomena, and how sensuous scholarship is transformed into text and image. Paper edition (unseen), $16.50. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Sensuous Scholarship

In February 1999 the tragic New York City police shooting of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed street vendor from Guinea, brought into focus the existence of West African merchants in urban America. In Money Has No Smell, Paul Stoller offers us a more complete portrait of the complex lives of West African immigrants like Diallo, a portrait based on years of research Stoller conducted on the streets of New York City during the 1990s. Blending fascinating ethnographic description with incisive social analysis, Stoller shows how these savvy West African entrepreneurs have built cohesive and effective multinational trading networks, in part through selling a simulated Africa to African Americans. These and other networks set up by the traders, along with their faith as devout Muslims, help them cope with the formidable state regulations and personal challenges they face in America. As Stoller demonstrates, the stories of these West African traders illustrate and illuminate ongoing debates about globalization, the informal economy, and the changing nature of American communities.

The Africanization of New York City

Money Has No Smell

A novel on a West African street peddler in New York and the effect his emigration has on his wife back home. With the money he sends, she opens a store and becomes an independent woman. Nevertheless, she suffers from loneliness because he keeps delaying his return, having found girlfriends.

In Sensuous Scholarship Paul Stoller challenges contemporary social theorists and cultural critics who - using the notion of embodiment to critique both Eurocentric and phallocentric predispositions in scholarly thought - consider the body primarily as a text that can be read and analyzed. He argues that this attitude is in itself Eurocentric and is particularly inappropriate for anthropologists, who often work in societies in which the notion of text, and textual interpretation, is foreign. In many of these societies not only are reading and writing unimportant but vision is not the central perceptual mode. Instead, the "lower" senses are central to the metaphoric organization of experience. Throughout Sensuous Scholarship Stoller argues for the importance of understanding the "sensuous epistemologies" of many non-Western societies so that we can better understand the societies themselves and what their epistemologies have to teach us about human experience in general.

"An ingeniously constructed springboard for a criticism of anthropology."--

The Senses in Anthropology

The Taste of Ethnographic Things

Yaya’s Story is a book about Yaya Harouna, a Songhay trader originally from Niger who found a path to America. It is also a book about Paul Stoller—its author—an American anthropologist who found his own path to Africa. Separated by ethnicity, language, profession, and culture, these two men’s lives couldn’t be more different. But when they were both threatened by a grave illness—cancer—those differences evaporated, and the two were brought to profound existential convergence, a deep camaraderie in the face of the most harrowing of circumstances. Yaya’s Story is that story. Harouna and Stoller would meet in Harlem, at a bustling African market where Harouna built a life as an African art trader and Stoller was conducting research. Moving from Belayara in Niger to Silver Spring, Maryland, and from the Peace Corps to fieldwork to New York, Stoller recounts their separate lives and how the threat posed by cancer brought them a new, profound, and shared sense of meaning. Combining memoir, ethnography, and philosophy through a series of interconnected narratives, he tells a story of remarkable friendship and the quest for well-being. It’s a story of difference and unity, of illness and health, a lyrical reflection on human resiliency and the shoulders we lean on.

The Quest for Well-Being in the World

Yaya's Story

As a young man in the 1960's David Lyons joined the Peace Corps and went to an assignment in Niger, Africa. While there he fell in love with a beautiful African girl, who became pregnant with his child. Within days of his leaving Africa David panicked and left Africa without his girlfriend in tow. Years later, he deciedes he must go back and see if he can make amends for his irresponsibility.

A Story about an African Past

Gallery Bundu

The most prolific ethnographic filmmaker in the world, a pioneer of cinéma vérité and one of the earliest ethnographers of African societies, Jean Rouch (1917-) remains a controversial and often misunderstood figure in histories of anthropology and film. By examining Rouch's neglected ethnographic writings, Paul Stoller seeks to clarify the filmmaker's true place in anthropology. A brief account of Rouch's background, revealing the ethnographic foundations and intellectual assumptions underlying his fieldwork among the Songhay of Niger in the 1940s and 1950s, sets the stage for his emergence as a cinematic griot, a peripatetic bard who "recites" the story of a people through provocative imagery. Against this backdrop, Stoller considers Rouch's writings on Songhay history, myth, magic and possession, migration, and social change. By analyzing in depth some of Rouch's most important films and assessing Rouch's ethnography in terms of his own expertise in Songhay culture, Stoller demonstrates the inner connection between these two modes of representation. Stoller, who has done more fieldwork among the Songhay than anyone other than Rouch himself, here gives the first full account of Rouch the griot, whose own story scintillates with important implications for anthropology, ethnography, African studies, and film.

The Ethnography of Jean Rouch

The Cinematic Griot

It is the anthropologist’s fate to always be between things: countries, languages, cultures, even realities. But rather than lament this, anthropologist Paul Stoller here celebrates the creative power of the between, showing how it can transform us, changing our conceptions of who we are, what we know, and how we live in the world. Beginning with his early days with the Peace Corps in Africa and culminating with a recent bout with cancer, The Power of the Between is an evocative account of the circuitous path Stoller’s life has taken, offering a fascinating depiction of how a career is shaped over decades of reading and research. Stoller imparts his accumulated wisdom not through grandiose pronouncements but by drawing on his gift for storytelling. Tales of his apprenticeship to a sorcerer in Niger, his studies with Claude Lévi-Strauss in Paris, and his friendships with West African street vendors in New York City accompany philosophical reflections on love, memory, power, courage, health, and illness. Graced with Stoller’s trademark humor and narrative elegance, The Power of the Between is both the story of a distinguished career and a profound meditation on coming to terms with the impermanence of all things.

An Anthropological Odyssey

The Power of the Between

"This ethnography is more like a film than a book, so well does Stoller evoke the color, sight, sounds, and movements of Songhay possession ceremonies."—Choice "Stoller brilliantly recreates the reality of spirit presence; hosts are what they mediate, and spirits become flesh and blood in the 'fusion' with human existence. . . . An excellent demonstration of the benefits of a new genre of ethnographic writing. It expands our understanding of the harsh world of Songhay mediums and sorcerers."—Bruce Kapferer, American Ethnologist "A vivid story that will appeal to a wide audience. . . . The voices of individual Songhay are evident and forceful throughout the story. . . . Like a painter, [Stoller] is concerned with the rich surface of things, with depicting images, evoking sensations, and enriching perceptions. . . . He has succeeded admirably." —Michael Lambek, American Anthropologist "Events (ceremonies and life histories) are evoked in cinematic style. . . . [This book is] approachable and absorbing—it is well written, uncluttered by jargon and elegantly structured."—Richard Fardon, Times Higher Education Supplement "Compelling, insightful, rich in ethnographic detail, and worthy of becoming a classic in the scholarship on Africa."—Aidan Southall, African Studies Review

An Ethnography of Possession among the Songhay of Niger

Fusion of the Worlds

A study of the West African Hauka - spirits that grotesquely mimic and mock "Europeans" of the colonial epoch. The author considers spirit possession as a set of embodied practices with serious social and cultural consequences. Embodying Colonial Memories is the first in-depth study of the West African Hauka, spirits in the body of (human) mediums which mimic and mock Europeans of the colonial epoch. Paul Stoller, who was initiated into a spirit possession troupe, recounts an insider's tale of the Hauka with respect and "brotherly" deference. He combines narrative description, historical analysis, and reflections on the importance of embodiment and mimesis to social theory, with particular reference to the Songhay peoples of the Republic of Niger.

Spirit Possession, Power, and the Hauka in West Africa

Embodying Colonial Memories

Paul Stoller has been writing a popular blog for the Huffington Post since 2011. Blogging, says Stoller, allows him to bring an anthropological perspective to contemporary debates, but it also makes him a better writer: snappier, more concise, and more focused on the connection he wants to make with readers. In this collection of selected blog posts, Stoller models good writing while sharing his insights on politics (including the emergence of "Trumpism" and the impact of ignorance on US political practices), higher education, social science, media, and well-being. In the process, he discusses the changing nature of scholarly communication and the academys need for greater public engagement.

Public Anthropology and Popular Media

Adventures in Blogging

In this collection of selected blog essays, Stoller models good writing while sharing his insights on politics, higher education, social science, media, and well-being.

The tale of Paul Stoller's sojourn among sorcerors in the Republic of Niger is a story of growth and change, of mutual respect and understanding that will challenge all who read it to plunge deeply into an alien world.

An Ethnography of Possession Among the Songhay of Niger

This book emerges from the author's 35 years of research and thought about the Songhay people of Niger. This ethnographic novel follows the life of Omar Dia, the oldest son of a West African sorcerer. When his father falls ill and dies, the great sorcerer vomits a small metal chain onto his chest. Following the path of his ancestors, Omar swallows the chain, becoming his father's successor, which means that he takes on the sorcerer's burden. The book also describes how custodians of traditional knowledge are creatively adapting to the forces of globalization—all in a highly accessible narrative text.

The Ethnographic Saga of a Global Family

The Sorcerer's Burden

Mitchel Stoller

“You have cancer.” Three words that will change your life forever. The diagnosis is often followed by surgery, chemotherapy, radiation therapy and many other stress-inducing treatments. Your future will seem like an insurmountable mountain. John, a 50-year-old corporate lawyer, found himself facing this exact situation when he was diagnosed with a low grade follicular lymphoma. But John was determined to win his fight. Doing research on how to cope with cancer, he found a way to cope with it and is now in long-term remission. Using his story, the authors provide a guide to climbing that mountain. They show how using preparation (research), practice (exercise and activity), and a variety of social supports to live well within the parameters that cancer imposes can help you deal with the disease. They consider how to cope with the stresses and strains of diagnosis, first treatment, short-term remission, second treatment, long-term remission and palliative care. In particular, the authors stress the important relationship between exercise, activity, and well-being.

Paul Stoller

About

Books

Join the club