PAUL STOLLER AND CHERLY OLKES, IN SORCERYS SHADOW.

Paul Stoller and Cherly Olkes, In Sorcerys Shadow

Paul Stoller and Cherly Olkes, In Sorcerys Shadow

About book

In Sorcery's Shadow is a record of five excursions to Niger, attempted by the authors between 1976 and 1984. All the time Stoller is the narrator, talking in the first individual, from here on I will be mentioning mostly to him. At first Stoller  plans to attempt accepted ethnographic study from an etic perspective. His subject is the connection between dialect usage and localized politics; the first part of the study is a language-attitude review amidst chosen respondents (Stoller and  Olkes 1987:8). Everything proceeds fine until the instant of the first respondent confrontation.

Sorcery's Shadow comprises a kind of narrative located precisely between benchmark ethnographic texts (scientific discourse such as ethnographic monographs or area reports), and anthropological fiction (scienfically founded scholarly discourse). It is so straightforward to easily classify In Sorcery's Shadow as an demonstration of a confessional, or even fictional narrative. Only the reading of other Stoller publications from this time span permits us to approximate what a well thought-out and grave enterprise it is. Stoller is revealing himself substantially to H.G. Gadamer's Fremdheit - a state of "not being at dwelling in the world". He appears to be looking for some steady points, sensible categorisation of the cosmos, "notification of resistance", to extract Fleck (1986:125-126). In this way he becomes more open to distinct causes of information about the world: from this issue of outlook he profits a more creative attitude. However, his conclusion to decline benchmark anthropological methodology not only deprived him of the metalanguage utilised in connection with other constituents of the technical community, as well as an very good emotional protect, but furthermore made him more impressionable to manipulation.

 

Critique

The anthropologist is integrated in the narrative, he seems in all dialogical situations. The narrative is concentrated more on the investigator than on the Songhay, although a apparently technical goal was established. Maybe this made Nigel Barley state about In Sorcery's Shadow that "this is at one time an anthropological and an anti-anthropological book". Robert Baum remarks that this work "provides deep insight into Songhay sorcery and one of the most perceptive anecdotes of that characteristic communal world conceived through the method of fieldwork itself that [Baum has] ever read". Baum states that Stoller comes to the boundaries of technical cognition. Along with a increasing ...