Doctoral Seminar, Fall 2003 Sam Howard-Spink
(Chapters 8/9 provide the best outline of Stoller’s reasons for an adoption of, and methodological approaches towards, sensual ethnography).
Stoller’s initial effort to learn about the Songhay through a questionnaire – a technique “based on an epistemology in which the goal is to produce ideal, verifiable, and replicable knowledge that we might use as a data base for comparison” – is an “unqualified failure” (129). He finds more success with a subjective approach, letting the Songhay teach him about their culture and society (130), but realises this can only occur through long-term study. These two ideas are the key elements of Stoller’s call for a new ethnographic methodology.
Stoller recaps the history of epistemology and approaches towards the establishment of Truth, or the search for “the One among the Many”:
Foucalt on the episteme that “governs what we see, what we think, what we say and what we write”. The human sciences present an epistemological paradox in that they “dissolve man” (via Levi-Strauss , 133).
Plato settled on Objectivity as the solution to unravelling the “world of appearances”, with its split between Form (immutable archetypes of knowledge behind every appearance) and Knowledge (an immutable pillar of reality)(131).
Saussure introduces systematic linguistics through the synchronic study of language ( parole, langue ) and distinguishes signifier and signified, with the sign as the immutable form (132).
Levi-Strauss adopts from structural linguistics the view that culture is a “system of systems” (133), devises the method of structuralism.
Most anthropologists are metaphysicians seeking Platonic Truth by way of a “universal observation language” that attempts to locate “the hidden reality in the mirage of data” (134). The consequence of this membership within the Platonic tradition is that, in terms of value, theorising trumps vivid description. This produces flat, “sludgy” prose that reflects the alienation of the anthropological episteme; the objectification of the other compels one to objectify the self (137).
The search for Platonic Truth also draws a clear dividing line between art and metaphysics, but Stoller believes “art and science should complement one another” (138). In ethnography, this means examining the texture of a society, its tastes, sounds and smells. It involves an approach to methods and language that is more humanistic in order to confront language in its “full being” (139), as opposed to a positivistic approach that sees language as a “neutral mechanism of representation”.
The reconstruction of ethnography is a call for a “humanistic anthropology” that offers “meaningful descriptions of… ‘human being’”. It demands a “fundamental epistemological shift toward others and away from ethnographic realism” (140). It is characterised by “multilayered texts” that acknowledge the “presence of the ethnographer in dialogue with his or her subjects”.
Stoller concludes his book by advocating a turn (“detour”) towards “the pragmatist notion of radical empiricism ”, which would allow “latitude to play with established disciplinary and literary conventions” (153). In the case of anthropology, this entails two forms of expression: film (eg the work of Jean Rouch) and narrative ethnography (the work of Stoller himself).
Brief chapter outlines :
Chapter 1
The tale of Djebo’s terrible sauce – its symbolic expression of her anger and the social structures it sheds light on (“it reeks with meaning” 25) – becomes the launch pad for Stoller’s call for a sensual ethnography.
Conventional, realist ethnographic discourse seeks the reality of the whole of a given society, employing analyses that “constantly evoke a social and cultural totality” (25). It limits itself to scientific methods and restricts what is published and accepted by other anthropologists. “Tasteful fieldwork” (29) and “tasteful writing” (30) would take us beyond the mind’s eye and into the domain of the senses of smell and taste, senses of deep importance to the other but disregarded by the Western tradition and its adherence at all costs to empirical objectivity.
Chapter 2
Eye, mind and word
Much substance of life-in-the-world is lost when we think operationally, by defining rather than experiencing the reality of things (Merleau-Ponty).
The Gaze: the act of seeing, an act of selective perception. What we see is shaped by our experiences, and our “gaze” has a direct bearing on what we think. In anthropology this gaze is directed at the other.
Dispassionate analysis is the goal of ethnography, but to a painter there is no Cartsesian distinction between subjective data gathering and objective data analysis. Stoller argues that “we need to transform ourselves from ethnographic ‘spectators into seers’”.
He tells a story of his apprenticeship as a sorko (praise-singer to the spirits). Note that it involves food preparation (42). At night his legs are paralysed and he uses a defence-against-sorcery chant. It works. Where is there room in traditional anthropology for this kind of experience? Foucault says all discourse is shaped by standards of acceptability – the episteme – which govern the appropriateness of (ethnographic) content and style. Stoller’s “bizarre, sensuous” account falls outside those standards, but does that mean it is without value?
Style, meaning, voice, language – all should be used to bring the reader into contact with “brute and wild being” (Merleau-Ponty), not detached in the way that most ethnography is (53). This approach can also lead to successful books being read by a diverse audience (eg Favret-Saada).
Chapter 3
Gazing at space
Space in Songhay society was originally conceptualised by Stoller as reflective of the social exclusivity of nobles, ie the reification of established socio-political relations. This was what his “gaze” allowed him to see, containing as it did the assumption that space is “given” and “out there”, relatively static and immutable (63). This goes all the way back to post-Socratic Greek philosophy.
Then exceptions popped up, and not just as “noise” (61).
So Stoller adopts a phenomenological approach – in which data are not just external objects of analysis, but objects of a perception which is linked dynamically to his or her own consciousness (64) – to observe ethnographic happenings from the perspective of the other.
This helps Stoller to see Songhay space as an arena for conscious political competition between the nobles and the newly emergent merchants – the former use it to reinforce their exclusivity, the latter to challenge that exclusivity (67).
Chapter 4
Signs and the bush taxi
Relations around the loading and driving of a bush taxi are explored through the language dynamics of the various participants. Stoller explores both deep and surface readings of the interaction (77), attempting to go beyond merely “reading” surface discourses and instead trying to “see” what is going on through Songhay eyes.
So insults such as “donkey” and references to “rocks” all carry metaphorical aspects of symbolic expression that only a speaker of the language (both langue and parole ) could penetrate. Donkeys have no dignity in the natural order, so the word is used to reinforce social hierarchies. Rocks refer to hardness and intractability, desirable qualities in Songhay social relations. These terms and their uses are metaphorically structured and understood in Songhay life, and employed to inflate the public status of the user at the expense of the social other.
The sensual approach reveals to the anthropologist the limitations of his or her knowledge – without years of commitment to “deep visions” (83), how can we be sure that what we find is indeed knowledge?
Chapter 5
Visions of the other, son-of-Rouch
One should consider how the other actually sees the anthropologist – Stoller says this would decolonise anthropological texts and add a sense of humour.
References to filmmaker Jean Rouch and Stoller, including the term Anasara (basically “white man”) reveal that to the Songhay history is “a living tradition”; it is not bound up in texts, but is a foundation of ongoing social relations (95). Also, the Songhay have their own myths about foreigners that one should be aware of.
Chapters 6 and 7
Sound in Songhay possession and sorcery
The eye and the gaze have a lockhold on Western thought (101), with the aural/oral world relegated to the back benches. Zuckerkland suggest this is because we observe material things in a field of vision.
Sounds are dynamic symbols, and should be considered not for what they point at but how they point. Sounds provide an entry into a world of intangibles; they link non-material inner and outer realms. In Songhay, sound is “a foundation of experience” (103).
The magical powers of incantations have been explored in anthropology before (108), but not the sounds of words, and more rarely still the sounds of musical instruments. The godji, a monochord violin, produces a high tone pitch like a wail. It “cries” for all the Songhay, it “penetrates them”, linking past to present. The gasi, or gourd drum, creates a “context in sound” the spirits find irresistible. Praise-poetry may even have a “rhetorical effect”: people named are “morally, socially, even physically transformed” (111). Vibrations in the air are physical manifestations that have material effects ( aside – chaos theory? ). Combine all three in a Songhay possession ceremony and the spirit will take over the body of the medium and throw him/her to the ground.
Music/sound are dimensions of experience in and of itself, something “inside”. Songs in many cultures are considered to possess power and energy, even “the veritable force of life” (121). To the Songhay, the sounds of their instruments are the voices of their ancestors, not merely signs or references.
Similarly, “the word” is seen by many peoples of the world as an energy that should be apprehended in and of itself, rather than only as a representation of a thing or function, as in the classical Western view.
There is no good or evil in Songhay sorcery; there is only power and the words that enhance power (119). There is no clear distinction between inner and outer, they become interpenetrated. They create in the individual a sense of communication and participation. Sound becomes the foundation of the universe (120).