Sensuous Scholarship (Contemporary Ethnography) [Paperback]

Paul Stoller (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 1997 | ISBN-10: 0812216156 | ISBN-13: 978-0812216158

Among the Songhay of Mali and Niger, who consider the stomach the seat of personality, learning is understood not in terms of mental activity but in bodily terms. Songhay bards study history by "eating the words of the ancestors," and sorcerers learn their art by ingesting particular substances, by testing their flesh with knives, by mastering pain and illness.

In Sensuous Scholarship Paul Stoller challenges contemporary social theorists and cultural critics who—using the notion of embodiment to critique Eurocentric and phallocentric predispositions in scholarly thought—consider the body primarily as a text that can be read and analyzed. Stoller 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.

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.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Paul Stoller is Professor of Anthroopology at West Chester University and the author of The Taste of Ethnographic Things: The Senses in Anthropology, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Product Details

• Paperback: 184 pages
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press (April 1, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0812216156
• ISBN-13: 978-0812216158
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,223,287 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Paul Stoller is an ethnographer, memoirist and novelist who has authored 11 books. His most recent work, a memoir, is called The Power of the Between: An Anthropological Odyssey, which was published in December of 2008 by the University of Chicago Press. He loves to hear and read good stories which inspires him to try to tell and write good stories. He is currently working on a new novel, The Sorcerer's Burden and is learning Spanish which he hopes to practice on his next trip to Ecuador.