Storytelling and the Construction of RealitiesAuthor(s): Paul Stoller

Source: Etnofoor , Vol. 30, No. 2, Race-ism (2018), pp. 107-112

Published by: Stichting Etnofoor

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26543134

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Storytelling and the

I N C O N V E R S AT I O N : S TO R I E S
Construction of Realities
Paul Stoller
West Chester University

For the Songhay people of Niger and Mali life is a
series of paths that end and then fork off in two new
directions. At these forks in the road the traveler must
choose her or his direction, destination, and fate. My
choices, many of which were shaped by forces beyond
my control, miraculously led me to two mentors: the
late Jean Rouch, French filmmaker extraordinaire, and
the late Adamu Jenitongo, a profoundly wise sorcerer-
philosopher among the Songhay people. Both of these
men loved to tell stories, the life source of their science
and their art. They never told me how to tell a story;
rather, they asked me to sit with them, walk with them,
and laugh with them. In this way, they said, I would
find my own way in the world and my own way to tell
stories. They both believed that the story, in whatever
form it might take, is a powerful way to transmit
complex knowledge from one generation to the next.
Like Milan Kundera in his magisterial The Art of the
Novel (2000), they believed that the evocative force of
narrative could capture truths far beyond the scope of
any philosophically contoured academic discourse.
Like most scholars in the humanities and social
sciences, I was trained to denote a world through
analysis and not to evoke it through narrative. Following
the path marked by my mentors, though, I have often
tried to resist that academic maxim. In most of my
writing I’ve attempted to use narrative to connect with
readers through what Jerome Bruner (1991) called the
narrative construction of reality. There are many
elements to Bruner’s approach. One central element –
at least for me – is that stories can underscore our
human vulnerabilities. In my experience, they can bring

Etnofoor, Race-ism, volume 30, issue 2, 2018, pp. 107-111

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to the surface deep fears about how we confront
misfortune, illness, uncertainty, the insecurities of social
relations and the existential fear of death.
Here’s the rub. It is one thing to talk about impor-
tant existential elements of narrative and yet another to
know how to express these important themes in our
works. It is clear – at least for me – that writing anthro-
pology, science, literature or religion is an activity that
requires an open-minded and playful approach to
exposition; an approach that has no rules or easy steps
to follow. Those writers who have found their way have
usually profited from: (1) critical guidance from
mentors and (2) a measure of existential fortitude. It is
not easy to pursue the truth of our stories, but a playful
openness to possibility can sometimes show us the way.
When I’m immersed in a writing project, which is
much of the time, things pop into my consciousness
that lead me in felicitous directions. When I sit down
to write ethnography, memoir, fiction, or a blog, I move
into a different space. When you are in the ‘flow’ of
writing, a space in which you temporarily lose your
sense of time and place, strange things sometimes
occur. Several years ago, I read through files trying to
find a topic for a talk at a conference on Anthropology
and the Paranormal. After several hours of fruitless
perusal, a copy of a Le Monde interview, which I hadn’t
looked at for seven years, fell to the floor. That inexpli-
cable event created a perfect storm, or what Arthur
Koestler called a library angel, that not only showed me
the way to that presentation but also inspired a new
book project. ‘Writing angels’ can sometimes appear in
other contexts. During a dog walk, a character from a
work in progress ‘talks’ to me, telling me that the tone
of such and such a passage is wrong, or that a particular
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dialogue is off the mark. Staring at the computer screen
a distant relative or a long-lost friend ‘visits’, reminding
me of a turn of phrase that clears a path through the
textual thicket.
If we are open-minded and playful, these inspira-
tions sometimes materialize and can be woven into
stories that powerfully evoke complex social realities.
When I sat with Adamu Jenitongo, he told stories to
convey the most important lessons of his being-in-the-
world. When I slowly read him the manuscript of what
was to become my first book, In Sorcery’s Shadow (1987),
he told me I needed more stories in the text. I asked
him if I should recount his story in more detail. He said
that would be fine, but ‘if you want to tell my story, you
have to tell your story as well’. His personal challenge
has shaped all of my professional writing in which
stories have been foregrounded, in which an attempt
has been made to evoke the texture of inter-subjectivity,
in which an effort has been made to describe sensu-
ously the nature of place, space, and character. In this
way I have attempted to use stories to evoke the themes
of love and loss, fidelity and betrayal, and courage and
fear – central elements of the human condition.
Remembering Adamu Jenitongo’s example, stories can
sometimes transcend the here and now, which means
that they can be fashioned into works that remain ‘open
to the world’. For me, that is the scholar’s greatest chal-
lenge and most important obligation.
Given the particularities of my path through the
academic maze, I would like to respond to the excellent
set of papers in the previous issue of Etnofoor on stories
as a writer of ethnographic narrative. As a storyteller I
want to know how these essays succeed in evoking a
world, a universe of meaning. How do they construct a
narrative portrait of reality? How can these various
narrative portraits of reality compel readers to think
new thoughts or feel new feelings?
In their introduction to the issue Kaulingfreks and
van den Akker wonder how storytelling can ‘do justice
to the lived realities of the people whom the anthro-
pologist tries to understand’ (2018: 7). They go on to
challenge readers to reconsider the divide between ‘fact’
and ‘fiction’. They write: ‘In the field of anthropology,
facts and fiction reinforce each other – more than that,
the imaginative writing about real people in real places
and real times could offer us insights in lived experi-
ences and could therefore enable us to understand
alterity or to empathize with others in unexpected
ways’ (ibid.: 10). In an age of the newly reinforced Big
Lie, this statement is a timely one that all the authors
in this issue consider in various ways.
In Mulder’s piece, ‘Stories of Autonomy on Non-
Sovereign Saba’, the author demonstrates powerfully
how people who lack political power can use stories to
resist their oppression. There is, of course, a long history
of scholarly work on the practice of cultural resistance
to colonialism and post-colonialism. The social, cultural
and psychological complexities of the colonial dynamic
is memorably expressed in Fanon’s The Wretched of the
Earth (1963) and Albert Memmi’s The Colonizer and
the Colonized (1965), not to forget Jean Rouch’s master
film, Les Maîtres Fous (1955). The more recent work of
Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (2001), also demon-
strates how stories can be used to resist political and
social oppression. Mulder’s cogent essay makes a
significant contribution to a well-established literature.
The same might be said of Macek’s contribution,
‘Family Stories: Between Experience and Myth’, which
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considers family stories about the Bosnian war – as told
I N C O N V E R S AT I O N : S TO R I E S
by Bosnians who immigrated to Sweden. Scholars have
long pondered the mechanics of remembering and
forgetting private – and public – stories. How do we
recount stories? Do we tell our stories the same way
each time we recount them? What do we include?
What do we leave out? And how do these illocutionary
machinations shape the conveyance of knowledge?
How does a society remember? These are important
questions that shape both our private and public expe-
rience.
In a somewhat similar vein, Torres and Flanders
Crosby (‘Timeless Knowledge, Embodied Memory’)
write about how memory gets embodied in movement,
especially in rituals like spirit possession. Scholars of
spirit possession have long linked the performance of
rituals to the construction and reinforcement of
embodied memories (see Connerton 1989; Taussig
1993; Stoller 1989, 1995). Torres and Flanders Crosby
present powerful performance metaphors to situate
their substantial research.
In ‘Ethnography and the Arts: Examining Social
Complexities Through Ethnographic Fiction’, Ingrids-
dotter and Silow Kallenberg take up the importance of
creative writing in the narrative representation of
ethnographic others. They compare and contrast fiction
and non-fiction, mentioning that in fiction the writer
can directly explore the inner dialogues of characters.
They also explore the power of fantasy, suggesting the
border between ‘artistic fantasy and scientific facts does
not need to be so sharp…’ (2018: 61). Indeed, anthro-
pologists who have ventured into creative spaces have
found new audiences of readers – a new, more expansive
way to communicate anthropological insights to a
109
broader public. Ingridsdotter and Silow Kallenberg not
only tell us about creative approaches to ethnography,
but also show readers the power of fiction through a
short example of ethnographic fiction.
In ‘Hamuda, the Wood and I’, Moderbacher writes
powerfully and persuasively about embodied practice.
She shows us through story and explication, or what I
call ‘weaving the world’, the nuanced dynamics of wood
craftwork. The story she presents is filled with sensuous
descriptions of places, dialogue, and characterization.
Such knowing from the inside, which, for me, suggests
an epistemology of apprenticeship, provides deep and
nuanced insight into social practices. Like Moder-
bacher, my embodied experience of a long and very
personal apprenticeship in Songhay sorcery compelled
me to choose different kinds of representational choices
– fiction and memoir.
The most experimental piece in this set of essays is
that of Van Wolputte (‘Desire Paths’), who uses the
newly emerging form of graphic ethnography to discuss
the whys and wherefores of city planning in Opuwo,
Namibia (see Hamdy and Nye 2017). In his essay Van
Wolputte tacks between academic text – ironically in
the margins – and graphic stories. The juxtaposition of
image and text works well here and brings to mind
Ruth Behar’s wonderful mix of image and text in her
magisterial An Island Called Home (2007). Such a juxta-
position is a good way for writers to connect to a wide
audience of readers.
Songhay elders long ago taught me that the rela-
tionship of secular science to religious practice is not
separated into hermetically sealed categories; rather,
they are in dynamic flux. Put another way, if we open
our eyes to the world, we immediately know that the
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paths we follow are not straight. As Wittgenstein wrote
in his incomparable Philosophical Investigations: ‘We
see the straight highway before us, but of course we
cannot use it, because it is permanently closed’ (1953:
67).
Life is full of contingencies that create uncertainties
that are unsettling. We therefore use science – and
scholarship – to transform chaotic contingency into
settled order, which gives us a much-desired sense of
control. In other words, science and scholarship repre-
sent a slice of ‘the whole story’. The essays in the
previous issue of Etnofoor take us a step closer to ‘the
whole story’; they challenge what the late Clifford
Geertz called ‘the dead hand of competence’ and are all
wonderfully nuanced examples of bold academic
writing in which the authors take a variety of represen-
tational risks. Like most academic texts, however, the
authors continue, in part, to write narratives about
narrative that extend and refine our comprehension of
contemporary anthropological practice. Indeed, the
authors recount a variety of stories in a variety of genres
to construct the complex reality of the human condi-
tion. In this way, the publication of the previous issue of
Etnofoor is an important and significant achievement.
And yet, I wonder what my mentors would make of
an issue of an anthropological journal devoted to story-
telling. Jean Rouch would probably say that the stories
should be brought into sharper relief to reawaken the
past, understand the present and imagine the future.
Adamu Jenitongo would say that we need more stories
– especially ones that underscore human vulnerability
– to jolt us from the complacency of form and thought.
Following the path of my mentors, I would challenge
the authors to continue their journey of discovery along
the path of narrative. I would challenge them to be Memmi, Albert

I N C O N V E R S AT I O N : S TO R I E S
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of well-being. That path can show us the way to meet Stoller, Paul
our fundamental obligation as scholars: to construct 1987 In Sorcery’s Shadow: A Memoir of Apprenticeship among the
and convey knowledge that makes life sweeter – the Songhay of Niger. Chicago: The University of Chicago
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