Sensuous Scholarship

by Stoller, Paul

• ISBN13: 9780812216158
• ISBN10: 0812216156
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1997-06-01
• Publisher: Univ of Pennsylvania Pr

Summary

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. InSensuous ScholarshipPaul 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. ThroughoutSensuous ScholarshipStoller 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.

Author Biography

Paul Stoller is Professor of Anthropology at West Chester University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Prologue: The Scholar's Body
Embodied Practices	p. 1
Introduction: The Way of the Body	p. 3
The Sorcerer's Body	p. 4
The Griot's Tongue	p. 24
Body and Memory	p. 45
Introduction: The Texture of Memory	p. 47
Embodying Colonial Memories	p. 48
"Conscious" Ain't Consciousness: Entering the Museum of Sensory Absence	p. 74
Embodied Representations	p. 89
Introduction: Embodying the Grammar	p. 91
Spaces, Places, and Fields: The Politics of West African Trading in New York City's Informal Economy	p. 93
Artaud, Rouch, and the Cinema of Cruelty	p. 119
Epilogue: Sensuous Ways of Knowing/Living	p. 135
Notes	p. 139
Works Cited	p. 149
Films Cited	p. 161
Index	p. 163
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