Paul Stoller

Transcription

Gerhard: We're here with Paul Stoller, who is a professor of anthropology at West Chester University. The first question I usually ask everyone is: how did you get into anthropology? Can you give us a little background information? Paul: Well, I originally wanted to be a writer, not an anthropologist. A novelist was my dream. I didn't—no one encouraged me to do so because they thought the writing life was really not very good. My mother, especially, said, “There's no money in it, so don't go into writing.” Then I told her I wanted to maybe go to Africa. She got very, very frightened about that. Then when I finally found my legs in Africa—I was in the Peace Corps, avoiding the Vietnam War. In so doing, I learned the Songhay language, came in contact with Africans, lived in small villages, and wanted to determine a way to get back there, to spend time in my life in West Africa, in Niger. First I enrolled in—I first studied linguistics. Then I found that limiting somewhat, and then I finally made my way into social anthropology, and made my way back to Niger and began my doctoral research. Of course, when I told my mother that I was going to become an anthropologist, the reaction was even more troubled. She said, "What can you do with anthropology," she said. I said, "Well, you'll be surprised." She said, "Well, I hope so." At any rate, it took them a long time to understand what I was doing. Eventually, when I started publishing stuff and they started reading my books, they came around to understand pretty much what I was trying to do. Gerhard: Anyway, you started with fieldwork before you got into anthropology because you were living, when you were with the Peace Corps, for several years in Niger, right? Paul: Yes. Two years in Niger in two small villages. It was—I got an occupational deferment, so I avoided going to Vietnam. I had my field experience before I studied—in college, I was a philosophy major. I was not an anthropology major. I took one anthropology course. It was the exposure to life in rural Niger among Songhay people, learning the Songhay language, that convinced me that I wanted to study anthropology. Gerhard: You started out studying linguistics. Do you think there's a—that language is obviously instrumental to engaging with others, but do you think there's something deeper about learning another language? Paul: Well, yes. First of all, I think that learning the language of the people you want to do research on or want to describe is the most important thing that you can do. I took great pains to learn the Songhay language. I studied it every day. I had tutors. I got to a point where I was pretty fluent in it. That was very, very important, I think, for any anthropologist to do that. Also, by learning the language, you also learn a lot about the culture and orientation. Your observations and your experience become more nuanced through a subtle appreciation of the language. I think that's really, really important. Gerhard: You mentioned earlier, your mother was not that pleased with you doing anthropology. How did you explain what anthropology was to her, which sort of leads me to the next question of: what is anthropology in a nutshell? Paul: Well, for me—the way I explained it to her and for me personally, I think anthropology is telling other people's stories so that we can understand human difference. In increasingly globally interconnected world, understanding human difference has become increasingly important. I explained to her that it's really very important for us to know how other people live, how other people—their passions, their desires, but also the conflicts in their lives, their issues, basically, and the more we know about how other people live, the better we can live ourselves. Gerhard: Which is, I guess, another segue to an issue that you've been writing on the last decade or so about well-being as understanding difference, but also understanding how people live differently, and how well-being, when it first came out, I think, was largely theorized or talked about in terms of measuring it, and measuring it in numericals such as—understood by economists in terms of, “Here is the poverty level, and you are either below or above it, and that tells us something about your well-being.” You've written very differently about what well-being means. Could you just talk to that a little bit? Paul: Well, first of all the—what you're talking about there is the UN index of well-being. There are also numerical indexes of happiness, as if you can measure well-being and happiness. There is another survey done about two years ago by the Gallup organization, and they discovered that—there was a happiness survey. They were shocked by the results because the results indicated that some of the happiest people in the world live in the most dire circumstances. Seven out of the ten happiest people lived in places like—in Latin America, and lived in Guatemala, and lived in Peru, Ecuador, places that are—Nigeria is another one. To me, well-being has to do—well-being is fleeting. We're always searching for it, but it's not something that you could measure. It's something I write about in my current book, the time when I first came face-to-face with well-being is I was 15 years old and I wanted to take this girl out for my first date. I was going to phone her. I go down to my basement in my house, and I'm all very nervous. I said, "What if she doesn't know who I am? What if she turns me down?” I'd be completely devastated. But I tried to do it. I called her up, and she did know who I was. She did accept me. We had a terrible time, but the experience—I felt so elated that she said yes that I was willing to go on and try to do this again. Well-being, we're seeking it at all different times of our lives. Depending on our economic, social, personal, and cultural circumstances, what constitutes well-being may vary from place to place. My latest book, which is called "Yaya's Story: The Quest for Well-Being in the World," is about this one guy who is from Niger who was an art trader, who was basically battling cancer. Toward the end of the book, he eventually goes through all sorts of chemotherapy, and he's miserable, and he's missing his family. At the end of the book, we meet, and he tells me that he's going home. He's going to not have any more treatments. We both knew that that would be the last time that we saw one another. He was going home so that he could have a dignified death. I found out later that he went home, and people came to see him from far and wide to pay their respects. He died a comfortable death, felt comfortable in his skin. He made the right decision. That's another case of emotional well-being and how it affects the texture of our lives. Gerhard: What sort of role do you think anthropology plays and perhaps should play in—you've mentioned earlier, the key role is to, I guess, get to the bottom of difference and tell stories about otherness. Should anthropology go further and change the world for the better or… Paul: Well, first of all, I think the main legacy of anthropology is not necessarily changing the world but is ethnography. That's what we do. We have lots of different kinds of theories that we put forward. These come and go as time goes on. What was popular when I was a graduate student, French structuralism, is no longer that much followed today. What stays is ethnography: telling people’s stories, describing people in their particular locale, describing how they live, how they talk, their conflicts, their passions, their lives. If it is well done, that's the sort of thing that has staying power. It's a text, I like to say, that will remain open to the world. In doing ethnography, in telling these kinds of stories from an ethnographic perspective, sheds a lot more light on questions of well-being because it's nuanced; it's detailed; it can be—sometimes the stories can be profound. They can implicate profound issues and philosophical issues. I think that that is—that's our great contribution to the world—is ethnography. It's one that has staying power. Now it has legs. In terms of changing the world, I think that anthropological voice has been largely missing from policy debates. That's why I and an increasing number of other anthropologists are beginning to blog, bringing an anthropological perspective on to the public policy debates. How much influence this has, I don't know. Usually it has more influence than we probably know ourselves, those of us who blog. I think it's important to get the anthropological orientation out there in the blogosphere and in policy debates. You really don't know who's reading these things and how they might have an impact—more people than you would imagine. I think it's—as a scholar and as an anthropologist, it's my obligation, obviously, to do my research and teach my courses and et cetera, et cetera, but I also think it's my obligation to share what little wisdom I've been able to acquire through the course of my long research and bring it to bear on public debate. It's not a question of whether people agree or disagree with me, but to get people talking about some of these cultural and social issues that are often forgotten in public discourse. Gerhard: I guess, stories are usually something very personal and allows people to connect, which I think is one of the strengths of storytelling. Why do you think storytelling has gone a little bit out of fashion, I guess? I remember one of your books. You wrote about—Walter Benjamin writing about the novel having taken over from storytelling, in a way. Paul: Yes. Gerhard: Now we live in an Internet-saturated world of the short—not story, but the short sort of Twitter, the shortest messaging possible, which perhaps makes it very difficult for anthropologists to get across their very elaborate stories and very… Paul: Sometimes but I—my struggle when I blog is that—my most successful blogs have been ones where I tell little bit—a little story about my students or my experience and relate it to a larger issue. The struggle is to try to reduce that to 850 words, which is not easy, but it is doable. It is doable. The more that I do it, the easier I find it is to do. You can do that and then provide links for people if they're interested. If the blog sort of incites interest, you can do that and provide links, and people can read on their own further about these kinds of issues. It is a challenge. That's for sure. I still—my own belief is that storytelling is central to the human condition. No matter whether we live in the blogosphere, Internet age, Twitter, and all of that, the stories are—there's something foundational about stories. There's a quote that I begin my—it's an epigraph of my new book. It's from Tim O'Brien. He's basically saying—I'm going to begin it a little bit wrong—but stories are for those late nights where you don't know where you've been or where you're going. Stories are a fraternity—I'm sorry, stories are for an eternity. When everything is lost, there is still the story there to sort of stabilize us and give us—buoy us across current of life, which has become complicated and complex and sometimes scary. Gerhard: In a lot of your stories, there's a lot of the anthropologist in there. It's quite personal. Do you think that's really important in anthropology: to allow the personal to be part of it? Paul: I think that you cannot separate the personal and the professional. I mean, anthropologists have been trying to do that for decades, since the inception of the discipline. I find that the personal has such an impact on the nature of the intersubjective encounter with—when you meet someone else, whether it's in your own society or another society. The personal texture of that relationship has a tremendous bearing on what you learn. The texture of that relationship is going to shape the kind of information that you will be able to acquire. In all of my fieldwork, I feel like it's not right to hide that personal relationship because those kinds of—my relationship with my teacher Adamu Jenitongo, my relationship with the filmmaker Jean Rouch, and my relationship with this man Yaya Harouna that I've been writing about in my new book—all of that involved all of the sort of tensions and the pros and cons, positive and negative aspects, of personal relationships. They all had a shape on—they all shaped my life as a person, but also as an anthropologist. For me you can't separate the two. I tried—my first book, "In Sorcery's Shadow," which is a memoir of my relationship to my teacher, I tried to write it as a traditional anthropological text. Then I asked myself—it wasn't very successful. I couldn't get past first or second chapter. Then I took it to my teacher and I said, "Baba, here's…" I translated the whole thing for him. It took me three months. He didn't say a word. At the end, he said, "Well, you know…" I said, "Baba, I'm leaving. What do you think of this book?" He said, "Well, it's not so good. Not so good." I said, "Why?" He said, "Because there's none of me in it, and there's none of you in it. If you're going to write about me, you have to tell the story of our relationship." That sort of stayed with me since that early encounter with him. That convinced me to write the book as a memoir, focusing on our relationship and how it shaped my knowledge of things of Songhay: Songhay sorcery and stuff like that. Gerhard: I guess, actually, in a lot of the interviews, that's come through true very strongly: the notion of relationships and how important they are for telling stories about fieldwork, but also anthropology in general, that they're really important and foundational for the discipline, but also foundational for how we write about them. One thing that I've got struck by reading one of your books—I forget which one now—where you recount the story that brought you on your very first fieldwork encounter where—I think it's sitting in a hut in Mehanna and the hut—two birds land on the hut, and that is the sign interpreted by Paul, I think, a local sorcerer. Paul: Djibo is the name. Gerhard: Djibo, sorry—a local sorcerer to take you under his wing. It struck me because it's luck in fieldwork. Not many people write about it openly because so many things happen and it's a lucky coincidence, and then we write our thesis about this based on luck, but it's really important, I think, in fieldworking. Paul: It mirrors life. I mean, contingency, luck is part of life's circumstances. Although from the Songhays’ perspective, Songhay people would say that it wasn't luck. That was destined to happen and that all the other things that happened to me were sort of planned out by my teacher who was waiting for me to learn enough about incantations and potions and stuff like that so that I would be ready to start studying with him. After a year of studying with these guys in Mehanna, I went—they said, "Well, we're finished, and our master wants to take you under his wing." They said it was my—Adamu Jenitongo whom I had met before when I was a Peace Corps volunteer. I arrived there and I knocked on the—clapped on the door, and he invited me. He smiled and he said, "What took you so long?" He had a sense of all of this sort of thing going on. Not that I can explain how he knew that, but somehow he did. In our view of things, life is contingent; but in other people's view of things, life is—there's no such thing as coincidence. Gerhard: I guess, as anthropologists, we often occupy this—what you call the in-between. Paul: Space between. Gerhard: The transition zone, the liminal, whatever you want to call it—between different worlds. In one of your books, you write about your own cancer treatment, where you used incantations, and you used things that you've learned in the field. Could you tell us a little bit more about how, I guess, those two worlds come together or what that in-between looks like for an anthropologist? Paul: Well, first of all—I mean, I'll give you one example of that, one story. When I went for my first—I was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. When I went for my first chemotherapy session, I met with my—my brother came with me. I met with my physician, and I was very, very nervous and frightened about the prospects of having chemotherapy. He outlined what was going to happen to me. None of it was very pleasant. He was a straight shooter. I said, "Okay, you told me what you're going to do. Now I'm going to tell you what I'm going to do." I said, "Let's hold hands," my brother and the oncologist and me. Then I recited the Songhay genji how. I realized that I needed something else more than what he was giving me to get through this. I got this little tingling in my stomach that I used to get in Niger. I said, "I realize what I needed to do." I recited the genji how, which harmonizes the force of the bush so that the inner dimension of my being would be in harmony with the other dimension of my medical experience. At the end of that, I had to spit in the four cardinal directions in the examination room. Spit in all directions. The oncologist was pretty cool about it. He said, "Well, that's cool. I want to find out more about that." Then he went—excused himself, and then came back with the levels of poisons they were going to put into me. Then he took me to meet my oncology nurse. She was one of the most beautiful women I had ever met in my life. She said, "Paul, I'm going take very good care of you." I turned to my oncologist, I said, "You see, it's beginning to work already." The point is, is that this being between has two possibilities: one, it can confuse you or rip you apart so you don't know your front side from your backside; or you can use the position of the between, which is—it's a kind of a—you can use the position of being in between to be creative, take advantage of what each dimension presents to it, and use that creatively to make life sweeter for you and maybe other people as well. That's the whole point. In Sufi mysticism, the between is the space of creativity. It's the space where invention and innovation occur. Gerhard: In a way, anthropology is often navigating that in-between. Paul: I think so. Anthropologists, we're always between—we're between languages, between cultures, between the public and the University setting. We're between all different kinds of things. It's a difficult—it's not an easy kind of negotiation. I think, ultimately, if you take the right approach to it, it can be extraordinarily productive and creative. Gerhard: Actually, you mentioned Sufism just now. There's a lot of Rumi in a lot of your books and Sufism comes through. Is it because Sufism was practiced in Niger? Is that an influence or… Paul: Well, one of the Islamic brotherhoods is the Sufi brotherhood. A lot of the Islam in West Africa, in Niger and Mali, is influenced by Sufism. It's more moderate, and there's more spiritual nature to it. They bring in spirits and things like that. They can encompass the pre-Islamic religions, religious practices, a little bit easier, or they do. There's that. Also, I've always been interested in Sufism, and I know lots of people from Iran who would tell me Sufi stories which are marvelous. I find them—they fit nicely with a lot of the things I write about. Gerhard: Well, I love them. Again, it's about the in-between, about that liminal space and connecting to otherness, in this case God, or the supernatural or whatever anyone wants to call it. Paul: I mean, one Sufi story that I can tell is—well, it's about a Sufi story. I have this very good friend, and I met him in New York City. I was wondering how to begin my book, one of my books. It was a book of essays. I had a book of Sufi stories that I was reading. He says, "Well, let's take a look at the book." I said, "Okay. I'm going to open it up, and the Sufi story that I happen upon, that's the one you're going to start the book with." He opened it up to the absolute perfect Sufi story to start the book. It was about—it was called "The Man Who Walked on Water." I don't know if we have time for me to go into the Sufi story. Gerhard: Maybe if you can just tell it because it's a really good story, and I think relates to anthropology again. Paul: So "The Man Who Walked on Water," there is this very fantastic scholar, Islamic scholar, renowned, taught at university, taught Islamic law at university, expert on the sharia. He was at a market and by river, and he heard someone reciting an incantation on an island which was wrong. The guy was getting the prayer wrong. He felt that it was his duty as a great scholar to go out there and correct this person. He thought doing this kind of good work, maybe one day he would reach the ends of his—he'd realize his dream of walking on water. He hires a boat, goes out to the island, sees this old man dressed in a coarse robe, which is what Sufi comes from, in this coarse robe, and he's reciting the incantation. He says, "My friend, it's great that you're practicing this incantation, this prayer, but you're getting it wrong. It's not ya-hu. It's ya-hu-ha.” The old man says, "Thank you so much. I wanted to make sure I get it correct. It's very, very important that you do. Thanks you so much my friend. You've done a very good deed today. I will make sure that I recite this prayer in the right way." The guy feels really self-satisfied with himself. He goes out in the canoe feeling, "I'm a step closer to walking on water." Then, in the middle of the river, he hears a commotion and the guy that had—he hears the fact that the guy didn't get it right, couldn't get it right. Then he hears a commotion in the water, and the man is walking on the water and says, "Excuse me, sir, but could you tell me that correction again? I can't seem to get it right." I mean, for me, that is an important story to be—in terms of the academic life, to sort of practice humility and to be humble and to appreciate the wisdom that people have who may not appear or may not be certified as wise people, wise men or women. That's been essential to my work because some of the wisest people I've met have been illiterate, living on sand dunes, dressed much like that man in the Sufi story. My teacher is that way, and he was the wisest person I've ever met. Part of my task has been to try to present as best I could some of his wisdom to the general public. Gerhard: Again, that's a story of anthropology. When we first get into the field, we start as almost children, childlike creatures having to learn everything from scratch, in a way, in a very humble position. Paul: That’s right, yes. That’s right. Gerhard: I think the last issue I'd like to raise is—you've called to reconnect with intuition and the imagination. It brings us to the senses that you’ve talked about, and the importance of talking about smells, textures, sensations in general, vis–à–vis a textural base, sort of Eurocentric view. You've done that in all your work. Can you just give us a story or something that really brings that to the fore, how important it is to bring it alive, I guess, on the page, because the page is still the main medium that we have to communicate? Paul: Yes. Well, I think the whole thing about the senses is to recreate—one of the great strengths of ethnography is it recreates place and space and the texture of relationships. All of that, if it's done in a sense—if it's done without evocation of the senses, that's very difficult to do. Rather than having an evocation of a place that someone can feel like they've visited that place by reading the text, you get some dry text, some kind of explanation of this or that. I think that's really very important. One story I'll tell—that is, when I was doing fieldwork in Niger in a compound of my teacher, Adamu Jenitongo, there was a lot of strife in his family. In fact, his youngest son had married this very, very beautiful woman from another ethnic group. She was a young woman in the compound, so she had to haul the water and do most of the cooking and stuff like that. She was not getting along well with her husband. I was there, which meant that she had extra duties. She had to prepare especially fine sauces, et cetera, et cetera. She was really irritated with him and me and everybody. What did she do? Well, she prepared me a particularly foul, bad sauce. It was really bad. My teacher and his son were insulted that she would prepare such a bad sauce for honored guest. I wrote a piece called "Bad Sauce, Good Ethnography." I sort of unpacked that whole scenario. For women in that particular circumstance, creating a foul-smelling, foul-tasting sauce was a way of engaging in protest. It was a really kind of powerful way to suggest, "I'm not going to put up with this anymore. Something's got to change." She couldn't verbalize it, but by doing it by way of smell and taste, she sent a very powerful message. To miss that sort of thing, that dimension of life in a compound, life in a small village, social life, is to miss an awful lot of that sort of dynamics of human condition. Gerhard: Great. Thank you very much. It was fantastic. Paul: I enjoyed it very much. Gerhard: Thank you.