Interview with Paul Stoller

by Adrián Navigante – Interstices: Center for Transversal Thinking

Paul Stoller is an American anthropologist, professor emeritus at the West Chester University of Pennsylvania (USA) and permanent fellow at the University of Erlangen-Nurnberg (Germany). He received numerous academic awards and grants (Wenner-Gren Foundation, Fulbright-Hays, National Science Foundation), as well as special distinctions, like the Anders Retzius Gold Medal – in recognition for his contributions to anthropology – by the King of Sweden. His singular itinerary and his intellectual production transcend by far the special field of African Studies.

He devoted almost two decades to the Songhay culture of Niger, West Africa, delving into the world of traditional healing practices (sorcery, herbal tradition, spirit possession) to the point of experiencing not only a methodological shift but also a kind of ontological shock leading to a deep reformulation of the very idea of “doing ethnography”. His personal and professional elaboration of his ethnographic adventure is relevant for any ethnographic and scholarly context, since it touches upon one of the most significant aspects of the human sciences: what does being (defined as) an anthropos mean?

Paul Stoller pleads for the practice of a “shared anthropology” which levels out the asymmetry between the scholar and the local. He also advocates the exercise of “narrative ethnography”, which is not characterized by objective descriptions of the studied field but rather by an intersubjective account that places the reader in the living world of relationships where the ethnographer not only studies “the others” but also learns from them – a process which certainly includes being challenged on different levels.

This is the first part of a long interview conducted by Adrian Navigante, in which the main focus is Stoller’s ethnographic experience and production from the 1970s to the 1990s. A second part will follow in the next issue of Transversal Paths (December 2025), which will cover the period from the 1990s to the present.

Adrián Navigante: Paul Stoller, my experience in reading your work was quite singular. From small and apparently insignificant details to remarkable insights and (self-)critical elaborations, you compel the reader to abandon taken-for-granted certainties and plunge into unexpected challenges, some of which may end up breaking cultural conditionings and weaving a new fabric for ethnographic work. I am very sensitive to such endeavors. Precisely because of this, I don’t skip any detail, and in fact I have chosen to begin our discussion by mentioning an aspect of your early books that could have been overlooked by readers, the epigraphs. I think they need to be carefully considered, since they are in many cases fore-glimpses of the author’s core argumentation. In your first books, the reader stumbles upon a peculiar combination of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophical wit and Songhay traditional wisdom. Without any doubt, these epigraphs reveal a key aspect of your understanding and way of dealing with the Songhay people of Niger. Let me expand a little bit on this. Your early ethnographic work consists of four books: In Sorcery’s Shadow (1987), The Fusion of the Worlds (1989), The Taste of Ethnographic Things (1989), and Embodying Colonial Memories (1995). The fourth essay, whose main subject is the embodied memories of colonial power in Hauka⁽¹⁾ possession cults, is not preceded by any epigraph, probably because it is addressed to a colleague and friend (French anthropologist Nicole Echard) whose untimely death remains epigraphically carved into those pages. The epigraphs of the other three books present not only the same choice of referents, but also a parallel structure: one quotation of Wittgenstein’s and one Songhay proverb or saying, both composing a dialogic structure. Your quotations of Wittgenstein refer mainly to the impossibility of directly accounting for the phenomena we intend to describe⁽²⁾, the constitutive gap between phenomena and the language that attempts to describe them⁽³⁾, and the importance of actions rather than mental processes⁽⁴⁾. The mere fact of mentioning one of the most iconoclastic philosophers in Western history seems to me a way of affirming the heterodox and in a way disruptive character of your writing, at least in the face of what you call “ethnographic realism”⁽⁵⁾. In this respect, it would be convenient to remind our readers that Wittgenstein’s thematization of a classical problem in philosophy, namely the gap between language and things, acquires a very concrete historical and anthropological stance in his notes on James G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough (written in the 1930s and 1940s, and never intended for publication). In those notes, he states that modern scientific discourse, in attempting to account for non-discursive practices of non-Western cultures (such as magic), fails at the very moment of explanation, precisely because it transforms a different form of life into an instance of cognitive or categorical inferiority. The Songhay sayings you quote appear to me as a complementary counterpoint to Wittgenstein’s statements: the first one from In Sorcery’s Shadow (“the floating log never becomes a crocodile”) refers to a space of alterity that persists and even expands once it has been opened; the second, from Fusion of the Worlds (“one does not study the spirits, one follows them”), to the necessity of inverting the asymmetry between worlds to bridge the gap toward the other; and the third, from The Taste of Ethnographic Things (“today you are learning with us, but to understand us you will have to grow old with us”), to the permanent effort required at interstitial spaces to come to terms with the challenge of alterity. The first Songhay quotation of In Sorcery’s Shadow is something you resort to in the last part of your book as a response to a woman from Mehanna who tells you (as a compliment due to your language competence and your familiarity with their culture) “you are a true Songhay”⁽⁶⁾; the second and third quotations are words from your teacher Adamu Jenitongo⁽⁷⁾ which allude to what you would later call “the interstices of the between”⁽⁸⁾ – and their arduous change of status from “factual gap” to “possible bridge”. I wonder whether you can expand on your choice of that epigraphic structure, as well as on the complex characterization of alterity that is artfully condensed in those epigraphs – especially in the light of the tension between ethnography’s vocation of truth and the need to experientially question that truth by re-working the field. After all, your books seem to account much more for the vocation of a griot at the service of the spirits (or at least of an artful ethnographer engaged in indigenous wisdom)⁽⁹⁾ than for the interest of a scientist attached to epistemic certainties.

Paul Stoller: No one has paid much attention to the epigraphs that I have used in many of my books. Your mention of them is thoughtful and compels me to think back to my early passion for philosophy. Indeed, the inclusion of these epigraphs derives from my reading philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, which was, and still is, one of the major centers of philosophical thinking in the US. Most of the philosophers there adhered to the strict study of epistemology and the search for a perfectly pure language. As a young man, I found this pursuit dry and uninspiring. Even so, I managed to find courses in existentialism and phenomenology that set the foundation for my past and present thinking. I was especially taken with the writings French thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, and especially Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Back then, the philosophy students in my cohort would drink too much coffee and stay up all night and debating the whys and wherefores of Being and Nothingness, The Stranger, The Second Sex, The Phenomenology of Perception, and especially Eye and Mind. Such reading and debate inspired me to become a writer. In those days, I often daydreamed about emulating Jean-Paul Sartre as I sat at a table at Les Deux Magots and wrote philosophy and fiction.

 

My training eventually led me to structure an academically competent research proposal to conduct anthropological fieldwork in West Africa. I wanted to discover how rival religious discourses as expressed during Friday Mosque sermons and spirit possession ceremonies shape the local-level politics of Mehanna, a market town in Niger on the west bank of the Niger River. During fieldwork, however, I stumbled into the world of Songhay healing, which introduced me to a parallel discourse and a new method of learning – apprenticeship, which, in turn, brought to the surface a different set of logical principles. When I wrote In Sorcery’s Shadow and Fusion of the Worlds, I found it intellectually productive to use epigraphs that juxtaposed the wisdom of Wittgenstein’s aphorisms in Philosophical Investigations to the wisdom found in Songhay proverbs and Adamu Jenitongo’s idiomatic expressions. In that way, I attempted to frame those books as works that embodied a set of competing ideas that challenged those found in the history of Western Philosophy.

Adrián Navigante: The subtitle of your first book (co-authored with your ex-wife Cheryl Olkes¹¹), In Sorcery’s Shadow, reads A Memoir of Apprenticeship Among the Songhay People of Niger. In the prologue, you already refer to that peculiar genre: “This book is not a standard ethnography; it is a memoir. There are no Songhay informants in this story – there are individuals who behave in very particular situations”¹². Your work, like any other ethnographic work, is composed of fieldnotes, transcribed tape-recordings, photographic material, maps, and sketches (of the Songhay country), and a chronological account of dates and places. However, the style of In Sorcery’s Shadow is not descriptive but narrative, and you are one of the characters in that story – the main character, not only as an anthropologist but also (and, as the book progresses, mainly) as an apprentice of sorcery.

The question imposes itself as to what you mean by “sorcery”. The term is quite difficult to pin down, partly because of what is usually understood by or rather associated with that word in the West (harmful magic, black arts, evil supernatural deeds, etc.¹³), but also because of different levels or shades of meaning that appear in your work. The official definition in the Glossary at the end of In Sorcery’s Shadow is quite pragmatic; it reads: “the conscious use of specialized knowledge to precipitate change”¹⁴. However, in chapter 11, the figure of the traditional sorcerer, or sohanci¹⁵, is opposed to that of the witch, who is said to practice malevolent magic (illness causation, soul-eating)¹⁶, so one could regard the main characteristic of Songhay sorcery as counter-sorcery – as Michael Taussig would put it, an apotropaic response to the active exercise of magic to do harm.

In chapter 19, where you refer to measures taken by a sohanci to protect himself, sorcery appears in a much broader sense as a world of war where anyone can be the target of the other¹⁷. This is reinforced in chapter 21, where sorcery is said to be a world in which morality does not exist¹⁸. Finally, in your epilogue, you give a definition that reminds me of what Eric de Rosny wrote about sorcery in Cameroon: “sorcery is a metaphor for the chaos that constitutes human relations”¹⁹. Could you give the reader an orientation, maybe based on Songhay vocabulary (in your books I merely found the term korte, which you translate as “magic”²⁰, and in Jean Rouch I stumbled upon the term tyarkaw, that is, “soul-eating sorcerers”²¹), to bear in mind the different nuances of the term (or the field) you translate as “sorcery” and still keep a somewhat unified sense (if that is possible)?

Paul Stoller: Like the concept of culture, the term “sorcery” is loaded with stigmatized associations that defy definition. Is it a metaphor? Is it a term that categorizes a set of practices? Indeed, is it important to define such a term? When practitioners or clients seek out “sorcery,” what are they looking for?

Steven Engler, my colleague at the Center Advanced Study at FAU-Erlangen recently suggested that people care less about a particular religious identity (Catholic, Sufi, Candomblé adept, or sorcery) than in the utility of religious practices. Put another way, definitions of sorcery are scholarly attempts, which are often imprecise or distracting, to comprehend seemingly incomprehensible phenomena. What really matters to both practitioners and clients is: Does it work? Will this practice solve my problems? Will it restore my health?

The overarching concern in any kind of religious ceremony, then, boils down to the process of healing. In Healing Stories: Healers and their Practices in a Troubled World, which is my current work-in-progress, the notion of healing takes center stage. Indeed, the primacy of healing conforms to patterns of thought and action in the Songhay world. There is no word for “religion” in the Songhay language. Songhay people see what we call religion as a set of paths – the path of the sohanci (descendants of Sonni Ali Ber, the magic King of the Songhay Empire (1464-1491)), the path of the sorko (descendants of Faran Maka Bote, the 10th Century master of the River Niger), and the path of Muslims, which includes clerics (alfaggey) who make healing amulets.

Among Songhay people, healers employ different sets of practices (korte). There is also the path of the cerkaw, or witch, nocturnal soul-eaters who maim and kill their neighbors. The witch is a lethal disrupter of a community. All these intentional and unintentional healers among Songhay people are seekers of power. Their “work,” which is a euphemism for healing and/or sickening practices, is judged by its effectiveness rather than by whether it is “good” or “bad.” In this sense, a sorcerous experience represents the always already chaos of the human condition.

Adrián Navigante: The “specialized knowledge” implied by the term “sorcery” (according to your glossary definition of it at the end of In Sorcery’s Shadow) is essentially related to a particular worldview and a form of wisdom that becomes manifest only when one delves into the traditional context – not as a detached observer but as a practitioner. This is a long and difficult path, which differs considerably both from the task of the classical ethnographer (forcing unusual, challenging, or even baffling phenomena into a standardized criterion of epistemic understanding) and from the personal accounts of “new age initiates” (capitalizing one’s own exotic experiences as universal gospels).

To focus on the aspect of “wisdom”, it is only in your later (and less academic) books, where you leave aside the dimension of “individual empowerment”, that the reader can grasp the deepest sense of the expression “Songhay sorcery”²² and the core of your ethnographic work. Does the knowledge of the practitioner contained in your books progressively depart from ethnographic contents (as they are prescriptively reproduced in mainstream scholarship), or do you think it rather sheds new light on them?

To this question I would like to add a complementary one: I have the impression that you write what you have reaped from an intense and long-standing immersion in a foreign world, but that the main revelation is the tensions of a singular learning process, where opposite worlds, contrasting sensibilities, and incommensurable ways of thinking and behaving play a key role. Do you think those tensions are mitigated at a certain stage by – unexpected or hard-earned – confluence points – or rather interstitial space emerging from such difficult confrontations?

Paul Stoller: The question of incommensurability has a long history in the Anthropology of Religion. It is the key message in E.E. Evan-Pritchard’s classic work, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande (1937). In that memorable book, Evans-Pritchard grapples with the incomprehensibility of Azande witchcraft logic and the systematic and logically coherent systems of thought that comprise 20th-century British philosophy.

In a famous passage, Evans-Pritchard sees the light of witchcraft streaking across the night sky. It disappears in his neighbor’s compound. After dawn, his neighbor announced the death of his kinsman. Evans-Pritchard’s neighbor then used the logic of witchcraft to explain that tragic event. A witch had landed in the compound, killing one of its residents. Evans-Pritchard wrote that he never discovered “the real” reason for the death of the neighbor’s kinsman. There are many such passages in a book filled with these fascinating equivocations.

The central question of Evans-Pritchard’s book begs two questions: (¹) how does a scholar who studies religion confront a set of apparently “irrational” beliefs, and (²) how does the scholar attempt to represent such systems?

One of the best discussions of the first issue comes from Clifford Geertz’s classic essay: “Anti Anti Relativism,”²³ in which he criticizes scholars who attempt to shape non-Western systems of thought into rational systems of universal application. He ends his nuanced argument with a reference to theory-seeking anthropologists: “If we wanted home truths, we should have stayed at home.”²⁴

In other words, the experience of fieldwork creates (¹) a set of ethical issues (how does one show proper respect to the ideas and practices of non-western peoples?) and (²) a set of representational issues (can one describe non-western thoughts and practices using the age-old practice of writing in 19th century plain style?).

My answer to the question of ethics is rather straightforward. If one becomes a healer’s apprentice, she or he spends years establishing and reinforcing bonds of social trust – a necessary element in transmitting precious knowledge. During an apprenticeship, any ethical betrayal undermines that trust and ends the apprenticeship. Apprentices must open themselves fully to the healing experience and negotiate the existential risks and joys that healing entails.

My answer to the question of representation borrows from the late Edith Turner who advised us to “Write about hot topics with a cool hand.”²⁵ I would add that such cool-hand writing should honor the wisdom of healers.

Adrián Navigante: In Sorcery’s Shadow is the story of a transformation, and it could even be read as a kind of ethnographic Initiationsroman – though with a notion of subjectivity that transcends by far the boundaries of a merely “individual story”. The book contains precious information about Songhay cosmology, history, custom, and tradition; however, its central plot is the story of an American anthropologist (mainly an individualist Westerner with power ambitions) turned into a sorko (a man embedded in different sorts of relations revolving around community and healing).

At the beginning of the book, we meet an anthropologist whose main goal is to investigate the relationship between the use of language and local politics among the Songhay. At a certain point, he becomes the main object in a local interpretation of a presumably fortuitous event, and that instance drastically modifies his status – not only for local people but also for himself.

Let’s summarize the scene for the readers: one fine day, while you were typing your fieldnotes in the company of Djibo Mounmouni, a Zerma living in Mehanna who turned out to be a sorko, two birds defecated on your head. The episode might have been very annoying for you, but for the sorko Djibo Mounmouni it was miraculous. He had no doubt that you had been pointed out to him. In the Songhay cosmos, the birds were two powerful beings, Dongo (a deity of thunder) and Harakoy Dikko (a deity of the Niger River). Djibo recognized the sign and felt the need (or the obligation) to teach you how to become a sorko.

It is interesting that, in that context, two authors crossed your mind: Edward Evans-Pritchard, who refused to become personally involved with Azande witch doctors for fear of losing his objectivity²⁶, and Carlos Castaneda, who transformed an ethnographic hoax on the Yaqui Indians into a spiritual best-seller²⁷. Once again, we see a tension of opposites – neither of them quite convincing to you. For that reason, you decided to learn from the Songhay without imposing your own categories on them and without superposing spiritual platitudes onto their own contents.

The world of traditional Songhay thought taught you that the learning process is not limited to verbal interactions with locals but takes place also among the spirits by means of different incantations, ritual meals, dancing patterns, and a profound refinement of perception and cognition. What took hold of you at first was a mixture of fear and fascination, and your task was to refine those impressions and feelings through increasing involvement in that “other world” – socializing with its agents the way Africans do.

This is a clear passage from the Western model of natural science (linking epistemic validity with objectivity) to a model of what post-ontological-turn anthropologists would call inter-subjective epistemologies (linking interaction and performance with a non-ethnocentric and much broader type of knowledge).

Could you perhaps try to delineate the spaces in which such epistemologies take place? In other words, how do terms like embodiment, imagination, and magic (among others) relate to each other, and in which way do they introduce other parameters of experience? Further, I would like you to say a few words – if possible – as to how those spaces end up displacing objectivity parameters and transforming the exercise of ethnography into an exploratory process and an exercise in ontological symmetrization of cultures that can barely be accepted by Western scholarship as a source of (epistemic) knowledge.

Paul Stoller: Soon after the death of my teacher, Adamu Jenitongo, I met a man who sold medicinal herbs at a market in Niger’s capital city, Niamey. He knew that I had studied with Adamu Jenitongo and asked me to sit with him. I spent many days on his palm frond mat in the shade of an acacia tree. Clients would approach him and ask him for medicines that would treat both village (physical) and bush (spirit) illnesses. I immediately sensed Soumana Yacouba’s kindness. In time, he told me that he was a do, a guardian of a certain section of the Niger River, and that the guardianship had been in his family for many centuries. As a do, he knew a great deal about the healing properties of plants, especially those found along the banks of the Niger River. After many days of sitting and listening, I asked Soumana Yacouba if I could learn from him.

“I cannot give you an answer right now.”
I remained silent.
Without further explanation, he stood up. “Come to my house. My wife is preparing lunch. She’s a good cook.”

We took a taxi to his compound, a cluster of mud huts with thatched roofs. We entered one of those huts and we sat on palm frond mats. Soumana’s wife brought us lunch – rice smothered with a fragrant meat sauce. Soon thereafter, Soumana’s wife returned. I complimented her cooking. She accepted my compliment with a smile and left.Soumana looked up to the roof of his hut and began to talk to his ancestors. He asked his ancestors if they would accept me as his apprentice. Listening to words that I could not hear, Soumana attested to my character and my capacity to keep secrets. He looked at me:

“They say that you are okay. You can become my apprentice.”
“But I didn’t hear anything.”
“In time, you’ll be able to hear the voices of the ancestors.”

I went on to study with Soumana Yacouba and didn’t think too much about how I could explain what I had experienced. Terms like “embodiment”, “imagination”, and “magic” may have linkages in the objectified world of academic discourse, but in Soumana Yacouba’s hut, they faded into the background. Placing my trust in the alternative logic of Soumana’s world, I wanted to know how I might one day be able to hear the voices of ancestors.

I have written extensively about embodiment, the imagination, and magic, but only because of my sensuous experiences in the world of Songhay healers.²⁸. When I listen to scholars presenting their work, I am always struck by how much time they spend attempting to define terms, like religion, sorcery, embodiment, and so on. If you think about these terms from this “inside”, which is the vantage of an initiated apprentice, these efforts seem to steer us away from a deeper comprehension of religion, embodiment, and sorcery. From the “inside,” it is perhaps better to borrow the much-repeated line of TV’s most famous mob boss, Tony Soprano: “It is what it is”²⁹.

Adrián Navigante: The account of your experience as an apprentice among the Songhay goes beyond established ethnographic research criteria and hermeneutic parameters. At the same time, it discloses (at least to me) another way of doing ethnography, by means of “the extended gaze”, irrespective of whether the contents of that reversed ethnography are accepted by Western academia or not. You approach essential aspects of Songhay life that are not objectifiable in the scholarly sense of the term; yet they remain an essential part of their tradition and way of living – usually inaccessible to Western researchers.

These aspects – or contents, if we see them from the point of view of a living tradition – build the core of your instruction as a sorko benya³⁰. That is why so much effort – not only intellectual but also bodily – was required of you to get deeply acquainted with them. The first aspect is sound, or rather the use of sound and vibration as a vehicle of power (for example, in incantations, which serve to activate objects, harness the forces of non-human beings, and protect oneself or attack others).

The second aspect is witchcraft, or more exactly the activation of a radar perception of witches in your body by means of a sacrificial ritual performed with a silver ring of yours and other ingredients (a small mirror, a sheet of white cloth, plants, twigs, roots, powders, incantations, etc.). The third aspect is related to Songhay healing rituals, like the shamanic retrieval of a bewitched man’s double³¹. Such rites demand an expansion of the senses toward the invisible environment to pinpoint agents of distortion, locate the abducted double, and eventually retrieve it. This was all new to you, especially as a practice with concrete effects.

Finally, you had to eat a magic paste called kusu, which your master, the powerful sorko³² of Mehanna, Kada Mounmouni, prepared for you to fix the substance of sorcery in your body. There are other aspects, but the ones I have just mentioned suffice to formulate my next question. Don’t you think that each one of those aspects enables you to get new – and otherwise fully inaccessible – ethnographic data precisely because the dominant perspective on the practice of ethnography is deeply questioned through the very discipline you are subjected to?

To expand a little bit on this last aspect: I cannot imagine how any other ethnographer would have learned, for example, that sorcery attacks in the Songhay context enter the body of the victims through the third finger of the left hand other than by undergoing the same initiatory processes you describe in your memoir – the main corollary of which seems to me the realization that a detached observation can never do justice to the essential aspect of the living culture being studied.

Paul Stoller: I once wrote an essay, “The Sorcerer’s Body”³³, which was my attempt to demonstrate the power of a more phenomenological approach to studies of magic, sorcery, and witchcraft. In that essay, I contrast embodied and disembodied approaches to the anthropology of religion.

I consider the ramifications of the distanced approaches of Lévi-Strauss, as presented in his essay “The Sorcerer and His Magic,”³⁴ and Evans-Pritchard in his book on the Azande³⁵. In both cases, these notable scholars use “data” gleaned from archival sources or from fieldwork to build a case for a particular theory. Lévi-Strauss drew on the work of scholars studying Amerindian populations to demonstrate the analytical power of structuralism. Evans-Pritchard, who, of course, sent his cook to apprentice with a Zande witch-doctor, used that “data” to discuss the so-called logic of non-Western others, which, in the end, he considered interesting but irrational and contradictory.

Faced with mind-challenging phenomena that threatened to sweep them away in the flood waters of an angry river, they opted to cling to the mind-saving branch of objectivity, a branch that promised measures of control in seemingly uncontrollable circumstances. Neither Lévi-Strauss nor E.E. Evans-Pritchard was ever “implicated” in the societies, groups, or systems that they sought to explain. That non-implicated scholarly path has long been followed by the great majority of anthropologists and their study of all aspects of social life, including, of course, the study of religious practices.

What happens when a scholar becomes implicated in a religious tradition, when he or she is initiated, when he or she eats or drinks a transformative substance? Is initiation and the apprenticeship that follows it merely a methodological tool that gives scholars access to secret or semi-secret knowledge? For me, the notion of scholarly implication is linked to much larger ethical questions.

If you are an apprentice-scholar, what are your ethical obligations? If you are entrusted with secret texts, the identity of “magical” plants, or important ritual practices, how do you link these elements to your scholarship? Can you simultaneously be a practitioner and scholar? The answer is an authoritative yes! There is no one way to write about subjects of magic, witchcraft, sorcery, or religion.

For me, the best practice has been to adjust my writing to the subject and audience. When I have written about sorcery, which involves personal implication and private scenarios, I write mostly memoir. When I write about spirit possession, which involves a large cast of characters – both human and spirit – and public performance, I stick to fairly standard ethnography, with much foregrounded narrative. Even so, I cannot forget that, besides being an initiated apprentice, I am also an anthropologist, a scholar who reflects on the philosophical implications of my ongoing research.

When I muse about anthropology or philosophy, I do so in narrative-laced academic essays. Above and beyond these attempts at broadly based representation, I am committed to adhering to high ethical standards which ensure that the trust I developed with my teachers, both living and dead, is not betrayed.

Adrián Navigante: What you have just referred to is a remarkable art of combination and delimitation of roles and functions, but it does not always turn out to be like that… In the same way in which certain aspects of your apprenticeship of sorcery are disruptive for Western scholarship standards, they may also be taken in a metaphorical sense and ultimately “explained away”.

Unprejudiced but still rationally minded anthropologists would say that the suggestive power of incantations is a social fact with its own effects, or that the discourse of sorcery (because of its very performativity) generates experiences corresponding to (or rather co-shaping) its own fictional reality, or that ritual ingestion creates the substance of sorcery by means of a transferential mechanism.

I would like to go deeper now, that is, beyond the question of “methods” or “approaches” and the debates around them. There are incidents you experienced as a result of your practice which provoked a radical turn not only in your method as an ethnographer but also in your way of being in the world.

If your objectivity was compromised the moment you decided to walk the path of a sorko-sohanci, the experiential reversal took place during your interaction with a magician and possession priestess in Wanzerbe. In the night after the first meeting, you felt a presence in the room, and when you started to roll off your mat and leave, you noticed that your legs were paralyzed. You recited a strong incantation that Adamu Jenitongo had taught you for protection, the genji how³⁶, for hours on end, until your body responded to stimuli and the presence left the room.

Next morning, you confronted the priestess, called Dunguri, and she told you: “Now I know that you are a man with a pure heart […]. You are ready. Come into my house and we shall begin to learn”³⁷. After this episode, you write the following: “Wanzerbe had turned my world upside down. Before my paralysis, I knew there were scientific explanations of Songhay sorcery. After Wanzerbe my unwavering faith in science had vanished. Nothing I had learned in academe had prepared me for Dunguri”³⁸.

Can we say that the episode with Dunguri in Wanzerbe was an ontological shock that pulled away your materialist and rationalist leanings and revealed an animistic underground in your way of experiencing the world and relating to other beings?

Paul Stoller: Scholars are trained in the tried-and-true methods of social science that have a centuries-old history. Scholars are taught to write passionless prose in the third person. We are wedded to Aristotelian logic and its rules of argumentation. Social scientists are taught to use systematic methods to gather data on political systems, economic exchange, kinship, and spirit possession. Once we gather the data, institutional expectations compel us to use it to refine theories of politics, exchange, kinship, and/or spirit possession. Clifford Geertz famously called this phenomenon “the dead hand of competence.”³⁹

For many years, I took up the burden of these institutional expectations. Although I had been initiated by Sorko Mounmouni Kada and Sohanci Adamu Jenitongo and had experienced events that defied comprehension, including near-death episodes in Wanzerbe, the pull of 200 years of (social) scientific practice was, at that time in my life, stronger. Those ingrained traditions compelled me to write a “dead hand of competence” book manuscript on Songhay sorcery. That draft had an introduction, a review of the relevant literature, a presentation of results, and a discussion of the study’s theoretical significance.

My love for my teacher, Adamu Jenitongo, however, compelled me to rethink my draft. I wondered what he would think about my untitled monograph. And so, I traveled to Niger to translate my academic work to my teacher.

I began the arduous task of translating my text. It took me more than two months of late-night translation to complete my project. During the process, my teacher would listen for a little while, yawn, and tell me to return the next day, but he offered no commentary. On the eve of my departure, I nervously asked my teacher about the work:

“Baba,” I asked, “I’ve translated my work, and you’ve said not a word about what you think?”
The old man smiled: “Well, it’s not so good.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“There’s not enough of me in it. There’s not enough of you in it. Write something that tells the story of our relationship. Write something that your grandchildren and my grandchildren will read and discuss.”

That comment presented me a challenge that I strove to meet in In Sorcery’s Shadow, a narrative in which I attempted to describe the whys and wherefores of the Songhay world through the prism of my relationship – of love and loss – with Adamu Jenitongo. That is why In Sorcery’s Shadow, which is a book written by a young man, has no footnotes or references. It is the story of the evolution of my relationship with Adamu Jenitongo. Although the University of Chicago Press published it more than 35 years ago, it is still in print. When my granddaughter sits down to read it, I will look forward to our conversation.

I should also add that a more profound ontological shock occurred when I was diagnosed with cancer in 2001, which precipitated yet another shocking confrontation with mortality. That experience led me to a deeper understanding of Songhay healing and a clearer comprehension of how I should proceed on the path of life. I will discuss those issues in the second installment of this interview⁴⁰.

Adrián Navigante: In Sorcery’s Shadow is a very rich book because it contains not only ethnographic data and accounts of personal experience with local priests, healers, and witches, but also an ethical question encompassing all the experiences mentioned in the book. If the world of sorcery (i.e. traditional Songhay methods of effecting change and the Weltanschauung related to them) does not respond to any moral criteria established a priori, if healing and harming are closely interrelated, if the visible human warfare we witness in history and politics knows a continuity in the invisible world and is perpetually fed by occult procedures, what orientation can be followed to gain “Songhay wisdom”?

It seems to me that this question can only be answered in a twofold way: with regard to one’s own actions (with the scope of harmonizing oneself) and in relation to the group’s habits and customs into which one is inserted (to create and preserve a collective balance). You accepted to become a sorko baya for different reasons: at first to gain more and better ethnographic data, then to empower yourself and influence others, subsequently to become a hard man (like a spiritual warrior), and finally to cope with the problems arising from the tension between the social and the spirit world.

To this last aspect, we can add the one you mention in Stranger in the Village of the Sick, although a detailed discussion of that book will be part of our next conversation. In that book, you say that a sorko benya is able to cope with his own mortality in the best possible way. What “guided you” throughout this long-standing progression so that you did not relapse to earlier ambitions or were led astray by false projections and promises, and what changes took place in your perception and understanding of the task of a sohanci-sorko from the 1980s to the present?

Paul Stoller: In the Songhay world, it is said that the sohanci, a master healer and guardian of the moral order, can defy death. When a sohanci joins the ancestors, his or her apprentices receive the objects that belonged to him (rings, bracelets, lances, special sandals, and satchels of medicines). Sohanci rings, which embody centuries-old power of Sonni Ali Ber’s descendants, are significant, for it is said that they link the person who wears them on the third finger of the left hand to her or his teacher.

While he was alive, Sohanci Adamu Jenitongo gifted me some of his medicines and a few of his ritual objects. He also gave me several rings, which I wear on the third finger of my left hand. Following his instructions, these are rings that one doesn’t sell or give away. They are the everlasting tangible link between me and my teacher. Put another way, Sohanci Adamu Jenitongo has “had my back” for many decades. He taught me much when he was alive, and even though he died decades ago, he has continued to help me on the sinuous path that is my life. Such a connection is not at all uncommon among Songhay healers and their apprentices.

Even so, it has taken me a long time to recognize the deep lessons that my teacher conveyed to me. As a young apprentice, I thought that Songhay healing entailed the use of specialized knowledge to heal, sicken, or kill. My introduction to the Songhay world of magic, sorcery, and witchcraft convinced me that that world was a space of murderous competition. Who might know the most powerful incantation, or where to find and how to use the most potent medicines?

As a young man, I lacked the life experience to understand the fundamental principles of Songhay healing. When cancer gripped my body in 2001, I found myself in a place in which Adamu Jenitongo’s words and acts took on new meaning. I no longer considered sorcery as a murderous competition for power, but as a set of practices that enabled the healer and her clients to feel “comfortable in their skins.”

I realized that as one ages, the healer’s obligations shift from primarily healing clients of physiological and spirit illnesses to those of being a mentor – conveying to the next generation what knowledge he or she has acquired. The sacred obligation of Songhay master healers, then, is to convey wisdom to the next generation.

Adrián Navigante: We will deal with the question of a healer’s obligations – which is a key issue in your work – in the second part of our conversation. Now, I would like to go back to In Sorcery’s Shadow. A very interesting aspect of that book is what I would call your “limit experience” with the most powerful sorceress of Wanzarbe, Kassey. I think that episode is worthy of being recounted because it triggered part of your consequential reflections in the last part of the book.

You had tried to meet Kassey for seven years without success (when you stumbled upon the other sorceress of Wanzerbe, Dunguri, you were actually looking for Kassey). Now, Kassey came to you one day in 1981 quite unexpectedly, while you were in Mehanna, through a messenger who told you that she had already met you, that she had seen you. This man gave you a present sent by her, a green powder which you were supposed to eat to gain protection against bullets, accidents, and evil people⁴¹.

You thought it could be poison and consulted your teacher, Adamu Jenitongo. To your surprise, he confirmed the authenticity of that powerful sohanci⁴² powder and told you that the present was Kassey’s way of inviting you to meet her at Wanzerbe. When that encounter finally took place (a year later, in 1982), she received you with words of approval⁴³, which inspired you to surpass your anthropological ambition (you wanted to record, among other things, her vast knowledge on medicinal plants) and open your heart to her.

This means, as far as I could understand, to adopt the opposite position of Western anthropologists who travel long distances and face lots of difficulties out of sheer ambition, that is, in order to get valuable information from local people and produce a scientific work. In your case, you decided to learn from Kassey by re-situating yourself (as a sohanci benya) within the universe of sorcery. The result was, as I said, a “limit experience”.

The last chapter of the period 1982-1983 ends with Kassey’s words “come back tomorrow, we shall continue”⁴⁴, but we don’t know what happened next. The following chapter begins in the following year, 1984, which took you for the last time to Wanzerbe. Your description of Kassey that year is quite different. She was reluctant to transmit knowledge to you; her behavior was odd and increasingly suspicious; it became threatening at a certain point…

In the night after your last meeting with her, you experienced a sorcery attack (of the type sent by Dunguri), but this time it was no test. You recited the genji how to deviate the destructive forces, and the next day, you learned that two close relatives of your property caretaker, Idrissa Dembo, whose family was originally from Wanzerbe, had died during the night. The news is even more shocking if the reader knows, as you mention in The Taste of Ethnographic Things, that Kassey was Idrissa’s stepmother⁴⁵.

About the night’s episode you write the following: “One night and two deaths. What I had done, I agonized. People had sent death to my house and in warding it off I had diverted it elsewhere. The world of sorcery was too much with me”⁴⁶.

Many questions come to my mind in recalling that episode: Was there any concrete learning process with Kassey between 1982 and 1984? If there was, why do you pass the whole of it in silence? If there was not, what did your dialogue consist of? As to the limit experience, I am curious to know whether the “limit” goes beyond what you yourself said to Cheryl Olkes at a certain point: “I know my limit and I’ve reached it”⁴⁷, which is a personal confession.

What I read in the Kassey episode, and I hope my assumption is not wrong, is the limit of trust between “boro bi” and “anasara”⁴⁸, the unavoidable and unsurpassable tension between locals and foreigners, and also the limit of transmission of knowledge in the world of sorcery, where nobody is reliable⁴⁹ – and teachers are therefore constrained not to transmit too much for fear of being destroyed by their own disciples. Do you agree with these aspects?

Paul Stoller: Following the death of Adamu Jenitongo, life in Niger became sad, and for me, more personally dangerous. After falling sick with a case of “malaria that wasn’t malaria,” a potentially lethal sickness that someone sent to me, I decided that continued fieldwork in Niger posed too many potentially life-threatening problems.

For that reason, I decided in 1992 to begin a research project on West African street traders in New York City. I spent most of my field time with traders from Niger and Mali on 125th and 116th streets in Harlem⁵⁰. During my time in Niger, I had known the relatives of many of the street traders. During fieldwork we sat, talked, trading stories of rural Niger, Niamey, the capital city, and, of course, their adventures in New York City. I began that project in 1992 and have continued to visit and learn from what people in Niger call, “Les New Yorkais.”

I developed a close relationship with one man in particular, Issifi Mayaki, who sold jewelry and incense at the 116th Street Malcolm Shabazz Harlem market. We talked on the phone regularly, and he would ask me where he could find a good French-speaking physician or an attorney who excelled at immigration law. We talked about the trials and tribulations of our families. In short order, we established a real friendship during which we shared our hopes, dreams, and fears.

After several years of friendship Issifi had saved enough money to fly his younger brother from Niger to New York City. He soon found a security guard job and moved into Issifi’s Harlem apartment. One evening I phoned Issifi to catch up. His brother answered the phone.

“Hello,” his brother said.
“Hi, this is Paul, Issifi’s friend.”
In the background, I heard Issifi ask: “Who’s on the phone?”
“It’s Paul,” his brother said.
“Oh, the white man,” I heard Issifi say, not knowing that I could hear him.
A moment later, Issifi picked up the phone: “Hello, my brother,” he said. “How are you?”

At that moment of truth, I came to realize that no matter the extent of my linguistic and cultural competence, Issifi and I would never completely cross a cultural divide that has long separated black people from white people, the colonized from the colonial, and research subjects from their anthropologists. An anthropologist, for example, can learn a great deal about another group of people. He or she can even learn cherished secrets about medicines, incantations, and ritual practices. Even so, there is an invisible boundary that one cannot cross. I became an initiated apprentice. I ingested magic cake (kusu), mixed potions, and learned how to read messages spelled out in the configurations of divinatory shells. Even so, Songhay people like to say: Lamba tondi, a si boro te jaanah, that is, “the landing stone will never make a person a jaanah.” Fishermen look for round semi-submerged stones to moor their dugouts in the shallows of the Niger River. The jaanah is a kind of mollusk that looks like a landing stone, but, of course, isn’t one and will never become one. And so my relationships with Songhay healers (Adamu Jenitongo, Kassey Wanzerbe, Moumouni Kada, Djibo Mounmouni, and Fatouma Seyni) led me deeply into their worlds, but at some point, I reached a barrier beyond which I could not venture. My telephone encounter with Issifi Mayaki brought me a megadose of cultural reality. Although I am an initiated apprentice to Songhay healers, I do not live in Niger, and I no longer treat clients. My telephone encounter with Issifi Mayaki convinced me that my personal and professional obligation was to mentor anthropological initiates and convey the wisdom of my teachers to anyone willing to listen, read, or watch my work – old world messages to new world audiences of people living in turbulent times.

Adrián Navigante: There is a lot to say about what the message an anthropologist like you can and should convey to a young audience in these times of general crisis. That is the subject of your book Wisdom from the Edge (2023), which we will approach at length in our next conversation. Now let me go back to Fusion of the Worlds, which can be read as the complementary side of In Sorcery’s Shadow. Your book on sorcery is a memoir in which subjectivity, secrecy, invisible entities, and other aspects of the more esoteric dimension of the Songhay tradition play a key role. Fusion of the Worlds is a book on possession, which in the Songhay tradition is a public affair with an aura of carnival as well as bright costumes, energetic dancing, and pulsating music. In this book, your appearance in the first person is scant. Far from being the main character of the book, you are rather a marginal figure. The main character is collective, a possession troupe of Tillaberi in Niger, and there is, as in In Sorcery’s Shadow, a narration. This renders the epithet “objective” (in the sense of an ethnographic report) quite difficult to define in your book. As Michel Leiris said with regard to Zār possession in Northern Ethiopia⁽⁵¹⁾, such cults have an undoubtedly theatrical aspect, and Fusion of the Worlds begins by presenting its dramatis personae – both from the social world and from the spirit world, which are separated in everyday life and fused in possession. As I was reading the book, I realized that the collective character has two sides: not only the human mediums of the Songhay troupe you were related to, but also the spirits (Tooru, Genji Kwari, Genji Bi, Hargay, Hausa Genji, and Hauka)⁽⁵²⁾. As the narration unfolds, the spirits gain more and more space, and your own association with the human group becomes more multifaceted, sensual, and poetic. The epithets I am using are not metaphorical at all: the spirits are manifold, and their dynamic is a challenging assemblage for anthropological understanding; the sensuality is in the medium’s bodies (as embodied spirits) and in the musicians (as a sensual bridge linking the social and the spirit world); finally, the word “poetry” refers to the words of power obliging the spirits to take the bodies of their mediums. When you refer to this last aspect, there is a revealing passage in which you write: “because of their word-power, sorkos do not give their praise-poetry to scholars in exchange for money. To record possession praise-poetry, scholars must learn it themselves. In this way, I learned spirit praise-poetry”⁽⁵³⁾. This defines your position in the narration and links you as a character to the character “Paul” in In Sorcery’s Shadow. In Fusion of the Worlds, you are barely visible; you are not part of the possession troupe, but you are inside their world. You are not only reporting on Songhay possession culture but also following the spirits (which are the neglected side of them, neglected by an anthropology that imposes rational criteria to make sense of the “irrational” others). Your attitude takes the reader back to the Songhay epigraph (by Adamu Jenitongo) at the beginning of the book: “One does not study the spirits, one follows them”. What is it like following the spirits in the strict sense of the word? What does it mean, anthropologically speaking? In other words: when one realizes that it is not about respecting the beliefs of others but rather about sharing their world-experience from the inside, how does the anthropologist (despite the defense mechanisms of his/her “cognitive ego”⁽⁵⁴⁾) gain corporeal, affective, imaginative empathy toward the others to the point of breaking not only methodological but also ontological barriers?

Paul Stoller: In my view, scholars can gain corporal, affective, and imaginative empathy towards others by taking a more artful approach to their scholarship. The great Swiss artist Paul Klee often discussed how he envisioned painting a forest. In his lectures, he said he had to open himself to the trees in the forest. In so doing, the forest gets entangled in his being, and he paints to break free – painting from the “inside” to get to Cezanne’s truth that “nature is on the inside.” In a turbulent world in dire need of wise counsel, is it important to produce work that gives us an artful glimpse of “the inside”? Consider what the great Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in The Birth of Tragedy:

“Socrates and his successors, down to our day, have considered all moral and sentimental accomplishments – noble deeds, compassion, self-sacrifice, heroism … to be ultimately derived from the dialectic of knowledge and therefore teachable … But science, spurred on by its energetic notions, approaches irresistibly those outer limits where the optimism of logic must collapse … When the inquirer, having pushed to the circumference, realizes how logic in that place curls about itself and bites its own tail, he is struck with a new kind of perception, a tragic perception, which requires, to make it tolerable, the remedy of art”⁽⁵⁵⁾.

Scholars in the social sciences and humanities can access this new kind of perception about which Nietzsche wrote through the framework of narrative–stories that the sages told to convey wisdom from one generation to the next. If narratives are well crafted, the words can jump from the writer’s hand, represented by words on the page, to the reader’s mind, enabling him or her to think a new thought or feel a new feeling. I’ll have more to say about these issues of representation in the second instalment of this interview.

Adrián Navigante : One of the most interesting parts of fusion of the Worlds is your description of the Songhay cosmology, where the reader can clearly see the tension between the animistic core of the local tradition (thematized by Jean Rouch as early as in 1945) and the progressive Islamization of the Songhay world. If the Songhay world consists, as Adamu Jenitongo told you, of seven heavens, seven hells, and the earth, it is on the twofold level of the earth where the animistic elements come to the fore, whereas the Islamic ideology dominates the speculative architecture of the farthest cosmic levels. In fact, the distribution of the agents or actors of hell and heaven is dictated by Islamic doctrine: Jews, Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, agnostics, and atheists belong to the nether realms, whereas the higher spheres are occupied by Islamic entities (let’s say angels and ultimately Allah), except for the first one, the spirit world, which closely interacts with the social world of living human beings. Parallel to that, the first level of hell appears a chthonic waystation populated by the souls of the recently dead, not yet severed from the world of the living. The world of possession (as the world of sorcery) is, in this sense, an animistic world in which all action is focused on the earth and the forces within and around it (the dead, the spirits, the mediums). In that context, the monotheistic God (Allah) becomes a deus otiosus, and Koranic elements have concrete use only if integrated (apart from prayers, in written form or as craftsmanship) into magical procedures like fabrication of amulets or talismans. This tension of these two worlds in the Songhay cosmology is not precisely a “fusion” (like the one between the social and the spirit world in possession cults). It seems rather a dynamic of dislocation. Mediums are considered devil worshipers, and some Islamic clerics resort to sorcery (another form of the “devil worship” they denounce in the animists!) with the aim of destroying traditional communities. My impression is that the more distance one takes from the animistic (that is, ambivalent, performative, and living) environment of human and non-human relationships, the more important Islamic theological speculation (based on metaphysical and moral principles devoid of concrete relations) becomes. Could you expand on this complex aspect of Songhay religious life?

Paul Stoller : Spirit possession among Songhay people is a symbolic reenactment of Songhay experience in the world. It is a performance of living history. The pantheon of spirits, divided into five groups, mirrors the social order. In both the spirit and social worlds, nobles and captives engage in master–slave relations. In both worlds, there are shepherds, Fulan pastoralists, and Fulan spirits. There are, as well, migrants and spirits from the East (Hausa-speaking people and spirits) and the North (Tuareg, Bella – Tuareg captives – and Arabs). There is a long pre-Islamic history among the Songhay people. Although Islam was first introduced to Songhay people in the 12th century or so, it did not spread far and wide during the Songhay Empire (1464–1591). In the recent past, one found Islam practiced in larger cities and towns. As Muhammad’s religion spread slowly to the countryside, new spirits, representing the impact of Islam in West Africa, began to take the bodies of Songhay spirit mediums.
When the French military occupied Songhay land during the late 19th century and colonized Mali and Niger in the early 20th century, the Hauka spirits – who represented colonial identities (military and political officials, military officers, truck drivers, physicians and nurses, and laborers) – began to colonize the bodies of spirit mediums. In this way, when a spirit possession ceremony takes place, it recounts in powerfully symbolic terms what can be termed the Songhay “being-in-the-world.” Put another way, among Songhay people, the social worlds and spirit worlds are not distinctly separate. They intersect. Such a complex interpenetration of history, social change, and social–spirit relations is played out dramatically every time a spirit possession ceremony is staged.
In this way, Songhay spirit possession, or holey hori, represents the establishment and reinforcement of cultural memory, a dimension of spirit possession that is often neglected in the literatures of anthropology and religious studies. Moreover, it is a cultural memory that is established and reinforced sensuously through sound, taste, smell, touch, and vision — the sensuous evocation of memory.
Spirit possession also underscores the epistemological flexibility of Songhay religious practices in the world — a flexibility that has emerged from the historical profusion of diverse beliefs in West Africa. I have already mentioned that there is no word in Songhay for religion. Instead, there are many “paths,” which are not mutually exclusive (sorcery, magic, witchcraft, Islam, Christianity) that Songhay people can follow in the negotiation of their life paths.

Adrián Navigante: Your book The Taste of Ethnographic Things can be read as a propaedeutic supplement to your early ethnographic work. The title itself is, to put it philosophically, clearly “anti-Platonic”. Things are not there to be grasped conceptually (as if they had a preexisting and immutable essence) but to be “tasted”, that is, approached sensuously and from different angles – taking permanent detours in order to enrich our experience of them. You seem to postulate a continuity between ancient metaphysics (with Plato as its most important figure) and modern episteme (whose shining example in anthropology is Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism). Even if scientifically-minded anthropologists could object that they do not speak at all about immutable essences (universalia ante rem) but rather about methodological frameworks (universalia post rem) to make sense of “the others”, you see in the very operation of establishing order through conceptual models – which goes hand in hand with the conviction of the universal value of such descriptions – an essential connection with the ambitions of the past. In other words: immutable essences become anthropological invariants, metaphysical principles become formal rules of intelligibility, etc. Both metaphysics and modern episteme eliminate the subjective component of learning processes (which they consider unreliable and arbitrary), they leave out multiplicity and becoming (which they regard as confusing and unmanageable) for the sake of a unified idea of their research object, and they tend to avoid mimetic and narrative components to ensure a “neutral” account of their explicandum. In your opinion, all this fails to really grasp “the things of the others”, because the very aisthesis (i.e. the use of the senses and the domain of perception) of ethnography should be modified. Subjectivity must not only be included in ethnographic accounts but also brought to the front, since it is in concretizing the relationship with others that one can learn valuable things while doing fieldwork. The others should not be “described” as if they were objects; they are subjects with a specific kind of agency, so the interaction process with them should be turned into narrative material capable of accounting for their own complexity. You plead for recurring human contact (against pragmatic use of informants), vivid descriptions (as opposed to neutral observation), valorization of singular cases (instead of generalizations), first-person narrative (in opposition to detached reports), poetical and theatrical accounts (in place of scientific expositions). This is fine and to a certain extent necessary, but at the same time you speak of a “shift toward Others and against ethnographic realism”. This does not only mean that the account of the others should become more subjective, more affective, more engaged in processes that do not accept mere descriptions and require more attention to variants, details, and singularities. It also means that the ontological assumptions leading to epistemic accounts should no longer be privileged as sine qua non conditions of ethnographic description. To mention two cases that you introduce in your book, it is fine to tell the story of a sorko woman like Fatouma Seyni, whose trust you gained after seven years of assiduous contact and small talk with her, or of the possession priest Amadu Zima, who revealed certain things of his religious life to you after five years of frequenting him. But what your “reformation of ethnography” requires is more than that. It concerns, as far as I can see, an ontological shift through the experience of the others by means of which many (if not all) conceptual tools of Western anthropology – even those concerning fieldwork descriptions – are brought to a point of collapse. Western ethnography, even in the most empirical kind of fieldwork, will never accept a symmetrical inter-subjective process between the ethnographer and non-human agency of the culture being studied. If that type of agency is not deemed “metaphorically relevant” (to know social hierarchies, religious ways of behavior, psychological factors of belief, etc.), it becomes an ontological risk bordering on superstition, pathology, or unbridled imagination. We have clear examples of how scholarship reacts to that in cases like Edith Turner, Eric de Rosny, Jean-Marie Gibbal, Kabire Fidaali, and other authors who were cancelled as scholars the moment they dared question such ontological presuppositions of Western epistemology. My question is whether you have a way of integrating that other level of “inter-subjective epistemologies” (for example receiving knowledge from plant-spirits, deceased members of a lineage, gods in the shape of birds, or other entities manifesting themselves in rituals) into the task of ethnography without radically changing (if not destroying) the basis of knowledge reception and transmission in the modern West. Is this last aspect related to what you call “the sensual” (as opposed to the visual) and in later books “sensuous narrative” and “tasteful ethnography”?

Paul Stoller: There is certainly an institutional risk for scholars who dare to question the ontological presuppositions of Western epistemology. Is such a risk worth taking? If you follow a here-and-now approach to the academy, the institutional risks, which cannot be ignored, seem too great: limited research funding, rare journal article acceptances, no book contracts, no promotions, and patchy respect for your work. And yet, Songhay people like to say: cimi fonda, a ga cuu, which means “the path of truth is long and tall”. Put another way, it’s important to take a slow and long view of one’s work among healers, spirit mediums, or, for that matter, any group of people or subject of study. There has been no shortage of intellectual derision projected at the pioneering work of Edith Turner, Eric de Rosny, Jean-Marie Gibbal, Kabire Fidaali, among many others, including me. And yet, ongoing attempts at academic humiliation have not resulted in authorial cancellation. Recalcitrant academics may well object to the work of my dear friend the late Jean-Marie Gibbal, but people continue to read his words, which still provoke them to feel or think differently. There is a whole host of younger scholars who dare to think, cite, and write otherwise. They are advocating a more creative ethnography that embraces the messiness of social life – of not knowing, of unlearning, of the ruptures of longstanding academic traditions. Here, a key question remains: Is the scholar implicated in the field? Is she or he entangled in a set of social and cultural relations that create a deep sense of obligation? In these times, how do we produce ethical scholarship?

Let me digress for a moment. Like the Harmattan, the desert wind that periodically blows south and covers everything in West Africa with a fine dust, the academy is a space through which the winds of change bring new clouds of dust that permeate many of our intellectual nooks and crannies. During my time in anthropology, I have witnessed much dust removal. Think of the dust of so many theoretical paradigms that colonized our consciousness only to be swept away – structural-functionalism, French structuralism, ethnoscience, symbolic anthropology, cultural materialism, interpretative anthropology, reflexivity, the experimental turn, post-modern anthropology, post-humanism, the ontological turn, and most recently the decolonial turn. The practitioners of these intellectual movements saturated the academic atmosphere with their particles of dust. In time, the messengers of new paradigms would sweep the dust of the old paradigm into the dustbin of intellectual history. Even so, traces of that old dust remain, and they continue to contribute to our comprehension of the human condition. The decolonial turn, which has been front and center in recent social science discourse, is no exception to this pattern. In time, its dust will also be swept away, leaving a residue that makes us much more conscious of our ethical obligations as scholars and human beings.

When we clear a space of its dusty residue, what is left? This question brings to mind an apt Songhay proverb: Boro si tama, laabu si, “one cannot walk where there is no ground.” In the history of anthropology, there have been many head-spinning “turns.” But when the spinning stops and the air clears of dust, do we not stand on the ground of ethnography, which, for me, is anthropology’s imperfect gift to the world? This dust-clearing realization begs the question: What constitutes an ethical ethnography in our turbulent times? In my experience, an ethical ethnography is shaped by love and loss, one in which ethnographers are emotionally implicated in the lives of the people they are attempting to describe. If ethnographers have felt the joy of love with all of its personal, social, and political implications, and if they have felt the sorrow of loss with its deep well of palpable memory, then, as scholars and human beings, they are emotionally and philosophically well positioned to take up the ethical burden: to convey carefully, faithfully and artfully the ethnographically inspired wisdom of others, a wisdom that can make the world a better place. For me, this ethical burden is a risk worth taking, a burden that will produce works that remain “open to the world.”

Adrián Navigante: The implication of the ethnographer with the others is many-sided, isn’t it? The process of learning, or rather of un-learning (that is, deconstructing one’s own prejudices) not only includes the way the ethnographer sees but also the way he/she is seen, and the kind of reflexivity that may result from that. The fifth chapter of The Taste of Ethnographic Things is entitled “Songhay Visions of the Other”. In that chapter, you attempt a reversal of gaze to depict yourself as the other of the Songhay and tell the reader how you were seen by them. There is a remark of yours that deserves to be quoted: “‘savages’, after all, enjoy savaging their ethnographers”. This is a kind of wake-up call against the automatism of certain anthropologists who carry out all their research with a deeply ingrained conviction that alterity is always on the other side (despite their writing papers asserting the contrary to secure a digestible political position). There are many levels of approaching what I would call “double alterity”, and you begin with a personal anecdote. At a certain point in your Songhay apprenticeship, you were called sohanc’izo, that is, “son of a sohanci”, for it became known that you were not merely an ethnographer but a practitioner under the guidance of Adamu Jenitongo. Now, before that epithet was attached to your person, you had been called rouch’izo, which translates “son of Rouch”.

With this epithet you introduce French filmmaker and ethnographer Jean Rouch into your own narration, the first ethnographer of the Songhay, who spent more than sixty years working on and especially with those people in Niger and Mali. One could say that Rouch really deserved the epithet l’homme du Niger – if we consider that his first encounter with the Songhay took place in 1941, that he worked incessantly in that context first as a colonial engineer, afterward as an ethnographer, and subsequently as a filmmaker, that he died in 2004 during one of his Nigerien sojourns, and that he was not buried in Paris but in Niamey. It is no surprise that he was at first a burden for you (since the Songhay decoded your person exclusively on the basis of the traces left by Rouch’s work), but as you progressed on your path, he became more and more an inspiration and the burden fell rather on the practice of sorcery. Shortly after the publication of The Taste of Ethnographic Things, you devoted a whole book to Jean Rouch, The Cinematic Griot (1992), which was reputedly the first book systematically addressing Rouch’s contribution to anthropology.

In the first chapter, you announce something similar: “The Cinematic Griot is a broad and integrated analysis of Jean Rouch’s ethnography of the Songhay as it is realized in his books and his films”. A conventional reader would expect a scholarly book on Jean Rouch’s work, but that is far from the case. Your optics are quite different. Apart from the term “griot” used for the title of your book, which strikes me as semantically opposed to that of “(conventional) anthropologist”, your approach to Rouch seems to me motivated by the way in which the Songhay saw him: the one who followed the spirits with the camera, the one who delved into the “truly surreal” world of Songhay possession, the one who fused camera and notebook to nurture a participatory (artistic) approach to ethnography, the one who rejected the increasing professionalization of anthropology in Europe, the one who defied methodological and political boundaries (fact and fiction, tradition and modernity, Africa and Europe), etc. The more scholarly Rouch, the “son of Griaule”, appears as the less interesting aspect of the amazing personality that he was.

Let me try to formulate a couple of interrelated questions based on what I have exposed so far. How much and how deeply did the griot tradition of the Songhay permeate Jean Rouch’s work? I know you embrace the griot’s perspective that you emphasize in your book, but do you embrace it to the point of renouncing all forms of observational ethnography and replacing it with an ethnography of juxtaposition, or more precisely, by a poetic ethnography based on alternative resources like montage, mosaic, or analogy? Can the textual order of the Western experience (of the other) be inherently subverted by the powerful images of its transgressors?

Paul Stoller: The impulse to subvert the intellectual order has a fascinating history. Your question makes me think of the surrealists, whose grotesque imagery in painting, poetry, film, and theater sought to disrupt the social order and offer a more deeply felt alternative. Although the surrealists continue to spark our collective imagination, can we say that they changed social values, then and now? Disruption is nonetheless a powerful tool to use in the creative quest to see and feel the world anew.

My mentor, Jean Rouch, lived with a productive tension in his life. On one side, Rouch was fascinated with the technical advances of 20th-century science. His father was an oceanographer who sailed on Le Pourquoi Pas for a turn-of-the-20th-century French scientific expedition to Antarctica. At his father’s insistence, Rouch studied civil engineering at L’École Nationale de Ponts et Chaussées, where he learned to build artful bridges and roads. His mother’s family, by contrast, was artistic. His uncles befriended the between-the-war surrealists, many of whom the young Rouch met in the cafes on the Boulevard du Montparnasse. Combine these associations with Rouch’s family links to anarchists, and you get someone who used art and technology to make more than 150 films (mostly documentaries but some feature films) that disrupted the French colonial and post-colonial order. In so doing, he created new genres like ethno-fiction to challenge a deeply entrenched French racism that underscored colonial and postcolonial relations in Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, Senegal, and Cote d’Ivoire.

Given their narrative power and inspiring cinematic innovations, like cinema vérité and sound synchronization, Rouch’s films, most of which were produced in the 1950s and 1960s, still provoke audiences to question conventional reality. They are narratives that remain “open to the world” because they highlight the things that define the human condition: fidelity and betrayal, love and loss, honor and shame, and the establishment and dissolution of social trust.

In short, Rouch was a cinematic griot. In West Africa, griots are important guardians of history and the moral order. They have long brought the past – and its historical lessons – into the present, instructing listeners to respect their ancestors such that the links that connect past and present are not severed. Rouch’s pioneering work paved the way for West African filmmakers, many of whom are celebrated today, to use film/video to perform the work of contemporary griots.

In the end, transgressors – filmmakers, a new generation of creative anthropologists, podcasters, and/or bloggers – can sometimes disrupt the social order, which begins but does not complete the process of social transformation. The social, political, and ecological turbulence of today threatens to destroy the society as we know it – mass extinctions, superstorms, massive floods, extensive droughts, incessant war, and persistent genocide. As Morton and Boyer (2021) suggest, persistent disruptors, most of whom are artists, can produce work that looks beyond scenes of contemporary social, economic, and ecological destruction to envision a new social order that will rise from the ruins of contemporary social life. They foresee a new social order in which we learn once again to become human. I will discuss some of these issues in the second installment of this interview.

Adrián Navigante: Now that you have mentioned Jean Rouch as a transgressive and disruptive artist of the mid-²⁰th century, let me proceed with a question about your relationship with him and the influence of his work on your “ethnographic taste”. In a collective volume called L’autre et le sacré (1995), you wrote an essay entitled “Artaud, Rouch, and the Cinema of Cruelty”, in which you attempt to bring Jean Rouch’s ethno-fiction very close to Antonin Artaud’s theater of cruelty. Despite Artaud’s preference of theater over cinema (that is, embodiment over image) and the clear identification of his theater of cruelty with (Balinese) possession rites, you affirm that Rouch’s cinema is a prolongation of Artaud’s radical project.

In the life of both authors, there are clear intersections: Artaud had a cinematographic moment with Robert Desnos, and Rouch was briefly trained by Yves le Gall into Artaud’s theater of cruelty. Reading your essay, one is tempted to think that, in the case of Rouch, you ascribe a deconstructive power to the image, but not in the philosophical sense of Derrida’s deconstruction. Quite the contrary, you think that Rouch managed (through his ethno-fiction) to de-familiarize the way we go about with images, breaking down the taken-for-granted register of relationship to something incorporeal and ultimately illusory.

Through his camera, Rouch managed to bridge over the distance of the gaze, to fill the gap between the imaginary and the real. You say there is something “embodying itself” (prendre corps) in the images composing Rouch’s cinéma vérité, as if those images were inscriptions revealing the other side of what one can see in terms of representation. In his essay Le vrai et le faux (1989), Rouch refers to the “moment of truth, when the eye is on the camera”, but the truth is in this case something quite different from representing reality. It is a re-arrangement of the whole situation and the penetration into a level of experience that is quite singular.

Is the “moment of truth” a kind of breakthrough? If so, of what kind? And closely connected with this aspect: don’t you find it paradoxical that the passage, the awakening to an almost inaccessible level of embodied vitality, and the breakthrough to that excess of the real that invades the spectator in films like Les maîtres fous (1955), is ultimately achieved by an “artificial eye” belonging to the world of technique, the eye of the camera?

Paul Stoller: There is a single-take Rouch film, Les tambours d’avant: Tourou et bitti (1971), which cuts to the heart of what Rouch enigmatically called “cine-transe.” The 12-minute film begins with an evocative image. We see Rouch, his camera perched on his shoulder, moving toward the scene of a spirit possession ceremony in Simiri, Niger. In his voice-over, Rouch explains that the members of Simiri’s possession group had been staging the ceremony for several days without a single possession episode. The group wanted to seek the advice of the genji bi, the “black spirits” (original inhabitants of the land, who control soil fertility and pestilence – elements that can ensure a good harvest of millet in a drought-plagued land).

In the hope of inspiring the spirits to take the body of a medium, Simiri people begin to play ancestral instruments, the tambours d’avant. They used these special drums to play spirit possession music. A sorko sings spirit praise poetry. Despite these extraordinary efforts, no spirit will come into the bodies of dancing mediums. As Rouch brings his camera close to the musicians and dancers, one of the mediums begins to shake, a sign that he has been taken by a spirit. Another medium, a woman, is also possessed by her spirit. In exchange for small gifts, vials of perfume, the spirits in the bodies of their mediums instruct Simiri residents about the steps they must take to ensure pestilence-free harvest. As the sun sets on Simiri, Rouch and the camera slowly recede.

Rouch believed that the presence of the camera was the catalyst that brought on spirit possession that day. For him, the camera could provoke cine-transe – a state of being in which the camera is an intermediary that temporarily closes the gap between self and other, between village and bush, and between seen and unseen. So yes, for Rouch, the camera had magical properties that could unexpectedly take the filmmaker, the filmed, and the audience into another dimension of reality.

Adrián Navigante: The previous question compels me to go briefly into Jean Rouch’s ethnographic film Les maîtres fous (1955), which – on the occasion of its first presentation at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris – shocked not only European but also African spectators, among others Jean Rouch’s academic mentor Marcel Griaule and Senegalese filmmaker Paulin Soumanou Vieyra. In The Cinematic Griot you define this work as the most controversial of Rouch’s career.

The film is about the migration of the Songhay and Zerma peoples from Niger to the colonial Gold Coast, and it focuses on the Hauka spirits. A possession ceremony is filmed in detail, with violent scenes including the sacrifice of a dog whose blood is drunk and whose meat is eaten by one of the Hauka mediums. It is interesting to analyze the reactions to such scenes. African scholars opposed the commercialization of the film on the basis that it would nurture racist stereotypes (the “wild Africans” eating a dog), while scholars like Griaule were shocked by quite another aspect, namely the way Europeans were portrayed by the Hauka spirits in the film.

Both aspects are complementary, I think, but do they refer to the same level? I think the objection of Rouch’s African colleagues touches a surface level, that is, commonplaces that are susceptible of being reproduced through lack of differentiated appreciation of complexity. In fact, the “wild ones” in Rouch’s film are not the African mediums but the content of what is depicted by the Hauka spirits, that is, the behavior of European colonialists. This double displacement is very connotative, but somehow the viewers can only understand it if they are prepared for that.

My question revolves around this paradox. In your book on Rouch you write against French anthropologist Jean-Claude Muller’s critical review of Les maîtres fous (in which he objects to lack of contextualization): “I cannot agree that films are the complements of written ethnographies”, but at the same time you add the following: “his review […] reinforces a major theme of this book [The Cinematic Griot]: that Rouch’s films, including Les maîtres fous, cannot be considered apart from his painstaking longitudinal ethnographic research”. Can we value “ethno-fiction” or “ethno-trance” (to use Rouch’s terms) as an epistemologically relevant turn in ethnography that goes far beyond the limited logic of a linguistic model and at the same time demand from such works that they provide the necessary (textual) explanations to avoid undesirable effects in their reception?

Paul Stoller: The images of Les maîtres fous created quite a stir in late colonial France. There is a standard notion in literature: the intentions of authors are not always understood by the people who read their words or see their films. This lack of connection between authorial intent and the audience’s subjective response is something that most authors and filmmakers find frustrating.

Ethno-fiction goes way beyond the limitations of the linguistic models of representation. The images and sound of film, it is said, create a special connection between the filmmaker and the audience of viewers, sometimes creating a visceral response. Many visual anthropologists and documentary filmmakers claim that the sensuousness of film cannot be reproduced in written ethnography. They suggest that films “show” and ethnographies “tell.” I profoundly disagree. Yes, the aesthetic dimensions of film and text are different. Even so, writers can produce texts (narrative ethnographies, creative non-fiction, and fiction) that evoke or show other worlds. By the same token, filmmakers can produce tedious films that, through extensive voice-overs, denote (tell) other worlds.

There is a movement among younger anthropologists to produce more evocative texts – essays, poetry, art installations, and narrative ethnographies – to expand the readership of scholarly works. Can an evocative, creatively produced ethnography be both necessary and sufficient to avoid academic condemnation? The power of narrative devolves from the fact that no matter what form it takes, stories can economically and powerfully depict a complex reality.

The most powerful literary texts show, rather than tell us about social theory – think Kafka, Kundera, Morrison, and Baldwin. These are texts that remain open to the world. Through my Weaving the World Writing workshops, I have been advocating for a creative approach to ethnography – ethnography that conveys to multiple audiences the wisdom of rigorously researched ethnographic insight. Linguistically contoured theory is important but tends to be short-lived. Narratives that evoke theory have legs.

1. The term Hauka, which literally means “crazy”, refers to Songhay spirits who mimic European figures of colonial history. They became known to Europeans through Jean Rouch’s most controversial film Les maîtres fous (1955). In his book on Jean Rouch, The Cinematic Griot, Paul Stoller writes the following: “From the Songhay perspective, the behavior of the Hauka spirits is crazy, indeed. In the bodies of their mediums, they handle fire, put their hands in pots of boiling sauce, eat poisonous plants. Sometimes Hauka spirits vomit black ink; saliva froths from their mouths. The Hauka also burlesque French colonial society. They often wear pith helmets and mock European behavior – especially French and British military behavior” (Paul Stoller: The Cinematic Griot: The Ethnography of Jean Rouch, p. 145).
2. This is the first epigraph of In Sorcery’s Shadow, which reads: “We see the straight highway before us, but of course we cannot use it, because it is permanently closed” (source Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophical Investigations, § 426).
3. This is what the reader can gather from the first epigraph in Fusion of the Worlds: “One thinks that one is tracing the outline of the thing’s nature over and over again, and one is merely tracing around the frame through which we look at it” (source Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophical Investigations, § 114).
4. The first epigraph of Paul Stoller’s The Taste of Ethnographic Things stems from Wittgenstein’s note-books (cf. Ludwig Wittgenstein: Vermischte Bemerkungen, Frankfurt 1977, English version: Culture and Value, ed. by G. H. von Wright, translated by Peter Winch, Chicago 1980) and reads: “I really do think with my pen, because my head often knows nothing about what my hand is writing”.
5. “Ethnographic realism” is an expression that Stoller already uses in his first book, In Sorcery’s Shadow, meaning the prescription of dispassionate analysis, exclusion of subjectivity, and disregard of extraordinary experiences (cf. Paul Stoller and Cheryl Olkes: In Sorcery’s Shadow: A Memoir of Apprenticeship among the Songhay of Niger, Chicago: London 1987, p. xi). He comes back to this expression in subsequent books (cf. for example Paul Stoller: The Taste of Ethnographic Things: The Senses in Anthropology, Philadelphia 1989, p. 47).
6. Cf. Paul Stoller and Cheryl Olkes: In Sorcery’s Shadow, p. 212.
7. See infra, note 15.
8. Paul Stoller: The Power of the Between: An Anthropological Odyssey, Chicago: London 2009, p. 6.
9. Cf. Paul Stoller: Wisdom from the Edge: Writing Ethnography in Turbulent Times, Ithaca: London 2023,
10. Paul Stoller’s reference stems from T.S. Eliot’s poem “Little Gidding”, the last of his famous Four Quar-tets (1941): “we shall not cease from exploration / and the end of all our exploring / will be to arrive where we started / and to know the place for the first time”.
11. The co-authorship is quite uneven, since Cheryl Olkes (who was researching the therapeutic uses of medicinal plants in Songhay country) joined Paul Stoller in 1984 – the last year of Stoller’s fieldwork in Niger. Their collaboration covers the last six chapters (out of a total of forty-one) of the book In Sorcery’s Shadow, on which Stoller worked from 1976 to 1984.
12. Paul Stoller and Cheryl Olkes: In Sorcery’s Shadow, p. xii.
13. Paul Stoller refers to such malevolent acts in Africa by using the term “witchcraft” instead of “sorcery”. In this, he comes very close to the notion of witchcraft in Evans-Pritchard (cf. Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande, Oxford 1937, pp. 63-64), although for Stoller the phenomenon of witchcraft is not due to locals’ lack of control over reality due to meager scientific knowledge, as Evans-Pritchard states.
14. Paul Stoller and Cheryl Olkes: In Sorcery’s Shadow, p. 235.
15. The word sorko, which in Songhay means “master of the river” (because of the river spirits), is applied to griots or praise-poets of the spirits (cf. Paul Stoller: Fusion of the Worlds: An Ethnography of Possession among the Songhay of Niger, Chicago: London 1989, pp. 100-101). Such fishermen are said to “live in the vicinity of the Niger river, which remains the Songhay spirits’ source of life and power” (Paul Stoller: Ibidem, p. 92)
16. Cf. Paul Stoller and Cheryl Olkes: In Sorcery’s Shadow, p. 58.
17. Cf. Paul Stoller and Cheryl Olkes: In Sorcery’s Shadow, p. 101.
18. Cf. Paul Stoller and Cheryl Olkes: In Sorcery’s Shadow, p. 110.
19. Cf. Paul Stoller and Cheryl Olkes: In Sorcery’s Shadow, p. p. 229
20. Paul Stoller: Wisdom from the Edge, p. 49.
21. Jean Rouch: La religion et la magie Songhay, Bruxelles 1989, p. 301.
22. For example, in Stranger in the Village of the Sick, where Songhay sorcery is taken as “a body of pragmatic knowledge that can enable even the most physically compromised person to squeeze pleasure and happiness from an imperfect world” (Paul Stoller: Stranger in the Village of the Sick, Boston 2001, p. 4).
23. Clifford Geertz: “Distinguished Lecture: Anti Anti Relativism”, in: American Anthropologist 86(2), pp. 263-78.
24. Cf. Clifford Geertz: “Distinguished Lecture: Anti Anti Relativism”, in: American Anthropologist, p. 276.
25. Personal communication from Edith Turner to Paul Stoller.
26. This step was anyway impossible because of the anthropologist’s own attitude toward the phenom-enon, which reveals a good dose of dogmatic thinking. Evans-Pritchard was seeking an objective explanation of something that can only be disclosed through action, that is, from the inside: “The Zande notion of witchcraft is incompatible with our ways of thought. […] That it kills people is obvious, but how it kills them cannot be known precisely. They tell you that if you were perhaps to ask an older man or a witch-doctor, he would give you more information. But the older men and witch-doctors can tell you little more than youth and laymen. […] Their intellectual concepts of it are weak and they know better what to do when attacked by it than how to explain it. Their response is action and not analysis” (Edward Evans-Pritchard: The Notion of Witchcraft Explains Unfortu-nate Events, in: Perspectives on Africa: A Reader in Culture, History and Representation, ed. by Roy R. Grinker and Christopher B. Steiner, Oxford 1997, p. 311.
27. Carlos Castaneda: The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, California 1968. This book was Castaneda’s Master thesis in anthropology, but the reception of it classed its contents rather as a work of fiction. In the book, Castaneda describes himself as an apprentice of a Yaqui Indian sorcerer, Don Juan Matus.
28. See also T.M Luhrmann: When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God, New York 2012.
29. Paul Stoller refers to a fictional character of the HBO television series The Sopranos, portrayed by American actor James Joy Gandolfini.
30. The Songhay term sorko benya means “slave of a sorko”, and it is given to people pointed out to become sorkos who don’t have sorko ancestry (cf. Paul Stoller and Cheryl Olkes: In Sorcery’s Shadow, p. 41) but have the capacities to receive that knowledge (Ibidem, p. 235).
31. In Songhay anthropology, the double (bia) is the essence of a person’s humanity. It leaves the body while the person sleeps and when mediums receive spirits in their bodies, and it can also be stolen by witches during the night (cf. Paul Stoller: Fusion of the Worlds, p. 31).
32. The sohanci are high priests and guardians of the ancient Songhay culture. Adamu Jenitongo, Paul Stoller’s second and most important teacher, defined himself a special sohanci, called guunu: “Because our fathers were sohanci and our mothers witches, we guunu are the most powerful sohanci” (Paul Stoller and Cheryl Olkes: In Sorcery’s Shadow, p. 81).
33. Paul Stoller essay was included in his book Sensuous Scholarship, published in 1997.
34. This essay was part of Lévi-Strauss’s famous book Anthropologie structurale, published in 1958.
35. Cf. Evans-Pritchard: Witchcraft: Oracles and Magic among the Azande, Oxford 1937.
36. Gengi how means “to attach or tie up the bush”, and it is “the most important incantation in a sorcer-er’s repertoire [among the Songhay]” (Paul Stoller and Cheryl Olkes: In Sorcery’s Shadow, p. 234). Stoller provides a full English translation of this incantation in Chapter 19 of In Sorcery’s Shadow (cf. Ibidem, p. 102).
37. Paul Stoller and Cheryl Olkes: In Sorcery’s Shadow, p. 149.
38. Paul Stoller and Cheryl Olkes: In Sorcery’s Shadow, p. 153.
39. Paul Stoller refers to Clifford Geertz’s book The Interpretation of Cultures, in which the latter thema-tizes the need to go beyond the canonical framework in anthropology of religion (Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, Sigmund Freud, and Bronislaw Malinowski), even at the risk of incurring in eclecticism, theory-mongering, and confusion, and “escape the dead hand of competence” (Clifford Geertz: The Interpretation of Cultures, New York 1973, p. 88. Geertz’s maxim is a quotation of Morris Janowitz’s article “Anthropology and the Social Sciences” (in: Current Anthropology 4, 1963, pp. 146-154, p. 139).
40. A second part of this conversation with Paul Stoller will be published in the fourth issue of Trans-versal Paths (December 2025), in which the the question of his illness and its relationship with his anthropolog-ical work will be treated at length
41. Paul Stoller and Cheryl Olkes: In Sorcery’s Shadow, p. 175.
42. The sohanci are the descendants of the first Songhay king, Sonni Ali Ber, well versed in sorcery (cf. Paul Stoller and Cheryl Olkes: In Sorcery’s Shadow, p. 235).
43. “I am opening my heart to you, Paul, because of your patience, because your heart is pure” (Paul Stoller and Cheryl Olkes: In Sorcery’s Shadow, p. 194.
44. cf. Paul Stoller and Cheryl Olkes: In Sorcery’s Shadow, p. 195
45. Cf. Paul Stoller: The Taste of Ethnographic Things, p. 88.
46. cf. Paul Stoller and Cheryl Olkes: In Sorcery’s Shadow, p. 226.
47. cf. Paul Stoller and Cheryl Olkes: In Sorcery’s Shadow, p. 226.
48. Cf. Paul Stoller and Cheryl Olkes: In Sorcery’s Shadow, pp. 4-5. The term boro bi means “black man” (cf. Paul Stoller and Cheryl Olkes, Ibidem, p. 5); anasara is derived from the Arabic insara i.e. Christian (Paul Stoller and Cheryl Olkes, Ibidem, p. 233), and it refers to Europeans or white people.
49. The world of sorcery, says Paul Stoller’s teacher Adamu Jenitongo, is a world of war. “Every person on the path is a target for the bad faith of others” (cf. Paul Stoller and Cheryl Olkes: In Sorcery’s Shadow, p. 101)
50. That research project led to the publication of a book entitled Money has no Smell: The Africanization of New York City, published in 2002.
51. Cf. Michel Leiris: La possession et ses aspects théâtraux chez les Éthiopiens de Gondar, Paris 1958.
52. Cf. Paul Stoller: Fusion of the Worlds, pp. xx-xxii.
53. Paul Stoller: Fusion of the Worlds, p. 101
54. This is an expression of French anthropologist Maurice Godelier. Against Michel Leiris’ conviction that what anthropologists find in the field is an “other” as mirror of themselves (which becomes manifest if one subjectively deals with his own phantoms to achieve another level of self-critique), Godelier thinks that anthro-pologists can shatter their own projective mirrors through the construction of a new (non-subjective or neutral) ego, “a cognitive ego which will be added to the other egos, the social and the intimate” (Maurice Godelier: Au fondement des sociétés humaines, p. 54). This “new ego” should be built before going to the field, and it consists of ideas, concepts, theories, reading material, debates and controverses related to the intellectual milieu of the anthropologist. Godelier blindly trusts the objectivity of Western epistemic thought and its “cognitive cleansing function” as well as the effectiveness of what he calls “critical vigilance” (Maurice Godelier, Ibidem, p. 55) as the cornerstone of anthropology
55. Friedrich Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy & The Genealogy of Morals, translated by Francis Golng, New York 1956, p. 93.
56. Jean Rouch: Apercu sur l’animisme Sonrai, in: Notes Africaines, Institut Français de l’Afrique Noire, Dakar, Octobre 1943, N°20, pp. 4-8
57. Cf. Paul Stoller: Fusion of the Worlds, pp. 30-31
58. “The juxtaposition of the first heaven and earth creates in the world two contiguous domains: the world of social life and the world of spirits. These worlds are fused during possession ceremonies when the spirits leave their world – the first heaven – to visit the social world by taking a medium’s body” (Paul Stoller: Fusion of the Worlds, p. 31).
59. “The first hell is a way station. When a person dies, he or she waits in the first hell for God’s decision” (Paul Stoller: Fusion of the Worlds, p. 30).
60. Paul Stoller’s teacher, Adamu Jenitongo, denounces Islamic sorcery to block Dongo’s path (the path of the rainstorm bringing fertility to the land), cf. Paul Stoller: Fusion of the Worlds, p. 185
61. Cf. Connerton’s How Societies Remember (1989) and Stoller in Vannini 2023 (ed.) Routledge Interna-tional Handbook of Sensory Ethnography
62. Paul Stoller: The Taste of Ethnographic Things, p. 140.
63. Cf. Paul Stoller: The Taste of Ethnographic Things, pp. 128-129. Paul Stoller tells the story of this woman with many details in the second chapter of Wisdom from the Edge (cf. Paul Stoller: Wisdom from the Edge, pp. 44-61
64. Cf. Paul Stoller: The Taste of Ethnographic Things, pp. 140-14
65. Paul Stoller: The Taste of Ethnographic Things, p. 9.
66. Paul Stoller: Wisdom from the Edge, pp. 30 and 93, respectively.
67. Cf. Cook, Cicek, Murphy, Offen, Sander Puustusmaa, Van Roekel, Thornton and Wardell, May 2025, “Beyond the Footnote: Citation as Disruption in Creative Ethnography. Allegra Lab (https://allegralaboratory.net/beyond-the-footnote-citation-as-disruption-in-creative-anthropology/)
68. Paul Stoller: The Taste of Ethnographic Things, p. 91.
69. For practical purposes I leave aside his work on the Dogon as well as his speculations about a possible connection between the Songhay of Mali and the Dogon. Suce it to say that, as early as 1949, Rouch wanted to establish a link between his ethnographic inquiries in Hombori and Marcel Griaule’s work on Dogon meta-physics (cf. Jean Rouch: Alors le Noir et le Blanc seront tamis: Carnets de mission 1946-1951, Paris 2009, p. 65).
70. This expression is the title of Alain Gheerbrant’s introduction to Jean Rouch’s first mission notebooks (1946-1951), cf. Jean Rouch: Alors le Noir et le Blanc seront tamis, p. 9
71. The expression “the sorcerer’s burden”, which appears in Stoller’s early ethnography, became the title of a book published in 2016, which became his third anthropological novel. It has many layers of meaning referring to the diculties involved in the path of sorcery: dealing with the jealousy of others who seek power, having to deal with spirits on a regular basis, protecting the village from bad people and bush spirits, etc. A key passage in Stoller’s novel, uttered by its main character, Omar Dia, the song of a Niger farmer and professor of literature in Paris who eventually becomes a sohanci (traditional sorcerer), can be said to encapsulate the core-meaning of the expression: “I’m a spiritual guardian for the people there [in Niger] and […] I’m supposed to help people wherever I might be. […] I am now someone who takes on other people’s pain” (Paul Stoller: The Sorcerer’s Burden: The Ethnographic Saga of a Global Family, New York 2016, p. 160)
72. Cf. Jean-Paul Colleyin (ed.): Jean Rouch : Cinéma et anthropologie, Paris 2009, p. 13. Colleyin empha-sizes the merit of Paul Stoller’s book, which was to show that Rouch had an intuition of subjects that imposed themselves only thirty years later in the scholarly milieu of anthropology. Previous studies on Rouch had focused exclusively on his films.
73. Paul Stoller: The Cinematic Griot: The Ethnography of Jean Rouch, Chicago: London 1992, p. 4
74. “Son of Griaule” is the title of Paul Stoller’s introduction to his book on Jean Rouch. The expression reaches its clearest explicit formulation in a passage where, after pointing to the ambiguities of Marcel Griaule on the question of participant observation (the demand of intensive and extensive research among the indige-nous peoples coupled with skepticism about blurring the distinction between “the European” and “the native” and the firm conviction on the neutrality of ethnographical reports, cf. Paul Stoller: The Cinematic Griot, p. 19), Stoller writes the following about Rouch: “In his fieldwork and writings, […] Jean Rouch is indeed “the son of Griaule”. His written work on the Songhay of Niger has little literary character” (Paul Stoller: Ibidem, p. 21
75. “Rouch’s political films […] are in my opinion a cinematographic prolongment of the theater of cruelty conceived by Artaud” (Paul Stoller: Artaud, Rouch et le cinéma de la cruauté, in: C. W. Thompson (ed.): L’autre et le sacré: surréalisme, cinéma, ethnologie, Paris 1995, pp. 315-332, quote p. 316
76. Cf. Jean Rouch’s own testimony in his essay “L’autre et le sacré : jeu sacré, jeu politique”, in which he describes his own experience (leading to a theatrical performance at the Vieux Colombier, where Artaud made his last public appearance) and refers to the theater of cruelty as a reduced model of Songhay possession rites (Jean Rouch: L’autre et le sacré : jeu sacré, jeu politique, in: Jean-Paul Colleyn (ed.): Jean Rouch : cinéma et anthro-pologie, pp. 29-47, especially pp. 29-30.
77. Jean Rouch: Le vrai et le faux, in: Jean-Paul Colleyn (ed.): Jean Rouch : cinéma et anthropologie, pp. 111-121, quote p. 115
78. Cf. Paul Stoller: The Cinematic Griot, p. 145.
79. The Hausa term hauka means “crazy” and refers to the behavior of these spirits, which according to Stoller have a kinship with the Songhay deity of thunder, Dongo. In their animist cults, Hauka spirits mimic European colonial figures grotesquely and mockingly enough to have been interpreted as a form of cultural resistance against colonial rule (cf. Paul Stoller: “Horrific Comedy: Cultural Resistance and the Hauka Movement in Niger”, in: Ethos, Vol. 12, N°2, Summer 1984, pp. 165-188; and The Cinematic Griot, pp. 145-146)
80. This is actually what happened almost immediately. Senegalese director Blaise Senghor reported having been verbally attacked by white spectators who looked at him saying “here’s another one who is going to eat a dog” (cf. Dan Yakir: “Ciné-transe: The Vision of Jean Rouch”, in: Film Quarterly 31 (3), 1978, pp. 1-10, quote p. 3, also apud Paul Stoller: The Cinematic Griot, p. 151)
81. Paul Stoller: The Cinematic Griot, p. 153
82. Cf. Fiona Murphy and Eva van Roekel: Anthropology and Humanism 49(2), December 2024, pp. 78-82, “Editor’s Note: A vision for Anthropology and Humanism’s next three years”