Wisdom from the Edge: Writing Ethnography in Turbulent Times With Paul Stoller

Adam:

Hello and welcome to another exciting episode of This Anthro Life, the podcast that takes anthropology out of the classroom and into the real world. I'm your host Adam Gamwell, and today we have a guest whose experiences will challenge everything you thought you knew about wisdom, belief, and the incredible power of storytelling. In today's episode, I am joined by the extraordinary Paul Stoller, a renowned cultural anthropologist and author who has conducted extensive fieldwork among the Songhai people in the Republic of Niger and Mali, as well as West African migrants in New York City. His research has focused on magic, sorcery, and spirit possession, as well as how to do sensory ethnography, that is, writing that gets into the senses, how we feel, touch, smell, taste the world around us. Now, Paul will transport us into the depths of his field experiences to ask what wisdom can be gained when we open ourselves up to other worlds and ways of experiencing the world. Because sometimes things happen that we experience that we can't explain. Things that might just feel a little bit too real that could be perhaps unsettling or maybe reassuring. And in these moments it is fundamental that we have someone that we can turn to that we trust. And at its best this is what anthropology can unlock. It's a rigor tapestry of human experience and connection that comes from deeply knowing and being a part of a community. And challenges to what we think we know help us better comprehend our relationship to the world around us, opening our eyes to the unseen forces that shape our beliefs, behaviors, and the very essence of being human. So in this episode we'll delve into the power of storytelling, the art of deep listening, and why ethnography should be more than just words on a page. Paul Stoler is going to challenge us to question our perception of the world around us and to uncover the wisdom that lies just beyond the edge of comprehension. What really grabbed my attention early on in the conversation was when Paul told me about an encounter that he had during a stint at fieldwork training under a sorcerer in Niger, with a group of people known as the Atacorma, believed to be the original inhabitants of the land, very long before humans set foot. And then one night, Paul found himself face to face with something he couldn't quite explain. So, we'll start there. Sit back, grab your headphones, and get ready to embark on a journey of discovery with Paul Stoller, on today's episode of This Anthro Life.

Paul:

My field experience as an apprentice to a number of healers in Niger brought me face-to-face with phenomena that I could not understand or explain. In the book, there are some stories about my encounter with the song I call the Atakorma. who are the elves, the so-called elves of the bush. And they, they are the original, supposedly the original inhabitants of the land. And they're, they're little people, like leprechauns. And, and my teacher. would, he had little, little sandals and little vials of water in his spirit hut to honor them and to, and he would go to the bush every Sunday to a crossroads in the bush. And he'd leave them a little bit of milk or a little bit of honey out of respect for them. And, but then one night, and I described this in the book, one night I couldn't sleep very well and I was woken by dogs and barking and donkeys braying at five in the morning. And so I got up and then I heard footsteps coming toward my door, which was like a tin door on a mud brick house. And I heard a high-pitched gibberish. I heard something akin to fingernails scratching on the tin door. Then I heard like a sing-song voice going like that. And I was, I was completely frightened. And my question was, should I open the door or not? And I decided I was too frightened to open the door. And finally the, the steps went away and then I opened the door and it was just, dawn was breaking out on the eastern horizon. And I saw dogs jumping up in the air. And I, my teacher's son, a guy named Musa, I slept through the whole thing. And I said, did you hear anything? He said, no, I didn't hear anything. And then, and then I went to talk to my teacher and I said, I heard these weird sounds in the night and the dogs were barking and the donkey. Oh, I said, you heard that? I said, yeah, yeah. What was it? He said, that was the Atta Korma. And I said, they were angry with me because I have not been giving them their food on Sundays. I forgot to do it for a couple of weeks. So they came to the compound demanding to be honored and fed by honey and milk. And then he looked at me and said, you heard that? And I said, yeah. And he said, so how do you explain that? And there are any number of it in my long experience as his apprentice. There are any number of experiences like that, that I had no real explanation for. It was things like that push you to the edge of comprehension, the periphery. And, but the periphery is an interesting place because the periphery is the space of, it challenges your thinking. It challenges you to think outside the box, so to speak. It challenges you to think of new ways of trying to understand what you experience with your senses. And that's just one example. There are other examples that, you know, that I experienced that compelled me to think about anthropology in a different way and think about writing anthropology in a different way. Another case is when I was with another healer, we were attending to a man who was very, very sick, deathly ill, and he's laying on his sort of his deathbed really. a religious Muslim who, as a last resort, called my teacher to come over and say, help me, heal me. We repaired what is called a harugusul solution in a gourd with water and herbs and perfumes. And he instructed the man's wife to wash him with it. We would leave. You should wash him in this solution. And then he took me out. I said, let's go find what's causing this man's spirit has been stolen. And I said, sure. And we walked outside the village and outside the village, there are a husk, husks of millet seeds that people put out to create little hills for the wind to take away. It's not useless kind of stuff, but it's a place where Witches will hide someone's stolen soul. So my teacher, he got on his hands and knees in one of these little hills called Duo in Songhai. And he jumped up and he said, you know, he went, and then he said, Hey, I found the man's soul. I've liberated it. And I say, he asked me, did you see it? I said, see what? Did you hear it? I said, hear what? Did you feel it? And I said, feel what? And then he said, oh, you're young. You look, but you don't see. You touch, but you don't feel. You listen, but you don't hear. And that challenge really stuck with me. And he said, maybe you'll tune your senses in the future. Maybe it'll take you 10, 20, 25 years to tune your sensibilities to perceive these kinds of things. And that's where I got the whole idea of paying more attention to the senses and the sensory dimensions of ethnographic experience, but that field experience. And there are two ways of dealing with that. One is you can sink back into conventional categories and sink back into those categories and produce what is expected in the academy, ethnographic texts, introduction, talking about the literature. using jargon, et cetera, et cetera, or the portal was open for me and I decided that to be as faithful as I could be to the field experience, I decided that I was going to walk through it. And so that's how I got the whole idea of trying to write a material that is sensuous and involves the senses in ethnographic description.

Adam: 

Hmm. Well, that's fascinating. And I think it's such a, it's a great poignant example of, of noting how the field itself can be such a transformative experience for anthropologists. Um, but also reminding like the very shallow sense too, that we, we want to say to students when possible, study abroad, right? Do get out of your comfort zone on one level and then be open to that. And something that you explore in the book too, I think that's really interesting to tag onto this idea of Uh, why ethnography also needs it. You just noted there too, that typically the kind of writing process that anthropologists go through is of having your introduction in your theoretical section. And then things tend to have a bit more of a dry, objective writing style to them to be jargon filled. But you're noting here that the field challenged you to rethink that. And what does it mean to actually be a little bit more sensuous in both scholarship and exploration? You know, I know you've written about this elsewhere too, so it's cool to see the evolution of these ideas. And so. On one level, I think also this book in terms of writing about wisdom from the edge, one of the calls that you bring out is that ethnography is helpful for troubled times today, right? That we're kind of living in a more fractured, troubled space. And so on the one level, we may have an idea of what we think that means, but I'm curious to get your perspective too. And when we think about troubled times, what does that kind of look like? And then how can we. bring ethnography into that conversation in new ways? I know that's a big question. I mean, unpack different ways of doing that with ethnography, but let's define a bit about what's the trouble that we're seeing today and then how can ethnography help respond to that?

Paul: 

I begin the book by talking about there's trouble in a place like Niger is right now there, there's, there's a coup d'etat. There's a lot of. There's, it's a very poor country. People are afraid to sleep in their houses because of brigands and Al-Qaeda of the Maghreb, they're going around kidnapping people and killing people. I have a number of friends who were murdered by, in the village where I worked, murdered by these agents of Al-Qaeda of the Maghreb. And so there's a lot of, in Niger, there's a lot of, which used to be a rather relatively peaceful place, where people of different ethnicities got along pretty well. It's become a dangerous place to live. It's full of tension. People are insecure in their homes. They're insecure in their own skin. They don't know who to, there's a lack of social trust. And I think you can say that is a more general phenomena in the world. Certainly, there's a lack of social trust. Can we trust the news media? Can we trust our politicians? Can we trust the physicians to do the correct kinds of testing or interpretation of testing of, say, blood work or a scan of some sort? So there's this sort of erosion of social trust in general. So when my teacher would say, one of the things that's important for people, whether they're in Niger or in the United States, is that we have this kind of, we have a balance that social relations are filled with trust and cooperation. Right. That's really important. So that's one thing that we have this sort of lack of, and so there's a lot of crude inhumanity. There's a lot of gun violence here in the US. There's gun violence in West Africa. There's political unrest. There's a lot of people don't feel, they don't feel secure in their homes, in their societies. It's a lot of stress about human relations right now. And so that's one thing. And the other thing is that the relationship of human beings to the environment. And my teacher says, if you don't treat the bush with respect, if you consume the bush without respect, it will consume you, right? Not only do people have to get along with one another, but they also need to respect nature. When Songhai healers go out and take a piece of bark for producing medicinal herbs or potions of some sort, They always say a text and they ask for forgiveness of the tree they're taking the bark from. And you pull up a plant, you ask, you pay respect to the bush, say, I'm pulling up this plant to do X, Y, and Z, please forgive me. And that's a small example, but. My teacher would say that if you do not treat the bush with respect, it will overwhelm you. And to maintain the balance between what he called the village and the bush is absolutely essential for the viability of society. And that's a relatively narrow example, but more globally. We've been for the past 200, since the industrial revolution, we have treated the bush or nature with disrespect. We've extracted from it all minerals, oil, we've cut down forests and we've done, we have petro-culture. And it's brought us a lot of luxury. It brings a lot of interesting kinds of things to the, we live relatively luxurious lives because of petro-culture, but we're beginning to see the costs of this extraction. And I say it's a culture of extraction. And we extract from the earth what we want. We take from it, we are masters of the earth. We're masters of the universe. We take from it what we want, not really worrying about the consequences. And we're beginning to see right now, we're beginning to see the results of that after 200 or so years of extraction, water shortages, flash flooding, droughts, intensive hurricanes, the permafrost melting in Siberia and Alaska. All of these things have serious, obviously, global ocean temperatures reaching almost a hundred degrees just this year to Miami. This is all the result of a longstanding practice of extraction. But I also make a point and wisdom from the edge is that extraction is not just a physical process that is offshoot of capitalism. In the Academy, we also are extractors. We extract theories from the live data, the stream of data that we experience. And so we take the, we extract the data from the field. And from that, we create concepts, we do analysis and this and that. And we too do this kind of extraction as part of our epistemology. And it all comes from the same source, from the industrial revolution, from academic practice, from science in a sense. And so my teacher is saying, if you do that, there are consequences. And the way forward, following Dominique Boyer and Timothy Morgan, is they say basically, we need to become human again. And so when I read their book that is about just that issue, hyper, they call it subjectivity. Um. When I read that book, it struck me that what they were saying about how we need to be more modest, we're not masters of the universe, we have to be more respectful of nature. Songhai people say, if you partake of sorcery, we'll master you. If you partake of the bush, we'll ultimately become your master. And so my teacher would always say, the bush is our master. We have to treat it with respect. Otherwise, its power, which is, we're seeing some of the implications of its power, will overwhelm us as human beings. So they're saying, and they were saying in their book, that if we don't If we don't become what they call hyposubjects, people who are more modest, people who take their time, who take a slow approach to knowledge, if we don't do that, then our species is threatened. The potential is for extinction. Uh, which other people have talked about as well. So when I read that, I said, this is exactly what my teacher has been taught me 25, 30 years ago. This is what he was teaching me. He said, we have to be, we have to be more humble. Uh, we don't, we have to admit that we don't know. We have to admit that there are limits to what we can understand. We're not masters of the universe. And for academics to do that is very difficult. It's very difficult for an academic to say, I don't know, or there's limits to what I can do, or I have to unlearn certain things in order to understand, right? So I got the idea from reading that lovely book. that I should do this book, Wisdom from the Edge, where I tried to compile the sort of wisdom of my teacher and who never, never left West Africa. He was not, he was, he didn't read or write, but he was very wise. And he knew an awful lot about human nature and he knew an awful lot about the world. And I try to suggest in the book also that What his knowledge and his wisdom, his practical wisdom about how to proceed in the future is shared by other indigenous elders. And I have some examples in the last chapter of my book where I talk about some people, Western Apache, their approach to space, Yanomami, their approach to the forest. Native Americans who have a different orientation, respectful orientation to the land. And basically I'm saying, these people have been saying these kinds of things for generations and they continue to say them, but to protect us from ourselves and we don't listen to them. I think that, I like to call it indigenous wisdom, and I think we need to recognize it and apply it. hopefully to our social and ecological problems. Otherwise we face some real difficulties in the future.

Adam: 

Yeah, I agree with you 100% too. And I think it's such an interesting piece. It also reminds me, there was a book I read semi-recently. by Tyson Yunka-Porta, who's an Australian Aboriginal scholar. The book is called Sand Talk, and it actually goes to some of the same things in terms of, yeah, you mentioned Keith Bassel's work with the Western Apache and the Yanomami in Brazil. And basically it's like, how do we learn to listen to this wisdom from the edge? In this case, like the edge is both the periphery of what we call standard academic knowledge, right? Putting in air quotes, if you're listening. But then also this other idea that that wisdom has been there, right? And it's practical. And so I think what's one of the very interesting things that you also do through this book is in order to help kind of push ethnography into being slower, even though it's funny, cause it already is one of the slowest research methods in terms of taking a lot of time. It's interesting that in order to also then keep the output less, to keep the output slower or to make it less extractive to your point too, is to be more in ourselves sensuously in terms of like smell and taste and touch and getting a sense of what it actually feels like to build a scene. Cause I think one of the points that you also note in the book that I also share in the, some of the work that we've done together on the Anthropology on the Public Stage video series is that. So oftentimes it's hard to get ethnography also out of the academic circle because it's jargony. It has its own formula and it's harder for the public to want to engage with it because it's difficult reading. It's hard for us to read as people that have been through graduate training. And so part of that work too, I think is, I think it really important that you're advocating here too, is that how do we make scholarship more public, publicly accessible. And so what's interesting is you're approaching this from the idea of being more, more sensuous with how we write and how we describe. You spent a lot of time in the book and in real life too, with Jean Rouge, the great ethnographic filmmaker, and some really wonderful examples that you pull from there too, in terms of what makes his type of film much more engaging, but then also what does that mean for writing? Also, how can we think about the way that we're writing scenes? And early on in the book, you note things like dialogue, right? And that's one of the hardest things to write. And it's funny, I've written a dissertation, I've written articles and I've never before reading this, I have not years ago, didn't think about dialogue as what I'm trying to put together when I'm having two, two folks, interlocutors or recounting a scene, talk to one another. But it's like drawing a bit from film methods, right? Or screenwritings. So let's talk a bit about that in terms of how you've begun to pull out some of the different sensuous ways of expressing ourselves in ethnography by drawing from these other kinds of styles, like thinking about dialogue and scene setting and character and pieces like this.

Paul: 

This, the ideas in the book come from, I, I have facilitated writing workshops for the last 15 years, mostly in Europe. And in those writing workshops, I introduce the participants to some exercises to, to do just that. So one of the things that we do is we do an exercise in evocation of space. How do you, how do you describe space sensuously so that the reader gets a sense of what's it like to be in that space, right? And I also say, and one of the things I say is what's important is to treat space as if it were alive, a sensuous, a sentient entity. And Keith Bathurst talks about this in Wisdom Sits in Places a lot, that each space has its own story. It has its own existence, right? Which is meaningful. And when you think about ethnography, one of the things that ethnography does more than one of its great gifts is that it gives the reader, or it should, a sense of locality. What is it like to live in this space? And in order to do that, you need to, what does this space smell like? How does it, obviously, how does it look? How does it, how does it, what does it sound like? What are the important sounds in the space? And then is, what kind of memories are embedded in the space? So if you see a building or a stream, and what, try to think about what, and that's the way that sort of the Western Apache approach. What is the story associated with this space? So these are some sensuous kinds of things that, so what I do in my writing workshop is I have students pick a important space in their fieldwork and then try to write about that space evocatively, trying to imagine what, what memories are embedded, what transpired in this space. Are there memories embedded in the walls of a house? And so when they do that, it, it opens a door and it comes through more often than not with really vivid, vivid descriptions. And I have some examples of, from other ethnographers who write about space really wonderfully, but also creative nonfiction writers write about space. So it's very sensuously, so you get a sense of. What it means, Lucas Basir has written about Western Kansas and the space of the high plains. And it's a book about water, but it's also a book about the landscape. And it's just really quite an amazing piece of writing that he's done there. And there are other people who've done a really very good at evoking space. So that's one thing. The second is, as you mentioned, dialogue. And dialogue is exceptionally difficult to write. The people, the writers that I admire perhaps the most are playwrights who are able to evoke literary themes without, just through the way people speak. And for me, I have the students in my writing workshop or the participants, I have them read mystery writers. Mystery writers are some of the best dialogue, people at dialogue. They, Walter Mosley and Elmo Leonard, fantastic dialogue writers. And, and more often than not, In ethnographic text, there is no dialogue. There are chunks of transcripts, right? Then you get in the sense of each person has their own idiolect. Each person has their own particular way of speaking. And that way of speaking is a window into their personality, who they are as a person. And which brings me to the third element, and that is the evocation of character. What is it about a person that makes them unique? Is there a certain expression? Do they carry their body in a certain way? Is their face set in a kind of expression? Do they have a particular laugh? Is their walk particular? Is there something, what is it about them that makes them unique? And so our character descriptions in most ethnographies are rather flat. There are obviously exceptions to that. So some of the great ethnographies that are in all of this, of course, is to, in a day, in an age of a social media distraction, how do you get the reader to turn the page, right? But you need the sensuous description, you need really evocative dialogue, you need the sort of sensuous description of place. And some of the people who do that in the past, Zora Neale Hurston, a great dialogue writer and a great descriptor, describer of place in Mules of Men, just fantastic book. Ruth Bahar is another person who is really fantastic at both dialogue and description of place. And my colleague, my friend, Anna Bodkin, who's a creative nonfiction writer, evokes space and place and character and just very poetic in a way that's mind-blowing. So all of these writers are able to do that. And which means that their books remain open to the world. Right? So very often what we write in the academy has a shelf life, it's a very short shelf life. It may be people speaking to the theory of the moment and they write it in a dense prose. And the question I asked my participants in my writing workshops is, will someone be reading what you're writing today 15, 20, 30 years from now? And will it have relevance then? If you write about a very narrow sort of theoretical interpretation, which is, I'm not saying that's bad, it's good. But the shelf life of that is theories come and go. The shelf life of that is short indeed. But if you write something that is a story with narrative, with dialogue, with evocation of place and a construction of character, chances are that it will be read and reread and with obviously different interpretations as time goes on. It's going to be read and reread for a long period of time. And so I always ask the question, why do anthropology? What are we doing when we do our fieldwork? What are we doing when we're writing? Why are we putting forth these hundreds of thousands of books every year that are published in the field of anthropology? Is it not to better understand the human condition, to make the world a better place to live in? Or as my teacher, Audemars Piguet, taught me, is it not to facilitate, to expand social trust? Is it not to improve social relations and improve the relations between social life and nature? To me, the, and if you, the thing is that anthropologists Slowly gather, as anthropologists, we have fantastic insights into the human condition and it's just quite remarkable some of the ideas that have been put forward in the 120 years that anthropology has been a professional discipline. Right? But more often than not, the public doesn't know about these kinds of things. And the reason is that we produce these kinds of things in a turgid prose, which does not evoke, there are obviously exceptions to this, but it doesn't evoke space and place. It doesn't evoke dialogue and character, that the stories are embedded. They're backgrounded into analysis and theoretical construction is put forward. And in our institution, those are the things that tend to be more rewarded than not. The committee, when someone asked me what I am, I said, first of all, I'm a storyteller. I said, I like to tell stories. And I'm a storyteller. And then, and so I work on that and I work on my, my, my capacity to write narrative and dialogue and evoke space and place. And then from whatever I've learned, I, I try to convey that to people through my writing, but also through the writing workshops that I, that I like to give. you know, that I've been doing for, you know, 10 or 15 years. Why do it? Because I think we have insight as anthropologists that are very important to share as widely as possible because they have a, given the state of the world, given the state of the relation, human relations today, and given the state of our relations to nature, these are important insights to recognize, celebrate, and convey to as many people as we can.

Adam: 

Yeah, I think that's a really powerful set of ideas that is worth continuing to build towards. But I think that's a really powerful point that you're bringing up there in terms of that ethnography in terms of what's the purpose of it. Yeah, I think, and I agree too, that it's to help elucidate the human condition and understand other ways of being in the world, right? It's like the moniker and another world is possible. And so it's interesting too, is that you also noted there on the one hand, we get to think about the craft of creating ethnography through things like character and dialogue and evocation of space. I love these exercises. And ideas, we may have to do like a, I don't know, This Anthro Life, Paul Stoller writing workshop, co-workshop or something. But I think it's, it's a really great idea to help, help folks think about this. And then the other thing you also mentioned too, you know, when you get, when you get asked, the first thing you notice that you're a storyteller. And that was, that was actually another piece in the book that really stuck with me is storytelling as a practice of deep listening. As a way of evoking, what does it mean to actually listen and to hear? And because we say storytelling, it's the telling of a story, but then also there is this embodied aspect of being a, I don't know, what's the recipient term? A story listener, a story receiver. But also even noting, it's not just about the words that we say. So even thinking about this when we're writing in ethnography, the characters tend to be more stilted and the dialogue, I think you're right, it tends to be transcript pieces, which isn't bad by itself, but I think in terms of how do we make it actually more accessible and more long-term and impact? Why does a novel stick around for much longer than a monograph does? An ethnography monograph might. And so I think another aspect that's really important that you're getting at here is this idea of storytelling. And so what, again, what sat with me was this idea that storytelling is not just about saying words, but it's also understanding what's happening through the storyteller themselves. There are things like, are, how are you moving? How are you intonation, right? Things like this. So let's talk a little bit about that idea too, in terms of storytelling. You mentioned this both in the field, right? This is something that you saw as a deep listening practice. I don't know. Cause I, again, when I hear storytelling, it's, it's something that I'm excited to be able to engage in either to be, to tell stories, but then also to receive them. But how are you, how have you been exploring this idea in terms of getting beyond just the words that someone is saying when they're already talking about storytelling?

Paul: 

Well, I have a colleague who, her name is Rose Boswell. She's a South African anthropologist. And she wrote a paper in Senses in Society called Deep Listening. And, and basically incorporating a sensuous approach to listening. So when you, when you listen to someone, what she calls deep listening, which I call deep listening as well, you're not just listening to their words, as you said, but you're listening to their total expression, how the tone of their voice, their facial, facial expressions, their sort of being in a sense, right? And when you, so it's a total sensuous. exercise, which increases your comprehension of not just the words that are being articulated, but the person who's articulating them. And you put those together and you have this revelatory, it's really revealing who they are. So like in my Twitter account or whatever I say. I say, I'm a storyteller, blah, blah, blah, blah, who likes to tell and listen to stories. And listening to stories is just as important as telling stories. And the more, the deeper you listen, the more insight you have into how to reproduce those stories in narrative. All those things go together. And, but the most, more important points is that when we talk about stories and narrative, there's, it's, it, human beings connect with one another through stories. Right? So how is culture conveyed from one generation to the next? It's not through academic texts. It's elders telling stories to future generations. So culture is, culture in most societies is transmitted from elders to other generations through storytelling. Right? So stories are told, right? And, and story, there is a cognitive psychologist who I'm trying to remember his name. And he talked about two, two versions of reality. There's a scientific version of reality, the scientific construction of reality, which is, we're all familiar with, or through scientific method, et cetera, et cetera. And then there's the narrative construction of reality. Narrative construction of reality is learning through the exchanging stories, right? And he said, what is it about, so if you go to a, if you go to a convention, anthropological convention, let's say, and you go there, there are hundreds of sessions, right? A 15 minute, 15 minute papers, people usually reading their texts. So I've been going to them for many, many decades. And I must say that I cannot remember. hardly any of the papers that I'd heard. I can't remember very few of the papers that struck my imagination. Except for two, a couple examples. Once I heard Margaret Mead give a lecture and she told stories. She was funny and she had the audience. So there's something about a story that sticks with people. that a sort of academic discourse doesn't. People tend to remember elements of the story, the moral of the story, whatever it is, they tend to remember that over a long period of time. And there are other examples that I can give that of people who gave a lecture, but it was filled with stories. People remembered those kinds of things. I certainly do. Whereas the sort of heavy jargon-laden lectures about this or that, or whatever the subject might be, are less memorable. So there's something about a story that sticks. And I think what it is is that the glue of social relations is how we connect with one another. as human beings, right? We connect by telling stories, listening to stories, that kind of exchange, a genuine exchange where you're both open. Very often in conversations today, one person is talking and the other person is trying to anticipate what they're going to come back with, right? Rather than listening to what the person is saying. The deep listening and the sort of nice way an exchange of stories which is mutually respectful, it creates a connection. And it's the same thing with writing through narrative. It's the same kind of thing. If you write narrative in a way that's compelling, the writer connects with the reader. creates a connection, right? And that connection, when that's established, and someone's going to continue to turn the page, read the book, maybe get and learn something, feel something that they haven't felt before. Maybe they will think something they haven't thought before. And so that's really, we're getting at the core of human relations and the human condition. Storytelling is right there at the center of it. It has been forever. And so to, to, to, to put it in the background, does this service to trying to understand and describe a human social relations in a human condition.

Adam: 

And it's interesting because when we think about also the value of ethnography and the challenge of it when it comes to storytelling is that, and something else that you write in the book too, is that when we think about what ethnography is, it's many things, but obviously when you put it out in forms of writing, that it actually, to get to this depth that we're talking about, it also is, it's a reflection of the quality of the length of relationships, right? And the depth of relationships that we have with people. And that's really what storytelling also helps us unlock. I think this is just an important point to underscore because The question people could be asking is like, why ethnography versus a biography or a novel, right? Because obviously part of it is we have to borrow or share, we might say, some of the techniques that we're seeing in playwrights and we're seeing from screenwriting and we're seeing from creative nonfiction. But the, so the thing that I'm taking away from this too, and I want to get your thoughts on this too, is that makes ethnography unique is in, in like Keith Bass was the day of like, we're getting the memories of places much more in depth by being there with people for long periods of time. Is, is that kind of how you understand what like ethnography is quote unquote unique value proposition is in terms of other forms of- If it's done, if it's done in a long-term basis, I'm a huge advocate of long-term field work.

Paul: 

My teacher used to say, when I was first starting out, he'd say, well, you're learning a lot, but you don't know, you're too young to understand what's going on. And he said, in order to understand us, you have to grow old with us. I love that. Because, because at Songhai view of things, and I think maybe other peoples have a similar kind of notion, is that the process of learning and understanding is slow. It takes a long time. And, uh, the mind of a young person from the Songhai people is, it's, it's not ripe. It's not ready to receive important information. And so the mind and awareness expands with social experience over time. And you're not really ready to, to partake as a healer or a weaver or whatever, a fisherman or whatever, whether, whatever scale you've been slowly learning until you become an elder. And then you practice what you've learned, but your greatest burden as a, say a healer, for example, your greatest burden is to not just practice what you've learned, but to convey the knowledge to the next generation. In a sense, one way of looking at it is that we are custodians of knowledge and our responsibility is to treat that knowledge with great respect. and convey it to the next generation. And the next generation will take up that knowledge and then refine it in their own particular way. This whole approach comes from the Sufis. And the Sufis believed that knowledge is Knowledge is precious, we don't own it, we are custodians of it, we take very good care of it, and then we pass it on to the next generation where they will do the same thing and the process unfolds over many generations. And that's the Songhai way of doing it as well. So your greatest responsibility as a healer, let's say, is to pass that knowledge on to the next generation. so that it remains alive and to the custodianship of a new generation. And so that's all done through stories.

Adam:

It's interesting too, cause it's, it stands in unsurprisingly like diametric opposition to the CEO tech world today of longevity and trying to live forever as one person and trying to collect all the knowledge that one can in one's own body. And this idea too, cause it has me just thinking about when we just reflecting, I don't know, Metaphorically, but also literally, cells in our bodies live and then change every seven years, for example. And so there's generations of cells that change in our own, that are us every seven years. And yet we also think about ourselves as these ongoing beings. But then it's really interesting to scale that up in this notion and kind of think about knowledge as something that, or culture, right, is what we as humans pass down to generations. And so it's, I might be sad that me as an individual is going to pass away and I won't be able to experience the knowledge seven generations down the road. To see that kind of thinking so common in so many indigenous cultures in terms of that we have to think either seven generations down the line or just be aware of that the work is actually to pass the knowledge on is really compelling and powerful. And I think of an antidote to a bit of the individualist fear that we have, the existential fear that like when I end, that's it. Because it's if this body might end, but actually if I'm also a collective and a conveyor of knowledge of culture, there's power in that too, I think. And it's also my work to pass that forward.

Paul: 

Yeah, Jean-Paul Sartre used to say that the, in his tomb, being in nothingness, he talks about the impermanence of human existence. And he said that, he said there are very few, what's important is the, your subjectivity dies with you as a, when your body dies, but if you're a custodian of knowledge, Whether you're a writer, whether you're a healer, passing things on orally or through texts, that subjectivity lives beyond your physical existence. The subjectivity of Plato is still out there. The knowledge doesn't die, the knowledge just continues from generation to generation. And to me, doing anthropology is preserving, it's being a custodian of a certain kind of knowledge and making sure that it gets passed on to other people. And then the implications of that, of course, are considering the state of the world, that now it's really important, it's more important than ever to pass that, is to recognize, celebrate, and apply that knowledge to some of the problems we have today in the world.

Adam: 

Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that's such an important point too. And it's an important reminder in the kind of clarion call through, throughout your book too, that this is one of our tasks, right? Is that we have to actually learn to listen to that knowledge. And ethnography is, I think as you make a good argument for it too, is that it's well poised to help us do that, right? That there are both practical steps as part of it. And so maybe as a wrap up question, one of the, the, the points to this that you both you mentioned Paul Klee the artist a few times in the book and one of the quotes that stood out was that is I'll paraphrase it but it's the idea of like how to open your being to the world to be affected by it and that's what art can do really well and so I know we haven't talked about art so specifically yet either but just this idea in terms of how the kinds of wisdom that we're talking about, wisdom from the edge, that it's comes through this idea of opening ourselves up, opening our being to the world, kind of be more affected by it. And that's where the sensuous part kind of comes through. So I just want to get your kind of wrap up thoughts as we put a bow on this nice package here. As folks are thinking about how do we realizing that wisdom can come from these unexpected places that we tend to in the Western world conflate wisdom with knowledge, right? And if we pull those two apart, then what we're talking about here is that there's actually a very embodied sense and an idea of opening ourselves up to be affected by the world through these more sensuous forms of engagement that help wisdom or maybe just let us re-remember, realize that wisdom is actually there too, right? It's not always up in the head and many times it's not actually in our mind, right? So how, I guess some ways to think about this as folks would want to say, aside from reading your book or in addition to reading your book, what are some things that we can take away in terms of how to be able to listen more deeply, right? To feel more deeply into the world, to be open to the world, to see that wisdom.

Paul: 

I think the main point is to accept our existential vulnerability. So if you open yourself up to the world, and when I was doing my field work, I could have, yeah, I made myself rather vulnerable because by working with these healers, there was some danger involved with it, but also I put in the book, I was tormented by what I was experiencing in some cases. So that's one thing. The other thing is the vulnerability as a writer. So you write about the emotions, and when you write about the ineffable, and when you write narrative, you are opening yourself up to the world. And that can be rather stressful. I think it's a good thing to do, because when you open yourself up and you talk about your vulnerability, that creates an enormous attraction to a reader or a viewer of a film. Because when a writer is admitting her or his vulnerability about this or that, the reader gets attracted, that creates a connection. So I think that the notion of vulnerability and also the other thing Jean-Rouche used to talk about is taking risks, which if you admit your vulnerability or embrace it, Um, it enables you to take risks, uh, representational risks, right? Writing, writing fiction, uh, writing a play or writing about subjects that are not part of the canon. So those kinds of risks, uh, embrace the vulnerability, but what it does is it expands the, expands the applicability and the accessibility of what you're trying to produce. And if you are a custodian of knowledge, that's a very good thing.

Adam: 

Thank you. This has been a really great conversation, Paul. I'm excited to get folks to check out your book and to dive further. As we head out, are you still doing a blog post on Psych Today and publishing in other directions as well?

Paul:

Yeah, I'm still doing, I still blog for psychology today, but not as often because the scope of it is a little bit limited. So I don't blog as often as I, a couple of times a year I do, maybe three or four times a year I blog on psychology today. And I'm working on a new project where I'm going to, I'm going to be writing about the nature of healing. I have a number of healers that I'm going to be talking with and talking about their experience in the world, what brought them to healing. Some of them are physicians, some are traditional healers. and what wisdom will they convey to the next generation. So I'm just starting to do that. I've just started doing interviews with that. So I'm working on that. I'm also interested in my work in New York City. I've been talking to the aging traders that I've been hanging out with for 30 years now and they, what goes into their decision, medical decision-making because some of them becoming sick, how do they approach the Western medical system and how do they blend traditional healing with modern medicine? And I've been gathering information about that and started to write about that a little bit.

Adam: 

Awesome. That sounds like a great project too. And it's like a wonderful kind of continuation of the work that you've been exploring in Wisdom from the Edge in terms of how do we listen to other forms of being. So healing is a great kind of area. So I'm excited to see how that develops. So Paul, thank you so much for taking the time to chat in the pod today. It's been a lot of fun and yeah, wish you well.

Paul: 

Thank you so much. Thanks so much.

Adam: 

And that brings us to the end of another captivating episode of This Anthro Life. And I hope you enjoyed our conversation with Paul Stoller where we explored the power of anthrographic storytelling and the importance of deep listening. I want to extend a heartfelt thank you to Paul for sharing his fascinating field experiences and insights with us today. Now it's time for us to reflect on the rich tapestry of ideas that we've woven together. I encourage you to take a moment to consider how the themes and stories that we discuss resonate with your own life and the broader society that we inhabit. How can we apply the lessons learned from ethnography to better understand ourselves and our connections with the world around us? So as we wrap up, I'd like to leave you with this question. How can we embrace a more sensory or embodied approach to engage the world around us? Whether it's through the stories that we tell, the spaces we inhabit, or the knowledge that we seek, let's explore how we can listen and learn from unexpected sources, transcending these traditional boundaries of knowledge. And of course, before we part ways, I want to express my gratitude to all of you as well for your continued support. Without your curiosity and engagement, This Anthro Life wouldn't exist. So if you enjoyed today's episode and found it thought-provoking, please consider subscribing to the podcast, leaving us a review. And if you're passionate about ethnography and anthropology, I invite you to check out the Anthrocurious Substack blog. You'll find additional insights, resources, and stories to fuel your curiosity. And remember, sharing this episode with someone who you think will love it is a great way to spread the love for anthropology. So, as always, community is a huge part of what we do, so I always value to hear your thoughts, inputs, feedback, suggestions for future episodes, and everything else. Please consider leaving a comment on YouTube, dropping me an email over on our website, or getting in touch on social media. Let's continue this conversation together. So thank you once again for joining us on This Anthro Life. Hope you stay curious, stay engaged, and until next time, keep exploring the fascinating world of anthropology. I'm Adam Gamwell, and we'll see you next time.