The power of the between

Stoller, Paul. The power of the between: an anthropological odyssey . xi, 201 pp., illus., bibliogr . London, Chicago : Univ. Chicago Press , 2009 . £29.50 (cloth), £10.50 (paper ) Paul Stoller's latest book suggests that an anthropologist's fate is always to be located between things: between different countries, between different ways of being and apprehensions of reality, between different forms of linguistic and cultural expression, and ultimately between life and death. Living between things, Stoller asserts, has several existential repercussions in that a person gets pulled in different directions at the same time and thereby often experiences an ongoing sense of indeterminacy and uncertainty that becomes part of daily life and experience. This offers a space in which habitual modes of thinking and being are recast and made strange, thus presenting an opportunity for realizing the contingency of one's life history and circumstances while simultaneously being exposed to new and different forms of understanding. When one journeys to other realms and experiences the in-between, figuratively or otherwise, it is difficult to return entirely to one's habitual presuppositions and practices, and for Stoller this means one is destined to remain, at least to some extent, dwelling in the territory of the in-between even after one returns ‘home’. Not surprisingly, Stoller draws upon anthropology's extensive use of the spatial metaphor of the in-between in the discipline's theoretical descriptions of social life, including its analysis of liminality, relativity, hybridity, and intersubjectivity, to explore some of anthropology's major concerns and contributions. This emphasizes how anthropology, as a fieldwork science/documentary art, is both a practical activity carried out amidst other people's social lives and an academic discipline and form of literary representation that draws upon different disciplinary, epistemological, and methodological worlds. As the author of Fusion of the worlds: ethnography of possession among the Songhay of Niger (1989), The taste of ethnographic things: the senses in anthropology (1989), and Money has no smell: the Africanization of New York City (2002), Stoller has often self-consciously attempted to create dialogues between literary style, the sensory realm of bodily experience, and the fluid, cultural worlds of fieldwork, while the current work, The power of the between: an anthropological odyssey, offers a more explicitly personal meditation upon the state of liminality and indeterminacy, having being written after the author's recent diagnosis with cancer. The emphasis on the in-between offers a doubly fitting metaphor insofar as the book is located somewhere in-between an autobiographical memoir and an ethnographic text. It presents a fascinating attempt to create a dialogue between anthropology's theories and concerns and the researcher's own life experiences in order to demonstrate how a shared process of embodied experience, interpretation, and storytelling frames both our personal and disciplinary understandings of social life. I must admit to an initial suspicion of the author's intentions in combining an autobiographical memoir with an anthropological monograph, and approached the book in a similar vein to the playwright Dennis Potter's pithy observations when asked to adapt Casanova's memoirs for the television, namely that ‘most memoirs are self-serving and adorned with lies. I simply don't believe them’. However, I soon became intrigued by Stoller's insightful and wonderfully well written approach to the subject matter, and became increasingly interested in how he constructed a relationship between his life and his work by placing anthropological theory into a narrative framework. Stoller's own life journey, including his recent confrontation with mortality, offers a way of linking complex theoretical discussions on diverse anthropological subjects – ranging from structuralism to storytelling, from metaphysics to medical anthropology, from Maurice Merleau-Ponty to Victor Turner – in order to build up a fascinating picture of the human condition. It is telling that this narrative repeatedly crosses the Atlantic and that the first chapter is called ‘Seeking truth’ and the last is entitled ‘Stories’, with the chapters in-between providing many timely detours and puzzles that touch upon ethnography, art, sensory life, epistemology, the imagination, contingency, sorcery, illness, and recovery. ‘Seeking truth’ begins with the young Stoller's initial attempts to try to explain the inner workings of social life and ‘understand the mysteries of the Songhay spirit world’ by way of rational, scientific inquiry based in an analysis of the deep structures of speech, syntax, and cognition that he suggested could unlock the rules that govern social behaviour in the same way Chomsky's universal grammar did with language. However, the book ends with Stoller putting his faith in biomedicine while simultaneously making his own recourse to sorcery and storytelling when diagnosed with cancer. By doing so he reaffirms the incantations and practices of divination that he learned while living among the Songhay when training to be an apprentice sorcerer. For the Songhay, the world is a dangerous place filled with misfortune and as such is not the exception but the norm. One must, therefore, be willing and prepared to confront misfortune such as betrayal, loss, and illness on an ongoing basis as one travels along the path of life. As misfortune is constitutive of life, it is not possible to avoid the different forms that misfortune takes; however, divination allows pre-emptive and other mediating measures that can prolong existence and make life liveable. Thus a story that begins as a quest for certainty and the universal truths that lie behind, sorcery, and spirit possession ends with an affirmation of sorcery. In summary, The power of the between: an anthropological odyssey is strongly recommend as an extended and beautifully written anthropological meditation upon the vitality and experience of the state of betweeness but encompasses much else of interest either side

Aesthetics · Communitas · Epistemology · Existentialism · Indeterminacy · Indeterminacy (philosophy · Liminality · Metaphor · Power (physics · Sociology · Anthropology · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · Philosophy