Anthropologists who have lost their senses write ethnographies that are often disconnected from the worlds they seek to portray. For most anthropologists, Stoller contends, tasteless theories are more important than the savory sauces of ethnographic life. That they have lost the smells, sounds, and tastes of the places they study is unfortunate for them, for their subjects, and for the discipline itself. The Taste of Ethnographic Things describes how, through long-term participation in the lives of the Songhay of Niger, Stoller eventually came to his senses. Taken together, the separate chapters speak to two important and integrated issues. The first is methodological—all the chapters demonstrate the rewards of long-term study of a culture. The second issue is how he became truer to the Songhay through increased sensual awareness.

Among the Songhay of Mali and Niger, who consider the stomach the seat of personality, learning is understood not in terms of mental activity but in bodily terms. Songhay bards study history by "eating the words of the ancestors," and sorcerers learn their art by ingesting particular substances, by testing their flesh with knives, by mastering pain and illness. In Sensuous Scholarship Paul Stoller challenges contemporary social theorists and cultural critics who—using the notion of embodiment to critique Eurocentric and phallocentric predispositions in scholarly thought—consider the body primarily as a text that can be read and analyzed. Stoller argues that this attitude is in itself Eurocentric and is particularly inappropriate for anthropologists, who often work in societies in which the notion of text, and textual interpretation, is foreign. Throughout Sensuous Scholarship Stoller argues for the importance of understanding the "sensuous epistemologies" of many non-Western societies so that we can better understand the societies themselves and what their epistemologies have to teach us about human experience in general.

This bold agenda-setting title continues to spearhead interdisciplinary, multisensory research into experience, knowledge and practice. Drawing on an explosion of new, cutting edge research Sarah Pink uses real world examples to bring this innovative area of study to life. She encourages us to challenge, revise and rethink core components of ethnography including interviews, participant observation and doing research in a digital world. The book provides an important framework for thinking about sensory ethnography stressing the numerous ways that smell, taste, touch and vision can be interconnected and interrelated within research. Bursting with practical advice on how to effectively conduct and share sensory ethnography this is an important, original book, relevant to all branches of social sciences and humanities.

It is commonly acknowledged that anthropologists use personal experiences to inform their writing. However, it is often assumed that only fieldwork experiences are relevant and that the personal appears only in the form of self-reflexivity. This book takes a step beyond anthropology at home and auto-ethnography and shows how anthropologists can include their memories and experiences as ethnographic data in their writing. It discusses issues such as authenticity, translation and ethics in relation to the self, and offers a new perspective on doing ethnographic fieldwork.

A study of the West African Hauka - spirits that grotesquely mimic and mock "Europeans" of the colonial epoch. The author considers spirit possession as a set of embodied practices with serious social and cultural consequences. Embodying Colonial Memories is the first in-depth study of the West African Hauka, spirits in the body of (human) mediums which mimic and mock Europeans of the colonial epoch. Paul Stoller, who was initiated into a spirit possession troupe, recounts an insider's tale of the Hauka with respect and "brotherly" deference. He combines narrative description, historical analysis, and reflections on the importance of embodiment and mimesis to social theory, with particular reference to the Songhay peoples of the Republic of Niger.

The tale of Paul Stoller's sojourn among sorcerors in the Republic of Niger is a story of growth and change, of mutual respect and understanding that will challenge all who read it to plunge deeply into an alien world.

The Things of Others: Ethnographies, Histories, and Other Artefacts deals with the things mainly, but not only, mobilized by anthropologists in order to produce knowledge about the African American, the Afro-Brazilian and the Afro-Cuban during the 1930s. However, the book's goal is not to dig up evidence of the creation of an epistemology of knowledge and its transnational connections. The research on which this book is based suggests that the artefacts created in fieldwork, offices, libraries, laboratories, museums, and other places and experiences – beyond the important fact that these places and situations involved actors other than the anthropologists themselves – have been different things during their troubled existence. The book seeks to make these differences apparent, highlighting rather than concealing the relationships between partial modes of making and being ‘Afro’ as a subject of science. If the artefacts created in a variety of situations have been different things, we should ask what sort of things they were and how the actors involved in their creation sought to make them meaningful. The book foregrounds these discontinuous and ever-changing contours.

Lochlann Jain’s debut non-fiction graphic novel, Things That Art, playfully interrogates the order of things. Toying with the relationship between words and images, Jain’s whimsical compositions may seem straightforward. Upon closer inspection, however, the drawings reveal profound and startling paradoxes at the heart of how we make sense of the world. Commentaries by architect and theorist Maria McVarish, poet and naturalist Elizabeth Bradfield, musician and English Professor Drew Daniel, and the author offer further insight into the drawings in this collection. A captivating look at the fundamental absurdities of everyday communication, Things That Art jolts us toward new forms of collation and collaboration.

Full of practical 'how to' tips for applying theoretical methods - 'doing ethnography' - this book also provides anecdotal evidence and advice for new and experienced researchers on how to engage with their own participation in the field - 'being ethnographic'. The book clearly sets out the important definitions, methods and applications of field research whilst reinforcing the infinite variability of the human subject and addressing the challenges presented by ethnographers' own passions, intellectual interests, biases and ideologies. Classic and personal real-world case studies are used by the author to introduce new researchers to the reality of applying ethnographic theory and practice in the field. Topics include: - Talking to People: negotiations, conversations & interviews - Being with People: participation - Looking at People: observations & images - Description: writing 'down' field notes - Analysis to Interpretation: writing 'out' data - Interpretation to Story: writing 'up' ethnography Clear, engaging and original this book provides invaluable advice as well as practical tools and study aids for those engaged in ethnographic research.

This richly drawn ethnography of Samburu cattle herders in northern Kenya examines the effects of an epochal shift in their basic diet-from a regimen of milk, meat, and blood to one of purchased agricultural products. In his innovative analysis, Jon Holtzman uses food as a way to contextualize and measure the profound changes occurring in Samburu social and material life. He shows that if Samburu reaction to the new foods is primarily negative--they are referred to disparagingly as "gray food” and "government food”--it is also deeply ambivalent. For example, the Samburu attribute a host of social maladies to these dietary changes, including selfishness and moral decay. Yet because the new foods save lives during famines, the same individuals also talk of the triumph of reason over an antiquated culture and speak enthusiastically of a better life where there is less struggle to find food. Through detailed analysis of a range of food-centered arenas, Uncertain Tastes argues that the experience of food itself--symbolic, sensuous, social, and material-is intrinsically characterized by multiple and frequently conflicting layers.