Overview

"Storytracking is a work of theory and application. It is both a study of history and culture and the academic issues accompanying the interpretation and observation of other peoples. Sam Gill writes about Central Australia, but, more importantly, he writes about the business of trying to live responsibly and decisively in a postmodern world faced with irreconcilable diversity and complexity, with undeniable ambiguity and uncertainty. Storytracking includes engaging accounts of many of the colorful figures involved in the nineteenth-century development of Central Australia, and it is an argument for a multiperspectival theory of history. It presents descriptions of an important aboriginal culture--the Arrernte--and it critically examines ethnography. It exposes the colonialist underbelly of all modern academic culture study, yet it embraces the situation as one of creative potential outlining an interactivist epistemology with which to negotiate the classical alternatives of objectivism and subjectivism. Gill presents an examination of the emergent academic study of religion focused on two exemplary scholars--Mircea Eliade and Jonathan Smith--offering a play theory of religion as the basis for innovative critical discussions of text, comparison, interpretation, the definition of religion, academic writing style, and the role of ""the other."" Based on painstakingly detailed research, Gill exposes disturbing and confounding dimensions of the modern world, particularly academia. Yet, beyond the pessimism that often characterizes postmodernity, he charts an optimistic and creative course framed in the terms of play."

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9780195115888

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Sam Gill is an engaging writer, and he charmed me in a pleasant way....it is in fact a thoughtful disquisition on our academic project in the human sciences....[the book] well repays the effort of close reading and rereading. --Journal of Anthropological Research An exemplary model of close readings of seminal texts. - Religious Studies Review Sam Gill is an engaging writer, and he charmed me in a pleasant way....it is in fact a thoughtful disquisition on our academic project in the human sciences....[the book] well repays the effort of close reading and rereading. --Journal of Anthropological Research

The strength of this book lies in its points of intersection, its detailed comparisons, and the emergence of a kind of narrative cohesion around differing interpretations of the Numbakulla texts. There is a careful interweaving of various ethnographic trails. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute Storytracking is enticing for its continually shifting lens on elements of 'play' that occur in the comparative analysis of texts cited, the to-ing and fro-ing between some search for an elusive Arrernte 'reality' and acknowledging the potential simulacra any such constructions may create. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

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