This innovative work takes a narrative technique (known as "storytracking") practiced by Australian aboriginal peoples and applies it to the academic study of their culture. Gill's purpose is to get as close as possible to the perceptions and beliefs of these indigenous peoples by stripping away the layers of European interpretation and construction. His technique involves comparing the versions of aboriginal texts presented in academic reports with the text versions as they appear in each report's cited sources. The ...
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This innovative work takes a narrative technique (known as "storytracking") practiced by Australian aboriginal peoples and applies it to the academic study of their culture. Gill's purpose is to get as close as possible to the perceptions and beliefs of these indigenous peoples by stripping away the layers of European interpretation and construction. His technique involves comparing the versions of aboriginal texts presented in academic reports with the text versions as they appear in each report's cited sources. The comparison helps reveal the extent to which the text is transformed through its presentation. Gill follows the chain of citations along, uncovering the story, or as he calls it the "storytrack," that interconnects scholar with scholar-independent subject. The storytrack reveals the various academic operations--translations, editing, conflation, interpretation--that serve to build a bridge connecting subject and scholarly report. Gill begins by examining Mircea Eliade's influential analysis of an Australian myth, "Numbakulla and the Sacred Pole." He goes back to the field notes of the anthropologists who originally collected the story and by following the trail of publications, revisions, and retellings of this tale is able to show that Eliade's version bears almost no relation to the original and that the interpretations Eliade built around it is thus entirely a European construct, motivated largely by preconceptions about the nature of religion. By applying this method to other received texts of aboriginal religion, Gill is able to bring us closer than ever before to the worldview of this vanishing culture. At the same time, his work constitutes an important statement on and critique of the academic study of religion as it has traditionally been practiced.
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Add this copy of Storytracking: Texts, Stories, and Histories in Central to cart. $4.96, very good condition, Sold by ThriftBooks-Atlanta rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Brownstown, MI, UNITED STATES, published 1998 by Oxford University Press.
Add this copy of Storytracking: Texts, Stories, and Histories in Central to cart. $4.96, very good condition, Sold by ThriftBooks-Reno rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Reno, NV, UNITED STATES, published 1998 by Oxford University Press.
Add this copy of Storytracking: Texts, Stories, and Histories in Central to cart. $5.00, good condition, Sold by HPB-Red rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Dallas, TX, UNITED STATES, published 1998 by Oxford University Press.
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Add this copy of Storytracking: Texts, Stories, and Histories in Central to cart. $5.42, good condition, Sold by Midtown Scholar Bookstore rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Harrisburg, PA, UNITED STATES, published 1998 by Oxford University Press.
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Good-Bumped and creased book with tears to the extremities, but not affecting the text block, may have remainder mark or previous owner's name-GOOD Standard-sized.
Add this copy of Storytracking: Texts, Stories, and Histories in Central to cart. $5.96, good condition, Sold by Midtown Scholar Bookstore rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Harrisburg, PA, UNITED STATES, published 1998 by Oxford University Press.
Add this copy of Storytracking: Texts, Stories, and Histories in Central to cart. $7.95, good condition, Sold by Book Alley rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Pasadena, CA, UNITED STATES, published 1998 by Oxford University Press.
Add this copy of Storytracking to cart. $10.50, very good condition, Sold by Powell's Books Chicago rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Chicago, IL, UNITED STATES, published 1998 by Oxford University Press.
Add this copy of Storytracking. Texts, Stories and Histories in Central to cart. $20.00, very good condition, Sold by Weiser Antiquarian Books, Inc., ships from Cape Neddick, ME, UNITED STATES, published 1998 by Oxford University Press.
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Softcover. Large octavo. xiv, 276pp. Endnotes, references, index. From the publisher: "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." Very faint shelf rubbing else a tight, bright near Fine copy. Appears unread.
