Storytracking - Texts, Stories, and Histories in Central Australia (Hardcover)

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.

General

Imprint:	Oxford UniversityPress
Country of origin:	United States
Release date:	April 1998
First published:	February 1998
Authors:	Sam D Gill (Professor of Religious Studies)
Dimensions:	242 x 161 x 23mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Hardcover
Pages:	288
ISBN-13:	978-0-19-511587-1
Categories:	Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary theory Books > Reference & Interdisciplinary > Interdisciplinary studies > Cultural studies > General Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Ethnic studies > Indigenous peoples Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Anthropology > General Books > Humanities > Religion & beliefs > Non-Christian religions > Ethnic or tribal religions > General Books > Religion & Spirituality > Non-Christian religions > Ethnic or tribal religions > General
LSN:	0-19-511587-2
Barcode:	9780195115871

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