![]() | Sensuous Scholarship Subjects: Ethnology -- Methodology; Ethnology -- Philosophy; Sensuality; Songhai (African people) -- Religion; Sonhgai (African people) -- History; Songhai (African people) -- Social conditions; 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. Paul Stoller is Professor of Anthroopology at West Chester University and the author of The Taste of Ethnographic Things: The Senses in Anthropology, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press. |
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