Neil L. Whitehead > Quotes

“How can we say “what happened” if the cultural meanings of a story (histoire) diverge in such a way as to appropriate the key events, which are registered in all versions but in culturally specific ways? Probably only by counting all versions as relevant and legitimate historiographical expressions.”
― Neil L. Whitehead, Dark Shamans: Kanaimà and the Poetics of Violent Death

“A more adequate response, in the light of nearly a hundred years of ethnographic engagements, must be to recognize the discursive origins of apparently empirical claims and that the proof of such claims is established by reference to the discourse from which they emerge, not by a suprahistorical procedure in factual verification. In one sense it really does not matter if I, or anyone else, was clinically poisoned—it is the claims made to that effect that are anthropologically significant for our understanding of the histories and historicities of others.”
― Neil L. Whitehead, Dark Shamans: Kanaimà and the Poetics of Violent Death