Storytracking: Texts, Stories, and Histories in Central Australia

by Sam D. Gill

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.

304 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

Sam Gill is Professor Emeritus at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Native American religions were the focus of his work for twenty-five years. He regularly hung out in cultures in the American Southwest—Navajo, Hopi, Yaqui, and Zuni—to observe ritual and dancing. Since the early 1990s Sam has been an enthusiastic student of dancing in cultures around the world including travel to observe and study dancing to Bali and Java, Thailand and Nepal, Ghana and Mali, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico. Sam has taught courses on many topics related to dancing notably a yearlong course “Religion and Dance” that covered over thirty dance traditions and included weekly dance studios taught by artists from the relevant cultures. In the late 1990s Sam founded, with his daughter Jenny, a dance and music school, Bantaba World Dance & Music. For many years he has taught salsa dance in high schools, in his classes at CU, and in the community including a performance group. He has developed an extensive catalog of salsa dance instructional videos. Sam’s insatiable interest in various fields of study—movement, dancing, play, masking, perception and the senses, cognitive science, neuroscience, philosophy, gender issues, fitness, gesture, aging—interweave and shape his current work. Since retiring from teaching in 2017 he has published at least a book a year including an Award Winning book "The Proper Study of Religion: Building on Jonathan Z. Smith" and most recently "Religion: A Contemporary Perspective."

Reviews

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

I bought this book because it contains documentation of the culture and oral history of aboriginal Australians before being modified or destroyed by Western culture. I was not such of fan of the author Gill's premise for the book, story tracking, which roughly corresponds to missionaries and anthropologists having preconceived notions of the culture that they were recording. These missionaries are then quoted by later writers and the basis for truth becomes lost once you start scrutinizing the documentation and the aboriginal sources for their cultural stories. The author makes the point that these biases in the recording of the Aboriginal culture has tainted the information itself. What the author doesn't admit is that story tracking would affect any and all cultural research and storytelling in the entire colonial history of the world. The story tellers are not perfect, but they are all we have left of the originals.