Storytracking: Texts, Stories, and Histories in Central Australia

Book Review: Sam D. Gill's Storytracking: Texts, Stories, and Histories in Central Australia The Skinny: This texts theoretical contributions far outweigh its deliberate focus on Australian history. It is a valuable text for anthropologists, ethnographers, historians, and religious studies scholars. Minus one star for its exorbitant list price. One danger that scholars face is the obliteration of subjects. Without getting into any of the theoretical background for this contention, we should accept (as a working proposition) that when we talk about others we are always already translating and interpreting and recontextualizing. If an informant tells you something, then you can hope to transcribe it accurately, but when you USE this quotation in a scholarly work you will inevitably reframe it for your own purposes. This leads to distortion, and this is especially true for those scholars who have studied Australia's aborigines. To start with let's take the instructive example of JZ Smith and Mircea Eliade. Both wrote about the arrente in Australia. Both relied heavily on secondary sources. Yet each scholar managed to incorporate the arrente into their work differently. On the one hand, we should expect differences. However, the other hand wags its nit-picky close-reading fingers at you. Gill skillfully deconstructs the "storytracks" created by these two scholars, identifying the differences in how they approach (and employ) their sources and explaining the implications for their interpretations. Here's the kicker: These differences reveal authors not subjects. This is an important contribution on its own, but it is Gill's clear application of his method to get to this point that makes this volume worth reading. Gill calls this method storytracking, and it intentionally calls to mind not only the "tracks" that scholars leave behind when they create "stories," but also the implication that new works are always sleuthing around, sniffing for that lead that breaks the case. While this method is far more of an abstraction than a heuristic model for interrogating sources, it does inventively re-frame the scholarly enterprise as not necessarily subject-obliterating. The big question emerges if we accept that works by scholars (often) say much more about themselves than their subjects: How can we reveal our subjects more clearly? Gill is obviously in favor of greater transparency about the relationship betwixt and between sources, and while this helps pull layers of obfuscation of subjects, it does not render them transparent. Gill's method creates a space for greater clarity, but he has really only opened the door to the possibilities of his own method. We should all eagerly await the downstream implications of this important text. PS: This book is AMAZINGLY expensive new. (What were the publishers thinking!) So be sure to grab a used copy!