Like other peoples in Sahelian West Africa, the Songhay take great pride in their hospitality. “A guest is God in your house,” goes the Songhay adage, and so when strangers are accepted as guests in most Songhay compounds they receive the best of what their hosts can afford to offer. The host displaces his own kin from one of his houses and gives it to the guest. He removes the mattress from his bed and gives it to the guest. And then he orders the kinswoman who prepares the family meals to make her best sauces for the guest.

In...

To know nature is to know the texture of inner space, for, as Merleau-Ponty wrote, “quality, light, color, and depth which are there before us are there only because they awaken an echo in our body and because the body welcomes them.”¹

Cézanne and his admirer Merleau-Ponty were heretics. They dared to challenge the Aristotelian premise that nature is on the outside. How can we know if we cannot see, touch, or smell the phenomenon? How can we know if we cannot test experimentally that which we observe? How can we know if we do not have a theoretical orientation...

If anthropologists take a sensual turn they will position themselves to let the other’s world penetrate their being. This repositioning, as I argued in Chapters 1 and 2, would transform the fundamental relationship among our writers, texts and readers. In most ethnographic texts, anthropologists are the authors. The texts they produce are the products of their disciplinary socialization. In more sensualized ethnographies the scenes described (people, interviews, ritual) become authors, the anthropologist becoming the intermediary between the author and an audience. These texts are then the products of socialization in two worlds. Socialization in two worlds implies a decrease of...

When a Western visitor to Songhay country rides a bush taxi, he or she is suddenly thrown into a social universe in which many of the advantages of being a “prestigious” European are rudely pushed aside. No matter a person’s status in the pecking order of Songhay society, riding a bush taxi in Songhay is a rude initiation both to the uncomfortable conditions of public travel in the Republic of Niger and to the “hardness” of Songhay social interaction.

I took my first bush taxi ride in the fall of 1969, when I had been in the Republic of Niger...

Imagine an anthropological discourse in which the others classify their anthropologists in the same way that we classify them. Such a movement would be a step toward the decolonization of anthropological texts; it would also help infuse our writing with a desperately needed sense of humor. “Savages,” after all, enjoy savaging their ethnographers.

In earlier pages I have written about how the Eurocentric gaze affected the perception and analysis of my Songhay field experiences. In this chapter I argue that “their” classifications of “us” are revelatory, for they situate ethnographic research in a broader, more epistemologically and politically sensitive context....

One afternoon in 1970 in Tillaberi, the haunting cries of the monochord violin drew me over a dune to witness my first ceremony of Songhay spirit possession. The possession dance was held in the compound of Adamu Jenitongo, who would later become the master my apprenticeship in Songhay sorcery. The sounds of these instruments so impressed me that I continued to attend possession ceremonies in 1971. Upon my return to Niger 1976 I again listened for the “cries” of the violin and the “clacks” of the gourd drum. In 1977 I began to learn about the sounds of spirit poetry...

It was in the village of Mehanna in the Republic of Niger that I learned my first lesson in Songhay hearing. I had been studying with Djibo Mounmouni, a village sorko, a healer who uses words as well as magical powders to heal people who are suffering from illness precipitated by natural and supernatural agents. For four days we attended to a man of some 35 years of age who was suffering from an illness that to me had no discernible diagnosis. The patient had been to the local Islamic healer, to the local health unit, to the regional health...

My first month of fieldwork among the Songhay of Niger in 1976–77 was a total failure. Having previously lived among the Songhay, and having learned to speak Songhay, I had few problems adjusting to life in a rural village. Still, I did not know many people of the village of Mehanna. Following the wisdom of the literature on fieldwork, I decided to conduct a survey to get to know my neighbors. Soon after I settled in a small mudbrick house, I designed a questionnaire that would generate, or so I thought, some demographic data. But I did not want...

In language and life, human beings are meanderers; we continually take detours. Artists, philosophers and ethnographers often take sideroads which lead them into dimensions of time-space that stray far from the main highway. But too many of us describe those sideroads as if they were still the main highway. The result is a “straight” discourse—sometimes analogic, sometimes digital—suggesting that we have taken highways that lead us directly to our theoretical destinations, suggesting that we “know the place for the first time.”

This straight discourse permeates the social sciences. We use it to write research proposals. Imagine a proposal...