Storytracking. Text, Stories, And Histories in Central Australia (Book Review‪)‬

By Sam D Gill. Melbourne:Oxford University Press. 1998. Pp. xi + 276. Price: AU$34.95 Storytracking. Texts, stories, and histories in Central Australia presents a critical and detailed investigation of ethnographic texts and their sources. However, Gill's analysis of four trajectories which constitutes the central part of the book, mellows into reparational theorising in the bracketing chapters for a scholarly error that he himself had made in a contribution to the study of Australian Aboriginal religion. Gill had drawn on Eliade's 'Numbakulla and the sacred pole' in one of his own writings, assuming this to be a 'legitimate interpretation" of a primary ethnographic text, Spencer and Gillen's 1927 The Arunta. Having become aware of sustained criticisms of the ethnographic sources and of Eliade's construction, Gill sets out to track down the textual history of these to find that all abound with distortions, illegitimate editing, even concoctions. This, then, is certainly not a book about the Arrernte for whom, so Gill declares in his preface, he 'deeply cares'. His real concern is the methodological cum ethical crisis in the study of religion as an academic discipline, and Gill, professor of religious studies at Colorado, sets himself the task to reinstate the possibility of 'legitimately' engaging with a research subject via textual encounters. The 'method' he claims to have developed is 'storytracking' which he applies to writings about the Arrernte of Central Australia. The idea is to follow the genesis of ethnographic texts backwards to the 'independent reality of the subject' (p.5) and to so reveal the 'various academic operations' (ibid.) through detailed textual analysis and the exploration of a number of perspectives. However, the acute scrutiny of textual constructions of the Other as produced by ethnographers is suddenly abandoned when the author attempts to 'resurrect the Hydra' and entangles himself in statements about Arrernte ontology without anthropological field work to draw upon.