Storytracking Texts, Stories, and Histories in Central Australia

This innovative work takes a narrative technique (known as"storytracking") practiced by Australian aboriginal peoples and applies it tothe academic study of their culture. Gill's purpose is to get as close aspossible to the perceptions and beliefs of these indigenous peoples by strippingaway the layers of European interpretation and construction. His techniqueinvolves comparing the versions of aboriginal texts presented in academicreports with the text versions as they appear in each report's cited sources.The comparison helps reveal the extent to which the text is transformed throughits presentation. Gill follows the chain of citations along, uncovering thestory, or as he calls it the "storytrack," that interconnects scholar withscholar-independent subject. The storytrack reveals the various academicoperations--translations, editing, conflation, interpretation--that serve tobuild a bridge connecting subject and scholarly report.L L Gill begins byexamining Mircea Eliade's influential analysis of an Australian myth,"Numbakulla and the sacreed Pole." He goes back to the field notes of theanthropoligists who originally collected the story and by following the trail ofpublications, revisions, and retellings of this tale is able to show thatEliade's version bears almost no relation to the original and that theinterpretations Eliade built around it is thus entirely a Europen construct,motivated largely by preconceptions about the nature of religion. By applyingthis method to other received texts of aboriginal religion, Gill is able tobring us closer than ever before to the worldview of this vanishing culture. Atthe same time, his work constitutes an important statement on and critique ofthe academic study of religion as it has traditionally been practiced.

Sam Gill is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder.