Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Return to Storytelling: An Inverted Ethnography

Return to Storytelling: An Inverted Ethnography

Stocker, Karen

Paperback

Series: Teaching Culture: UTP Ethnographies for the Classroom

AnthropologyGeneral Racism & Ethnic StudiesGeneral Sociology

Publisher Price: $34.95

PREORDER - Expected ship date September 15, 2026

ISBN10: 104980791X
ISBN13: 9781049807911
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Published: Sep 15 2026
Pages: 264
Weight: 0.83
Height: 1.00 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

Return to Storytelling is a lyrical ethnographic work that presents stories from healers, community members, storytellers, witches, sceptics, and tricksters in an intentionally unnamed Central American Indigenous community.


Anthropologist Karen Stocker investigates how stories of all kinds - written historical accounts, stories told within the community, and stories familiar to readers from North American backgrounds - shape people's frameworks for interpreting both the everyday and the extraordinary. Stocker interrogates history as portrayed in sixteenth-century chronicles and upends scholarly writing styles in favour of the verbal artistry characteristic of the community as well as the Latin American magical realist genre. Thus, Return to Storytelling constitutes an inverted ethnography that prioritizes community collective memory over colonizers' accounts, and privileges critical insight conveyed in accessible language over jargon-laden writing. At the same time, it remains grounded in sound, long-term ethnographic research and ultimately urges readers to question how they know what they know.

Also in

Anthropology

View All