Based on the article in The Chronicle (1/15/99) about Stoll's book, it would seem that this book will set the discipline of anthropology back 30-40 years. Many of us in the humanities thought that such anthropological methods had ended thanks to Claude Levi-Strauss. I'll certainly read Stoll's book; it will provide fodder for my current project on "The Discourses of Testimony," which include ethnography. The most glaring problems seems to be the imposition of a Western epistemology on a fundamentally non-Western (in spite of deBray's mediation) account of events. The ontological status of testimonios is fundamentally different that that of "autobiographies" and "memoires". All of the apparent contradictions or lack of confirmation indicated by Stoll are anticipated by Menchú's account which she emphasizes that she and her people don't reveal all of their secrets to outsiders (deBray and Stoll). If academics are guilty of only hearing what they want to so that they can "project their fantasies" (like Margaret Mead in Samoa to mention an anthropologist who confused the fictions told her by her informants for fact) Stoll is apparently equally guilty of listening only to those informants who confirm what he wants to hear.
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