Analysis Of The Book Stranger s The Village Of The Sick...

Ashley Scott ANTH 221-01 FA 2014 Ethnographic Assignment In his autobiographical novel â€Å"Stranger in the Village of the Sick† American anthropologist Paul Stoller recounts how spending 17 years as an apprentice sorcerer in West Africa prepared him for dealing with Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma later on in life. While conducting field work in Niger, Stoller, who was raised with a formal Jewish education, underwent a spiritual and religious rebirth, and later drew deeper meaning from this experience as he dealt with his cancer diagnosis and treatment. Having cancer provided Stoller with the opportunity to seek out a spiritual revival and to go back to his sorcerer roots. Stoller claims that his experience with sorcery gave him many advantages while undergoing aggressive Western medical treatments, and draws many parallels between being a cancer patient and being a sorcerer. On one hand, Stoller praises the Western healthcare system because it saves lives and uses amazing tools to do so, like an efficient, well-run machine. On the other hand, he criticizes it for having a cold, calculated and mechanical nature. Stoller states that to be a patient in the West requires that you be your own advocate, while in West Africa the healer is your advocate. He laments that one of the major faults with Western healthcare is that is that no healthcare professionals truly seem to care. Yet when doctors and nurses try to reach out to him at different times he states that because of his independent