Professor Emeritus Paul Stoller Honored at the American Anthropological Association
On November 20, 2025, Dr. Paul Stoller was honored at the American Anthropological Association’s annual meeting in New Orleans with a special retrospective celebration of his work.
Bringing together a multidisciplinary group of scholars and artists from around the world, the half-day festschrift honored Stoller’s pathbreaking scholarship and his influence on the anthropology of West Africa, humanism, wellbeing and the senses.
“It was wonderful to have colleagues, friends and former students speak so wonderfully about my life as a teacher, writer, and anthropologist,” Stoller commented after the event.
For four decades, Stoller conducted fieldwork among the Songhay of Niger and, later, among the West African diaspora in New York. Captivated early on by Songhay spirit possession troupes, Stoller was taken under the wing of a sorcerer and a possession priest, as well as the French ethno-cinematographer Jean Rouch. Stoller is well-known for his book, In Sorcery's Shadow: A Memoir of Apprenticeship among the Songhay of Niger, which describes his experiences living among the Songhay as an apprentice to a sorcerer; as well as Fusion of the Worlds: An Ethnography of Possession Among the Songhay of Niger, which generations of students—at West Chester and elsewhere—continue to read. Panelists Scott Youngstedt, Laurian Bowles, and Conerly Casey discussed the strong impact this body of work had on their own scholarship.
Stoller’s life and fieldwork shifted dramatically after a series of illnesses, first in Niger, where he was told bad magic was being cast on him, and again after a cancer diagnosis in the early 2000s. His resulting works are humanistic in nature, holistic in their treatment of sensory engagement, and accessibly written.
Feeling he could not return to Niger, he shifted his field site to the Malcolm Shabazz Market in Harlem, NY, studying the West African diaspora in the 1990s; Money Has No Smell is one of several books emerging from his Harlem research.
Stoller is particularly renowned for his unique writing style, having pioneered the “ethnographic novel”—readable, yet instructive academic work. A Stranger Among the Village of the Sick is a memoir about his experience of fusing Western cosmopolitan medicine with Songhay spirituality during his cancer journey.
He has been a regular contributor to the Huffington Post and Psychology Today, bringing anthropological insight to a non-academic audience through the publication of over 100 articles. Sergio Gonzalez Varela, an anthropologist who shadowed Stoller on a Fulbright at West Chester University in 2017, stated, “The importance of the evocative power of storytelling is one of Stoller's most notable contributions.”
Based on his time at WCU, Gonzalez Varela published the first Spanish-language biography of Stoller, Entre Dos Mundos: La Antropología Radical de Paul Stoller in 2018. “Paul Stoller has taught us that, regardless of the research topic we choose, anthropologists always find ourselves confronted with the existential dilemma of never again belonging to just one world, but to several; where misunderstandings proliferate, but where distances are bridged to bring human beings closer together,” Gonzalez Varela said in his address.
Panelist Helena Wulff drew on Stoller’s pioneering work on sensory anthropology, particularly his book, The Taste of Ethnographic Things. Wulff, an anthropologist of dance at Stockholm University, connected Stoller’s work on spirit possession and the senses to the ballet world’s quest for wellbeing amidst pain, rivalries and the stress of achieving peak performance. “Connecting to others and carefully nurturing people in one’s network are indeed the heart of well-being not only in Niger, but everywhere. And this is also what Paul Stoller does, as a wonderful ethnographer, colleague and friend,” she said.
The event embraced the senses. Irish poet Fiona Murphy celebrated Stoller’s mentorship with a beautifully moving poem, while artist Gina Athena Ulysse capped the event with Haitian-inspired invocations to the spirits.
Medical anthropologist David Napier, a close friend and colleague based at University College London, commented that the celebration “was such an inspiring event, very much in line with Paul’s work and personality. I certainly appreciated the variety of presentation formats and the many rich stories they generated. As usual, Paul liberates my mind!”
Stoller taught for the entirety of his career at West Chester University, where he inspired thousands of students and mentored junior faculty, and is now Professor Emeritus of Anthropology. Prior to retiring in spring 2025, he published Wisdom from the Edge, about mentorship and the universal human search for wellbeing.
Opening the event, WCU Professor of Anthropology Michael A. Di Giovine commented, “Each one of us moves through their career and intellectual development with the help of mentors: people who inspire, who guide, who serve as an iconic personality around which a mentee models himself and his behaviors. Having spent the entirety of my teaching career at West Chester University with him, Paul is clearly that for me.”
Closing the event, ethnographer and WCU anthropology alumna Erica Walters (2016) spoke on behalf of Stoller’s recent students. “One of the main reasons I chose West Chester University for undergrad was not for its wonderful location but for Dr. Paul Stoller,” she said. “Being in Dr. Stoller’s class was like being in the coolest and strangest book club you could imagine. His storytelling didn’t simply teach us about the world; it opened up the world to us. Many of us were first-generation students, or local kids who hadn’t traveled far; yet in his classes, we traveled continents.”
Stoller now travels around the world giving writing workshops and transmitting the knowledge of the Songhay ancestors to a new generation of students.
The retrospective is only the latest in a long list of honors Stoller has enjoyed over the years. In 1994, the American Anthropological Association awarded him the Robert B. Textor and Family Prize for Anticipatory Anthropology, honoring those whose significant contributions affect policy decisions; and the Anthropology in the Media Award in 2015. In addition to fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, he was awarded the prestigious Anders Retzius Gold Medal in Anthropology—the discipline’s “Nobel Prize” given by the King of Sweden every four years.
In 2023, WCU museum studies students curated the Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology’s exhibition, Surrounded by the Spirits: Paul Stoller and the Songhay Journey Towards Wellbeing; a 3D virtual exhibition is available online and includes an oral history series with Paul, as well as links to various podcasts and interviews with him from the press. A recording of this event is also available on the site.