David Stoll
David Stoll is an American anthropologist. In his book Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans, Stoll documents the contrast between the testimony of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Rigoberta Menchú, to anthropologist Elizabeth Burgos in 1982, and how her neighbors and relatives remember their history. Stoll also criticized solidarity scholars for using Menchú's story to ignore other indigenous perspectives that do not fit their political agenda.[1] The New York Times confirmed his findings about Menchú's personal history in a front-page story.[2]
According to Mark Horowitz, William Yaworsky, and Kenneth Kickham, the controversy about Stoll's account of Menchu is one of the three most divisive episodes in recent american anthropological history, along with controversies about the truthfulness of Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa and Napoleon Chagnon's representation of violence among the Yanomami[3].
Stoll continues to carry out research in the Guatemalan highlands, most recently focusing on immigration, microcredit, and what he argues is a financial bubble created by the two. He teaches at Middlebury College.
Publications
- Fishers of Men or Founders of Empire? (1983), about the Wycliffe Bible Translators
- Is Latin America Turning Protestant? (1990)
- Between Two Armies in the Ixil Towns of Guatemala
- Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans (1999)
- El Norte or Bust: How Migration Fever and Microcredit Produced a Financial Crash in a Latin American Town (2012)
External links
- Robert Strauss, Truth and Consequences
- "I, Rigoberta Menchu". The New York Review of Books. 21 October 1999.
- https://archive.is/20140104183838/http://europe.microfinancefocus.com/book-review-david-stolls-new-book-el-norte-or-bust/
- Stoll, David (2013). El Norte or Bust! How Migration Fever and Microcredit Produced a Financial Crash in a Latin American Town. ISBN 978-1-4422-2068-3.
References
- Stoll, David Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans, 1999.
- LARRY ROHTER (15 December 1988). "TARNISHED LAUREATE: A special report.; Nobel Winner Finds Her Story Challenged". The New York Times. Retrieved 6 July 2018.
The New York Times conducted several interviews here in early December that contradict Ms. Menchu's account. Relatives, neighbors, friends and former classmates of Rigoberta Menchu, including an older brother and half sister and four Roman Catholic nuns who educated and sheltered her, indicated that many of the main episodes related by Ms. Menchu have either been fabricated or seriously exaggerated.
- https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/705409