Description: Yaya's Story is a book about Yaya Harouna, a Songhay trader originally from Niger who found a path to America. It is also a book about Paul Stoller--its author--an American anthropologist who found his own path to Africa. Separated by ethnicity, language, profession, and culture, these two men's lives couldn't be more different. But when they were both threatened by a grave illness--cancer--those differences evaporated, and the two were brought to profound existential convergence, a deep camaraderie in the face of the most harrowing of circumstances. Yaya's Story is that story.
Harouna and Stoller would meet in Harlem, at a bustling African market where Harouna built a life as an African art trader and Stoller was conducting research. Moving from Belayara in Niger to Silver Spring, Maryland, and from the Peace Corps to fieldwork to New York, Stoller recounts their separate lives and how the threat posed by cancer brought them a new, profound, and shared sense of meaning. Combining memoir, ethnography, and philosophy through a series of interconnected narratives, he tells a story of remarkable friendship and the quest for well-being. It's a story of difference and unity, of illness and health, a lyrical reflection on human resiliency and the shoulders we lean on.Brief description: Paul Stoller is a professor of anthropology at West Chester University of Pennsylvania.He is the author of many books, including ethnographies, biographies, and memoirs. In 1994 he was awarded a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2002, the American Anthropological Association named him the recipient of the Robert B. Textor Award for Excellence in Anthropology. He lectures frequently both in the United States and Europe and has appeared on various NPR programs as well as on the National Geographic Television Network.
Review Quotes: "Stoller's Yaya's Story: The Quest for Well-being in the World is a richly textured, ethnographic tale of the intertwining, 'existential convergences' of two men's lives. This is a story with the power to linger, a story of 'mutual understandings, ' intimate bonds, and the virtues of moral intelligence. . . . Writing against the scholarly grain, Stoller has produced a text that enchants. Over the course of a few pages the reader is brought to places and times that are in the same moment both wounded and spectacular, diverse and engaging. . . . Whether interested in a study of well-being, of transnational African traders, of spirit possession, of anthropology, or simply of the friendship of two very different men, Yaya's Story is a book offering much to a wide readership. It is without doubt a book with a soul."-- "LSE Review of Books"