Talk:David Stoll (anthropologist)

Deletion of birth date

I was responsible for adding Stoll's birthdate to this article several years ago, mostly so I'd remember to send him a birthday card. In retrospect, I think it's inappropriate to include that kind of information for an academic and I've deleted it.

Size of that parcel of land

I have added the following to User:TDC's talk page.

You added to the David Stoll article that "Vicente Menchú had in fact been quite prosperous.... He had owned a 2,753 hectares parcel of land." Unless this was poisoned waste land it would have made him more than a "quite prosperous" peasant, it would have made him a major upper-class landowner. 2,753 hectares is about 7,000 acres or more than ten square miles. Was this a mistake? 2.753 hectares seems more likely for the plot of a "quite prosperous" peasant. It has since been converted to "27.53 suare km" but I'm going to replace it with something non-specific. Could you perhaps find the time to double check the source? And of course it is possible that the source is wrong. If 2,753 hectares is right, the whole of the article is hard to understand. I know Stoll was arguing they weren't that poor, but landownership on that scale would surely make the conflict referred to one between two landowning factions rather than a peasant revolt. Bhoeble 14:50, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

Change in language

The opening paragraph had the sentence: "He achieved brief notoriety, making the front page of The New York Times, for his controversial work concerning the Guatemalan activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Rigoberta Menchú and currently teaches at Middlebury College." I think that language is quite loaded and inaccurate. There is still quite a stir of Stoll's arguments, so it was not brief. "Notoriety" is an opinionated word, implying ill-repute. I changed it to "In his book Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans (1999) , Stoll pointed out inaccuracies between his fieldwork and the memoir that Nobel Peace Prize laureate Rigoberta Menchú wrote with Elizabeth Burgos. Additionally, Stoll criticized many Western academics in their interpretation of Menchú's story, claiming that such academics romanticize guerrillas in Latin America. The New York Times featured his controversial findings about Menchú on their front page."Mvblair (talk) 06:18, 30 May 2009 (UTC)

References

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Additional content related to Rigoberta Menchú et al.

Greetings. I apologize beforehand for the edit war on this article. In the heat of the moment, I was too caught up reverting and changing contentious edits to begin a proper talkpage discussion. To begin, the purpose of my recent additions was to further clarify the actual controversy of David Stoll's claims about Rigoberta Menchú, and to fully describe the criticism he received from other anthropologists and scholars about the content of his thesis, particularly from Victoria Sanford, John Beverley, John Feffer, David Johnson, and others, in large part due to several factual errors and misinterpretation of history in order to portray the Guatemalan military regime in a positive light and falsely discredit Menchú herself, a particularly egregious example being Stoll's implication that Menchú's testimony was motivated solely to "spread propaganda in favour of the Marxist ERP guerilla organization". This particular controversy is a defining moment of David Stoll's career, and it would be inappropriate to simply make a passing reference to it while omitting any further important details, such as the nature of his arguments and where exactly did he receive criticism. After a lengthy argument spanning more than a day, me and EB Hoop have arrived at an agreement to include Sanford et al's critique of David Stoll as long as it didn't create undue bias towards either party, and I agreed to have the disputed categories about genocide denial and historical negationism removed due to concerns of possible libel, whose addition I agree was quite hasty of me. My intention is not to defame and smear David Stoll in any way, but to fully describe the nature of his statements about Rigoberta Menchú and the controversy and criticism they have generated, as established by several reliable sources and scholars. After EB Hoop removed the categories and I accepted his changes, I thought the dispute was resolved, only for all of the recent additions to be erroneously rolled back by another editor named Johnnie Bob a moment later, even though I did not make any further edits or reverts. Why exactly were they reverted, and what are the remaining objections, if any, to the inclusion of my proposed revision? 91.127.73.122 (talk) 22:05, 16 May 2021 (UTC)

There were, in my mind, three separate issues with your recent edits. The first is that you added categories to this article for "Denialism", "Genocide Denial", and "Historical negationism". I think that that is unacceptable, since it could even be interpreted as libeling a living person. At the very least it didn't reflect a neutral point of view on the work of the anthropologist in question.

Another issue is that your edits referred to the criticism of Stoll's work published in 2000 by Victoria Sanford in a way that seemed to me non-neutral. That is, you didn't just report her criticism, but seemed to me to be presenting it as actually refuting Stoll on the subject of the life story of Rigoberta Menchú. That was why I intervened to keep the reference to Sanford but to make the language more neutral.

Finally, my own take is that nowadays the weight of scholarly opinion supports Stoll's conclusions regarding Menchú. For starters, the anthropologist who actually wrote the book based on Menchú's testimony and published it in 1982, Elisabeth Burgos (then known as Elisabeth Burgos-Debray) hasn't just publicly conceded the validity of Stoll's criticism, but even wrote a foreword for the extended edition of Stoll's book that appeared in 2008. According to that foreword:

David Stoll completed the task that I would have done myself —if I had handled this as an anthropological project rather than a political one. Stoll submitted the book that Rigoberta Menchú and I produced to anthropological practice, by situating it in sociocultural and political perspective. He verified facts with other witnesses and carried out a historical, sociological, and ethnographic survey, in the best professional sense of the term. This is why his book, despite its polemical character, possesses an undeniable merit —to have rescued I, Rigoberta Menchú, from the fossilization to which it has been subject, returning it to historical perspective and thus returning it to life.

Most of the published criticisms of Stoll's book have been based not on the questioning of the credibility of Stoll's sources (who included Menchú's brother and half-sister), but on the notion that Menchú was working within a framework of testimonio that legitimately incorporated the experiences of others into the voice of a single speaker (see, e.g., the commentary by Horowitz, Yaworsky, and Kickham, cited in the article). For this reason I'd be wary of giving over much more space here to Sanford's 2000 article, which may not even be representative of the bulk of published critiques of Stoll's work. - Eb.hoop2 (talk) 00:21, 17 May 2021 (UTC)

If new evidence is discovered that points to Stoll's stance being the majority view among anthropologists and historians, then we'll add it into the article when available, but unless there are reliable sources that satisfy the WP:EXTRAORDINARY standards for the presentation of Stoll's claims as the consensus position, we'll go by what the current scholarly literature states regarding Stoll, and that includes Victoria Sanford's critique in full, to avoid misleading the reader into thinking that David Stoll's polemic about Rigoberta Menchú, especially his politically charged accusations of "Marxist propagandizing", is a undisputed and empirical fact. As for your first two concerns, they have already been addressed by my last edit to this article before it was mistakenly reverted, so I hope there aren't any remaining problems.91.127.73.122 (talk) 02:10, 17 May 2021 (UTC)

I see various problems with your more recent edit on this subject. First and foremost, this Wikipedia article is not a proper forum for an extended airing of grievances against the person in question or his work. Especially since this is the biography of a living person, it is very important to maintain a neutral point of view. You must not see your role as editor here as "setting the record straight". And it is emphatically not the case that Stoll's work on Menchú is an "extraordinary claim", as you seem to be suggesting above. His work was published in 1999 by a reputable academic publisher, and the gist of it was confirmed just before publication in a news story that appeared on the front page of the New York Times. Stoll himself was and remains a respectable anthropologist, with solid academic credentials and a track record of research publications based on many years of field work among the native communities from which Menchú derives. His book on Menchú was re-published in 2008 with a foreword and endorsement by the same anthropologist who had written and published Menchú's original testimony, as I already pointed out above.

It is certainly proper to document here some of the controversy that met Stoll's book about Menchú, but it seems to me that the changes that you've made recently clearly make this discussion less neutral, and are not even an accurate reflection of what most of Stoll's critics have argued. For starters, you give a great deal of space and weight specifically to the criticism by Virginia Sanford, who was one of relatively few critics who questioned the factual basis for Stoll's claims. The great majority of Stoll's critics (including, e.g., Greg Grandin in this article from 2010 in The Nation) grant that what Stoll said in his book about Menchú's life is factually correct, even if they strongly dispute the use that Stoll and others make of this in interpreting the Guatemalan Civil War. Sanford's indictment of Alfonso Rivera (not, as you have repeatedly written, Riviera) as an informant is something that Stoll replied to long ago:

[Sanford's] attack on Uspantán's former town secretary Alfonso Rivera is ill-informed and unfair; while it is true that Alfonso went to jail for graft, so did four other members of the pro-Rigoberta town council. While the New York Times quoted him as criticizing Rigoberta, he was always a defender of the Nobel laureate, her father, and her family in his conversations with me. [1]

As far as I can tell, the issue of Rivera's testimony has not come up again in the Menchú controversy in the last twenty years.

Finally, the use of references in your most recent edit is confusing, to say the least. You cite as a criticism of Stoll's work an article by John Beverly in Modern Fiction Studies that was published in 1989, i.e., ten years before Stoll's book, as well as the Nobel Peace Prize website, which mentions Stoll's book but says nothing against it at all, and in fact treats it as factually sound.

For these reasons I cannot regard your recent edits as an improvement to the article. - Eb.hoop2 (talk) 00:41, 1 June 2021 (UTC)

You've now reinstated most of your edits, without first responding here to any of my concerns. I insist that those edits do little except make the language of the article less neutral. But what most concerns me is that you're using some citations to support something different from what they actually say. Your statement that "Stoll's analysis of Rigoberta Menchú has received criticism for bias in support of the Guatemalan military dictatorship, for trivializing and denying the atrocities committed by the military regime, and for omitting several relevant findings and testimonies that contradicted his thesis" is certainly not supported by Feffer or by Johnson (who never dispute the factual basis of Stoll's book or accuse him of personally supporting military dictatorship), much less by the Nobel Peace Prize website (which says nothing at all against Stoll's work and in fact cites him in support of the awarding of the prize to Menchú). You've also included in a footnote the statement that Alfonso Rivera was "Stoll's main informant" about Menchú, something that I've already shown above was explicitly denied by Stoll, and which is easily contradicted by the contents of Stoll's published book.- Eb.hoop2 (talk) 15:51, 5 June 2021 (UTC)