David Stoll

David Stoll is an American cultural anthropologist. His research has focused on the indigenous peoples of modern Latin America, and especially on the Mayas in Guatemala. He has been a professor of anthropology at Middlebury College since 1997.
Education and early work.
Stoll studied anthropology at the University of Michigan. He became interested in Protestant evangelism in Latin America and, as an independent researcher, investigated the role of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, focusing on its ties with Evangelical missionary work among the indigenous populations (see Wycliffe Bible Translators), as well as with its possible covert ties with the anti-communist foreign policy of the United States government. That work was published in 1983 in the book "Fishers of Men or Founders of Empire?"
Stoll started post-graduate work at Stanford University in 1985. He investigated the role of and impact upon the native Maya Ixil communities of Nebaj of the Guatemalan Civil War at the peak of its violence in the early 1980s. That work led to two books: "Between Two Armies in the Ixil Towns of Guatemala" (1994) and "Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans" (1999). Stoll received a doctorate in anthropology from Stanford in 1992 and joined the faculty at Middlebury College's Department of Anthropology in 1997.
Rigoberta Menchú critique.
Stoll's book "Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans" argued that the life story of Guatemalan Nobel Peace Prize laureate Rigoberta Menchú, as she had told it to anthropologist Elizabeth Burgos in 1982 and as it was recounted in the book "I, Rigoberta Menchú" (published by Burgos in 1983), was not entirely consistent with the testimonies of her neighbors and relatives or with the documentary evidence. According to Stoll, although the basic elements of Menchú's testimony were true, significant aspects of it had been distorted to make it more compatible with the ideology of the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP), with which Menchú was affiliated at the time. Stoll also criticized some anthropologists and historians for ignoring other indigenous testimonies that did not fit so well with their own political agendas. "The New York Times" confirmed Stoll's main findings about Menchú's personal history in December 1998, shortly before Stoll's book appeared in print.
Stoll's book about Menchú raised a great deal of controversy, especially within the academic community in the United States. Fellow anthropologist Victoria Sanford accused Stoll of historical negationism and victim blaming. She argues that there are serious inaccuracies in Stoll's book, and claims that he used highly questionable sources as informants. According to Mark Horowitz, William Yaworsky, and Kenneth Kickham, the controversy about Stoll's allegations regarding Menchú 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. Stoll's "Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans" was re-issued in 2008 in an extended edition with a new foreword by Elizabeth Burgos.
Other research.
Stoll continues to carry out research in the Guatemalan highlands. He has recently focused on immigration, microcredit, and what he argues is a financial bubble created by the two.