Vincent Crapanzano

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Vincent Crapanzano (* 1939 in Glen Rich , New York) is Professor of Anthropology and Literary Studies at the Graduate School of New York City University. He lives in Paris and New York with his wife Jane Kramer .

research

His interests focus on the epistemology of the interpretation and articulation of experience, symbolic and interpretative anthropology , ethno-psychology, the relationship between anthropology and literature, and theories of interpretation . Among other things, he did research with the Navajo Indians in Arizona. With the members of an Islamic Sufi brotherhood, the Hamadscha in northern Morocco , he carried out an ethno-psychiatric study on the possession spirit of Aisha Qandisha . During the apartheid era , he conducted research with white South Africans and later with Christian fundamentalists and conservatives in the United States.

Vincent Crapanzano is one of the contemporary, postmodern anthropologists who claim that there can be no objectivity in cultural analysis. He argues that ethnographers would tend to mix what they believe the people they study think with what those people actually think. This error results from an attempt by the respective author to maintain his authority through the coherence of his text at the expense of accuracy. Unless an author differentiates between his own view and the views of the people he describes, readers would tend to forget that the author's voice is the only one they hear and that the text is an objective reality without any interpretation of the Author submit.

Another assumption by Crapanzano is that anthropologists tend to infer the constitution of the entire population of a given society on the basis of individual cases. Crapanzano finds that this kind of generalization reveals a conventional attitude of anthropologists towards their research subjects. They would tend to isolate themselves from the population they study and would refuse to see people as equal individuals.

The underlying concept of Crapanzano's work is that anthropologists construct meanings by writing ethnographically. Although ethnographic data is mute itself, the act of writing is both a literary construction on the author's part and a construction of himself as an author.

In order to uncover these connections, Crapanzano takes apart rhetorical devices in ethnographic texts and examines them. The method for this type of critical analysis is called (literary) deconstruction . It is intended to uncover interpretations and hidden prejudices (English bias ) that authors display in the course of justifying their authority and is intended to determine the underlying hierarchies in the transmission of information. The process of literary deconstruction, which plays a major role in postmodern anthropology, is intended to challenge anthropologists to become more sensitive to their own unconscious assumptions.

Works

  • The Fifth World of Foster Bennett: A Portrait of a Navaho. Viking Press, New York 1972; Bison Books Edition 2003
  • The Hamadsha. A Study in Moroccan Ethnopsychiatry. University of California Press, Berkeley 1973 ( partial online view from Google books )
  • Tuhami: A Portrait of a Moroccan. University Of Chicago Press, Chicago / London 1980
  • Waiting: the Whites of South Africa. Random House, New York 1985
  • Hermes' Dilemma & Hamlet's Desire: On the Epistemology of Interpretation . Harvard College, Harvard 1992
  • Serving the Word: Literalism in America from the Pulpit to the Bench. The New Press, New York 2000

Published in German

  • The Ḥamadša. An ethno-psychiatric investigation in Morocco, with a foreword by Paul Parin . Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1981, ISBN 3-12-931610-8
  • Tuhami . Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1983

As editor

  • With Vivian Garrison (Ed.): Case Studies in Spirit Possession. (= Contemporary Religious Movements: A Wiley-Interscience Series ) John Wiley & Sons, New York 1977

literature

  • Vincent Crapanzano: Life Histories. In: American Anthropologists 86, 1984, pp. 953-960

Web links