Vendor
	Liepman Literary Agency Marc Koralnik
Original language
English

RECAPITULATIONS

Vincent Crapanzano

A distinguished anthropologist tells his life story as a wistful novelist would, watching himself as if he were someone else

How do we remember? Is the act of remembering related to the creation of a responsive self? How do our memories resonate with everyday experience? In Recapitulations, author and distinguished professor Vincent Crapanzano attempts to answer these questions by reflecting on his personal experiences as an anthropologist, literary theorist, and critic. At once an autobiography and an ethnographic study, this book brilliantly explores the author's lifefrom his earliest memories to thoughts about deaththrough seemingly disparate recollections drawn from his wide range of experiences. Crapanzano uses these recollections as a way of questioning our cultural and psychological assumptions, and in the process, calls attention to the limits they impose on our self-understanding, imagination, and interpretations of reality. Like Claude Lévi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques and C. G. Jung's Memories, Dreams, Reflections, this unique memoir is a beautifully written guide to the hidden realms of personal memory and experience. VINCENT CRAPANZANO is an author and Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center. He has published articles in major periodicals and academic journals, such as The American Anthropologist, Les Temps Modernes, Yale Review of Literature, The New Yorker, The New York Times and The Times Literary Supplement. His previous books include The Fifth World of Foster Bennett (Viking, 1977), The Hamadsha (University of California Press), Tuhami (University of Chicago Press), Hermes' Dilemma and Hamlet's Desire: Essays on the Epistemology of Interpretation (Harvard University Press), Serving the Word (The New Press, 2000), Imaginative Horizons: An Essay in Literary-Philosophical Anthropology (University of Chicago Press), and The Harkis: The Wound that Never Heals (University of Chicago Press). PRAISE FOR THE HARKIS Combining interviews, literary analysis, and psychoanalytical insights, Vincent Crapanzano traces the ways in which betrayal and powerlessness have played out in the lives of the Harkis and their children. Times Literary Supplement PRAISE FOR SERVING THE WORD Crapanzano takes the Fundamentalists as he finds them and expounds the manifestations of their literalism without condescension or contradiction. New York Review of Books

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Book Published 2015-03-01 by Other Press

Comments

In what he so thrillingly reveals to be the echo-chamber of autobiographical self-invention -- a vertiginous terrain of memory, reflection, inescapable figuration -- Vincent Crapanzano creates a uniquely compelling sequence of immediate experience and profound insight into how we each construct the story of our lives. A lifetime of anthropological as well as literary interpretation by one of our most subtle interpreters of human expression and behavior here turns upon Crapanzano himself, in the telling of his own story. In so doing, he gives us a vivid speculative adventure, part detective story, part Augustinian-Sartrean meditation, always hovering between origins and ends, the known and the unknowable. Skeptical, alluring, wrenching, exhilarating, always riveting, Recapitulations is a tour de force--a genuinely philosophical investigation of a remarkable life, which also teaches us how to seize that freedom distilled by every profound encounter both with others, and with that paradoxical other we call the self. Peter Sacks, Harvard University

A book of memories about the act of remembering.In this memoir, anthropologist [Vincent] Crapanzano uses all the tools of his trade, approaching his memories skeptically and psychoanalytically, as a set of data where the truth is wrapped in self-protective layers. Crapanzano's self-conscious, self-analytical style makes this a unique and interesting search for lost time.

Crapanzano is a compelling narrator, and his Recapitulations will be fascinating to anyone who has ever wondered what it's like to be an anthropologist, or how an anthropologist thinks -- all the more so because of his uniquely cosmopolitan vision of human experience and his wry and distinctive voice in describing his own. Thomas J. Csordas, Ph.D., Professor and Chair, Department of Anthropology, University of California San Diego

[A] thoughtful, intellectually engaging book that looks at how we organize our memories, understand ourselves and the world around us, and create and recreate meaning in our lives An intriguing, perceptive memoir that encourages readers to think more deeply about their own lives.

"Distinguished anthropologist, philosopher, and literary critic Crapanzano (The Harkis) nevertheless deftly conducts us, sometimes ploddingly and haltingly, often brilliantly and dazzlingly, through the twists and turns of a life lived reflectively."

Galaade

Vincent Crapanzano is not only a thoughtful man who writes eloquently about his rich and adventurous life, but he is also a worldly emissary who advises us never to take for granted our own vision of the world: there is much to learn from people we do not understand and who do not understand us.