A distinguished anthropologist tells his life story as a wistful
novelist would, watching himself as if he were someone else
Vincent Crapanzano is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center. He is the author of six books-The Fifth World of Forster Bennett- Portrait of a Navajo, The Hamadsha- A Study in Moroccan Ethnopsychiatry, Tuhami- Portrait of a Moroccan, Waiting- The Whites of South Africa, Hermes' Dilemma & Hamlet's Desire- On the Epistemology of Interpretation, and Serving the Word- Literalism in America from the Pulpit to the Bench-and has published articles in major periodicals and academic journals such as American Anthropologist, Les Temps Modernes, The New Yorker, New York Times and Times Literary Supplement. He lives in New York City.
"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." —Kirkus
"[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." —Book Reporter
"[An] elegant probing of identity, nostalgia, memory, and
loss." —Publishers Weekly
"[A] stylish, splendidly literary memoir." —Times Literary
Supplement
“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
Univeristy
"With Recapitulations, the anthropologist Vincent
Crapanzano has not only written a moving, ambitious, and
compelling memoir; he has forged a new genre. Call
it the meta-memoir. A brilliant storyteller, he asks
himself—and us—what it means to tell, to listen, to
remember, to share, to probe the imagined truths of recollection.
This is a profoundly original book, and may well change the way you
think about your own “recapitulations.” —Wednesday Martin, Ph.D.,
author of Stepmonster and Primates of Park
Avenue
“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
“This deeply candid and personal memoir opens with a question that
all of us have been asking all life long: Have I learned
anything? This gem of a book asks the same question of love,
of people, of places, of careers, of everything. Profoundly
human, the author, a scholar and writer, revisits his life not just
to give an account of his past but to understand his blind spots
and, in the process, to uncover what he’s always known but didn’t
always care to say he knew. This is me, exactly
me, we say.” —André Aciman, author of Out of Egypt: A
Memoir
“Recapitulations is more than a fine and moving memoir. Using
the fabric of his life as teacher, reader, listener, thinker, and
traveler, Vincent Crapanzano has written a remarkable, wide-ranging
book about anthropology and what it can tell us about all aspects
of modern life, thought, and memory.” —Caroline
Moorehead, author of A Train in Winter
“Crapanzano’s evocative and intense prose takes away one’s breath.
Rejecting the fast—and so often false—intimacy and revelatory
conventions of autobiography, he invites the reader to partake in a
mode of reflection that exquisitely moves between the ironic and
the uncertain, the considered and the serendipitous, the delicate
and the raw. With luminous
insight, Recapitulations conveys a life lived with an
ethnographic sensibility so finely tuned and deeply embraced that
one can’t help but feel one has been given a gift—folded in love
and loss, wrapped in keen perception and the pleasures of paradox.”
—Ann Laura Stoler, author of Along the Archival Grain
“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.” —Gay Talese, author of A
Writer’s Life and other books
"Vincent Crapanzano's astonishing memoir, Recapitulations, is the
most fascinating and intelligent book I've read in a long time. A
true marvel!" —Louis Begley, author most recently of Memories of a
Marriage
Praise for Waiting: The Whites of South Africa
"What Mr. Crapanzano has to say about the state of white South
Africa, when he writes as interpreter and commentator, is so
interesting, [and] so insightful into the processes of
self-deception, yet without loss of human warmth." —J.M.
Coetzee, New York Times
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