Synopses & Reviews
Treating subjects as diverse as Roman carnivals and Balinese cockfights, circumcision, dreaming, and spirit possession in Morocco, transference in psychoanalysis, self-characterization in teenage girls' gossip,
Alice in Wonderland, and Jane Austen's
Emma, dialogue models in hermeneutics, and semantic vertigo in Hamlet's Elsinore, these essays look critically at the inner workings of interpretation in human sciences and literary study.
In modern Western culture's attempts to interpret and communicate the nature of other cultures, Crapanzano finds a crippling crisis in representation. He shows how the quest for knowledge of "exotic" and "primitive" people is often confused with an unexamined need for self-definition, and he sets forth the resulting interpretive paradoxes, particularly the suppression of any awareness of the play of power and desire in such an approach. What is missing from contemporary theories of interpretation is, in Crapanzano's account, a crucial understanding of the role context plays in any act of communication or its representation-in interpretation itself.
Review
The argument of the book is both subtle and telling, lodged between Hermes' dilemma of a message he cannot deliver without co-opting and Hamlet's predicament of a language from which one cannot 'steal.' -- David Martin - Times Literary Supplement
Review
Enormously learned, quite brilliant in its details, and magisterial in its theoretical purpose. -- Roy Wagner, University of Virginia
Synopsis
A distinguished anthropologist and a creative force behind postmodern writing in his field, Vincent Crapanzano here focuses his considerable critical powers upon his own culture. In essays that question how the human sciences, particularly anthropology and psychoanalysis, articulate their fields of study, Crapanzano addresses nothing less than the enormous problem of defining the self in both its individual and collective projections.
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. [357]-375) and index.
About the Author
Vincent Crapanzanois Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Comparative Literature at the <>City University of New Yorkand author of, among other works, The Hamadsha, Tuhami: A Portrait of a Moroccan, and Waiting: The Whites of South Africa.
Table of Contents
Introduction
PART 1: THE TEXTUALIZED SELF
1. Centering
2. Hermes' Dilemma
3. The Self, the Third, and Desire
4. Self-Characterization
PART 2: THE DIALOGIC SELF
5. Text, Transference, and Indexicality
6. Talking (about) Psychoanalysis
7. Mohammed and Dawia
8. Dialogue
PART 3: THE EXPERIENCED SELF
9. Symbols and Symbolizing
10. Glossing Emotions
11. Saints, Jnun, and Dreams
12. Rite of Return
PART 4: THE SUBMERGED SELF
13. Maimed Rites and Wild and Whirling Words
Notes
References
Index