Vincent Crapanzano

(Ph D Columbia, 1970; Dist Prof, Anthropology and Comparative Literature) Symbolic and interpretive anthropology, ethno-psychology, anthropology and literature, theories of interpretation; North Africa, South Africa ()

Vincent Crapanzano is currently revising the Jensen lectures on the Anthropology of Imagination which he delivered in spring, 1999, in Frankfurt. These include lectures on the genealogy of the imagination; on landscape as narrated and moralized, on intransigeant moments (those inner and out of time/articulation) in exchange of gifts, communicative exchanges, and ritual passages; on hope as a category of and for social and cultural analysis; with special emphasis on cargo cults; on the body and pain as anchoring linguistic systems, emphasizing trauma and memory; on ecstasy, less in a mystrical sense and more in a sense of a stepping-out, a distanciation, achieving an transcendent position; on memory as a sort of backword/justificatory frontier, in which he argues for considering memory, both indidivual and social as a memorialization rather than as simply a "content'; and on end-of-world scenarios, in which he discusses Fundamentalist apocalypses, and phantasies, in which he treats of a Swiss peasant's belief in the end of the world.

He is also working on a final chapter to a collection of essays on the articulation fo dramatically transformative experiences. Three of the four essays have been published: 1.) on Herculine Barbin, a 19th century "woman" whose gender identity was legally cha;nged to a man -- she was thought to be a hermaphrodite; 2.) on the "paranoid" Schreber's Memoirs about his illness; 3.) on a case of Rhodesian anti-terrorist soldier who was also a born-again Christian and the messy way in which he articulated his military and religious career; 4.) (yet to be written) on legal constructions of biographies of people in vegetative states who can no longer make any decisions about their fate.

Recent Publications

• Serving the Word
• French translation of The Hamadsha
• Italian translation of Tuhami
• Hermes' Dilemma and Hamlet's Desire

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