Vincent Crapanzano
- LAST MODIFIED: 23 June 2023
- DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199766567-0283
- LAST MODIFIED: 23 June 2023
- DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199766567-0283
Introduction
Vincent Crapanzano was born on 15 April 1939 in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, the son of Domenico and Florence Crapanzano. In 1967, he married writer Jane Kramer. The Crapanzanos have one child: Aleksandra. Crapanzano served as an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University, 1970–1974; as an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Queens College, 1974–1979; and—since 1990—as Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center City University of New York. Crapanzano graduated from the Ecole Internationale in Geneva and received his A.B. in philosophy from Harvard in 1960 and his PhD in Anthropology from Columbia University in 1970. From 1961 to 1964, he served in the U.S. Army at the Army Language School in Monterey and in Frankfurt/Main. Like most anthropologists of his generation, Crapanzano’s writings reflect his life experiences. He did more fieldwork than most. He worked among the Navajo, the Hamadsha (a Moroccan Sufi order), White South Africans, Christian Fundamentalists in the United States, and the Harkis (Algerians who served as auxiliary troops for the French during the Algerian war of independence). With the possible exception of his Navaho fieldwork (begun while still an undergraduate student at Harvard), all of his research was conducted in complex, multiethnic societies marked by intense political, economic, and religious conflicts. Crapanzano is an American, but his sensibilities are largely European. Much of his secondary education took place in Europe. He was a Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, Jensen Memorial lecturer at the Frobenius Institute (Frankfort), and he received grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation as well as the Fulbright Commission in Brazil, and the CNRS (France). His wife—Jane Kramer—was the European editor for New Yorker magazine. Vincent’s publications transgress disciplinary boundaries. His initial appointment at Queens College was in the department of Comparative Literature. His A. B. was in philosophy. Many of his publications lie at the intersection of psychiatry, psychology, and religion. His father was a psychiatrist. The eminent Psychological Anthropologist Margaret Mead was his advisor at Columbia. He was elected as President of the Society for Psychological Anthropology. At Princeton, he taught graduate seminars in Anthropology of Religion.
Works
Vincent Crapanzano’s major publications are: The Fifth World of Forster Bennett: A Portrait of a Navaho; The Hamadsha: A Study in Moroccan Ethnopsychiatry; Tuhami: Portrait of a Moroccan; Waiting: The Whites of South Africa; Hermes’ Dilemma and Hamlet’s Desire: Essays on the Epistemology of Interpretation; Serving the Word: Literalism in America from the Pulpit to the Bench; Imaginative Horizons: An Essay in Literary-Philosophical Anthropology; The Harkis: The Wound That Never Heals, and Recapitulations. He is co-editor (with Vivian Garrison) of Case Studies of Spirit Possession and published articles in major scholarly journals as well as a contributing to The New Yorker Magazine, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, and TLS. His publications have been translated into French, Italian, German, Japanese, and Czech. Beginning with his Navaho research, Crapanzano recognized the importance of portraying the “humanity” of those he studied—even when those studied had been widely vilified (e. g. South African whites; the Harkis). Crapanzano’s writings are not “politically correct.” He understood the writing of ethnography as a process, and he recognized his obligation to accurately represent the moral ambiguity of his informants. His sensitive, highly nuanced portrayals make it clear, for example, that many South African whites do not/did not support apartheid and that Harkis children struggled mightily due to choices their parents made. Perhaps this is Crapanzano’s greatest contribution to the writing of ethnography.
Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content on this page. Please subscribe or login.
How to Subscribe
Oxford Bibliographies Online is available by subscription and perpetual access to institutions. For more information or to contact an Oxford Sales Representative click here.
Article
- Africa, Anthropology of
- Aging
- Agriculture
- Animal Ritual
- Animal Sanctuaries
- Anorexia Nervosa
- Anthropocene, The
- Anthropological Activism and Visual Ethnography
- Anthropology and Education
- Anthropology and Theology
- Anthropology of Islam
- Anthropology of Kurdistan
- Anthropology of the Senses
- Anthrozoology
- Antiquity, Ethnography in
- Applied Anthropology
- Archaeobotany
- Archaeological Education
- Archaeology
- Archaeology and Museums
- Archaeology and Political Evolution
- Archaeology and Race
- Archaeology and the Body
- Archaeology, Gender and
- Archaeology, Global
- Archaeology, Historical
- Archaeology, Indigenous
- Archaeology of Childhood
- Archaeology of the Senses
- Archives
- Art Museums
- Art/Aesthetics
- Autoethnography
- Bakhtin, Mikhail
- Bass, William M.
- Beauty
- Belief
- Benedict, Ruth
- Binford, Lewis
- Bioarchaeology
- Biocultural Anthropology
- Bioethics
- Biological and Physical Anthropology
- Biological Citizenship
- Boas, Franz
- Bone Histology
- Bureaucracy
- Business Anthropology
- Capitalism
- Cargo Cults
- Caribbean
- Caste
- Charles Sanders Peirce and Anthropological Theory
- Childhood Studies
- Christianity, Anthropology of
- Citizenship
- Clinical Trials
- Cobb, William Montague
- Code-switching and Multilingualism
- Cognitive Anthropology
- Cole, Johnnetta
- Colonialism
- Commodities
- Consumerism
- Crapanzano, Vincent
- Cultural Heritage Presentation and Interpretation
- Cultural Heritage, Race and
- Cultural Materialism
- Cultural Relativism
- Cultural Resource Management
- Culture
- Culture and Personality
- Culture, Popular
- Curatorship
- Cyber-Archaeology
- Dalit Studies
- Dance Ethnography
- de Heusch, Luc
- Deaccessioning
- Design
- Design, Anthropology and
- Diaspora
- Digital Anthropology
- Disability and Deaf Studies and Anthropology
- Douglas, Mary
- Drake, St. Clair
- Dreaming
- Durkheim and the Anthropology of Religion
- Economic Anthropology
- Embodied/Virtual Environments
- Embodiment
- Emotion, Anthropology of
- Environmental Anthropology
- Environmental Justice and Indigeneity
- Ethics
- Ethnoarchaeology
- Ethnocentrism
- Ethnographic Documentary Production
- Ethnographic Films from Iran
- Ethnography
- Ethnography Apps and Games
- Ethnohistory and Historical Ethnography
- Ethnomusicology
- Ethnoscience
- Europe
- Evans-Pritchard, E. E.
- Evolution, Cultural
- Evolutionary Cognitive Archaeology
- Evolutionary Theory
- Experimental Archaeology
- Federal Indian Law
- Feminist Anthropology
- Film, Ethnographic
- Folklore
- Food
- Forensic Anthropology
- Francophonie
- Frazer, Sir James George
- Geertz, Clifford
- Gender
- Gender and Religion
- Gene Flow
- Genetics
- Genocide
- GIS and Archaeology
- Global Health
- Globalization
- Gluckman, Max
- Graphic Anthropology
- Grass
- Haraway, Donna
- Healing and Religion
- Health and Social Stratification
- Health Policy, Anthropology of
- Heritage Language
- HIV/AIDS
- House Museums
- Human Adaptability
- Human Evolution
- Human Rights
- Human Rights Films
- Humanistic Anthropology
- Hurston, Zora Neale
- Identity
- Identity Politics
- Indigeneity
- Indigenous Boarding School Experiences
- Indigenous Economic Development
- Indigenous Media: Currents of Engagement
- Industrial Archaeology
- Institutions
- Interpretive Anthropology
- Intertextuality and Interdiscursivity
- Kinship
- Laboratories
- Language and Emotion
- Language and Law
- Language and Media
- Language and Race
- Language and Urban Place
- Language Contact and its Sociocultural Contexts, Anthropol...
- Language Ideology
- Language Socialization
- Leakey, Louis
- Legal Anthropology
- Legal Pluralism
- Liberalism, Anthropology of
- Linguistic Anthropology
- Linguistic Relativity
- Linguistics, Historical
- Literacy
- Literary Anthropology
- Local Biologies
- Lévi-Strauss, Claude
- Magic
- Malinowski, Bronisław
- Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, and Visual Anthropology
- Maritime Archaeology
- Marriage
- Material Culture
- Materiality
- Mathematical Anthropology
- Matriarchal Studies
- Mead, Margaret
- Media Anthropology
- Medical Anthropology
- Medical Technology and Technique
- Mediterranean
- Memory
- Mendel, Gregor
- Mental Health and Illness
- Mesoamerican Archaeology
- Mexican Migration to the United States
- Migration
- Militarism, Anthropology and
- Missionization
- Mobility
- Modernity
- Morgan, Lewis Henry
- Multispecies Ethnography
- Museum Anthropology
- Museum Education
- Museum Studies
- Myth
- NAGPRA and Repatriation of Native American Human Remains a...
- Narrative in Sociocultural Studies of Language
- Nationalism
- Needham, Rodney
- Neoliberalism
- NGOs, Anthropology of
- Niche Construction
- Northwest Coast, The
- Oceania, Archaeology of
- Paleolithic Art
- Paleontology
- Performance Studies
- Performativity
- Personhood
- Perspectivism
- Philosophy of Museums
- Pilgrimage
- Plantations
- Political Anthropology
- Postprocessual Archaeology
- Postsocialism
- Poverty, Culture of
- Primatology
- Primitivism and Race in Ethnographic Film: A Decolonial Re...
- Processual Archaeology
- Psycholinguistics
- Psychological Anthropology
- Public Archaeology
- Public Sociocultural Anthropologies
- Race
- Religion
- Religion and Post-Socialism
- Religious Conversion
- Repatriation
- Reproductive and Maternal Health in Anthropology
- Reproductive Technologies
- Rhetoric Culture Theory
- Rural Anthropology
- Sahlins, Marshall
- Sapir, Edward
- Scandinavia
- Science Studies
- Secularization
- Semiotics
- Settler Colonialism
- Sex Estimation
- Sexuality
- Shamanism
- Sign Language
- Skeletal Age Estimation
- Social Anthropology (British Tradition)
- Social Movements
- Socialization
- Society for Visual Anthropology, History of
- Socio-Cultural Approaches to the Anthropology of Reproduct...
- Sociolinguistics
- Sound Ethnography
- Space and Place
- Stable Isotopes
- Stan Brakhage and Ethnographic Praxis
- Structuralism
- Studying Up
- Sub-Saharan Africa, Democracy in
- Surrealism and Anthropology
- Technological Organization
- Tourism
- Trans Studies in Anthroplogy
- Transnationalism
- Tree-Ring Dating
- Turner, Edith L. B.
- Turner, Victor
- Urban Anthropology
- Value
- Violence
- Virtual Ethnography
- Visual Anthropology
- Whorfian Hypothesis
- Willey, Gordon
- Witchcraft
- Wolf, Eric R.
- Writing Culture
- Youth Culture
- Zoonosis
- Zora Neale Hurston and Visual Anthropology