Vincent Crapanzano is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY).
Biography
Vincent Crapanzano graduated from the Ecole Internationale in Geneva, received his A.B. in philosophy from Harvard in 1960 and his PhD in anthropology from Columbia in 1970. From 1961 to 1964, conscripted, he served in the U.S. Army, first at the Army Language School in Monterey and then in Frankfurt/Main.He has taught at Princeton, Harvard, the University of Chicago, the University of Paris (Nanterre), the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, also in Paris, the University of Brasilia, and the University of Cape Town. He is the author of nine books, numerous papers and reviews in academic journals, as well as in The New Yorker, the New York Times, The Times Literary Supplement, and The Washington Post. Many of these have been translated into a broad range of languages or written in French. He has lectured at major universities and research centers in North and South America, Europe, North Africa, Lebanon, Hong Kong, and South Africa. He has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including those from the Rockefeller and Guggenheim foundations, and the Fulbright Program (Brazil). He was a Sherman-Fairchild Distinguished Scholar at the California Institute of Technology, a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, a Jensen Memorial lecturer at the Frobenius Institute in Frankfurt, the President of the Society for Psychological Anthropology from which he received a Life Time Award. He has done fieldwork with the Navajo, the Hamadsha (a Moroccan Sufi order or tariqa), and White South Africans during apartheid, Christian Fundamentalists and legal conservatives in the United States, and the Harkis (those Algerians who served as auxiliary troops for the French during the Algerian war of independence).
Work and thoughts
Crapanzano is an eclectic thinker, a firm believer in rigorous interdisciplinary studies, and severe critique of disciplinary parochialism. He prefers to speak not of anthropology but anthropologies. He often refers to cultural anthropology as a philosophical discipline, at least one that can serve as a corrective to the ethnocentrism of academic philosophy. Once, when asked how he would differentiate anthropology from sociology, he referred to anthropology as a science of the intimate. In many of his ethnographic works, he focuses on the individual, in his early works from a psychoanalytic perspective, later from a dialectical one, and more recently from a critical phenomenological one that stresses inter-subjectivity. He recognizes phenomenology's inherent limitations, which stem from its embeddedness in a particular language –its language of description— and, Husserl notwithstanding, from the threat posed by the possibility of solipsism and the stress on the opacity of the other characteristic of the epistemologies of modernity. He argues that as social actors we are destined to be bad epistemologists insofar as we have to assume, rightly or wrongly, that we can intuit what the other is thinking and feeling. He does recognize the possibility of other epistemologies; say those of the heart, which are not haunted by what transpires in the mind of the other. Though he had been considered a cultural relativist of a postmodern bent, he in fact advocates a heuristic relativism – one which brackets, as best one can, one's own cultural presuppositions, as one engages with other worldviews. He relates this stance to the way Keats referred to as negative capability. Ideally it furnishes one with a critical perspective on both one's own worldview and that of one's informants. But, underlying his thought is an at times pessimistic skepticism, which is tempered by irony. Irony, he claims, is sorely missing from the social sciences.