Recapitulations

(Hardback)

Available Formats

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

A much lauded anthropologist recounts stories from throughout his line in much the same way as a wistful novelist would, watching himself as if he were someone else. This memoir recaptures meaningful moments from the author's life: as his childhood on the grounds of a psychiatric hospital, his psychiatrist father's early death, his years at school in Switzerland and then at Harvard in the 1960s, his love affairs, his own teaching and his far-flung travels. Taken together, these stories have the power of a nothing-taken-for-granted vision.

Reviews

"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-inventiona vertiginous terrain of memory, reflection, inescapable figurationVincent Crapanzano creates a uniquely compelling sequence ofimmediate 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 hereturns 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, alwayshovering between origins and ends, the known and theunknowable. Skeptical, alluring, wrenching, exhilarating, always riveting,Recapitulationsis atour de forceagenuinely philosophical investigation of a remarkable life, which also teaches us how to seize that freedom distilled by everyprofound encounter both with others, and with that paradoxical other we call the self. Peter Sacks, Harvard Univeristy

"WithRecapitulations,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 himselfand uswhat 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 ofStepmonsterandPrimates of Park Avenue

Crapanzano is a compelling narrator, and hisRecapitulationswill be fascinating to anyone who has ever wondered what its like to be an anthropologist, or how an anthropologist thinksall 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 hes always known but didnt always care to say he knew.This is me, exactly me,we say. Andr Aciman, author ofOut of Egypt: A Memoir

Recapitulationsis 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 ofA Train in Winter

Crapanzanos evocative and intense prose takes away ones breath. Rejecting the fastand so often falseintimacy 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,Recapitulationsconveys a life lived with an ethnographic sensibility so finely tuned and deeply embraced that one cant help but feel one has been given a giftfolded in love and loss, wrapped in keen perception and the pleasures of paradox. Ann Laura Stoler, author ofAlong 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 Writers 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 forWaiting: 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

Author Bio

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.