Recapitulations A Memoir

A distinguished anthropologist tells his life story 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, fighting those conventions and ideologies that deaden the creative and inquiring mind.

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.