Bøger af Vincent Crapanzano

One of the country's leading anthropologists has written an extraordinary book examining the prevalence of fundamentalism and literalism and the unexpected forms they take in modern America, in both religious and secular life.

Brilliantly observed and persuasively argued, Serving the Word, now in paperback, is an unprecedented look at the prevalence of literalism and the unexpected forms it takes in modern America's religious and secular life.Hailed as "thoughtful [and] suggestive" (The New York Review of Books), Serving the Word treats literalism as a modern belief system, analyzing its place in two seemingly contrasting fields: Christianity and the law. Moving from wealthy Angelenos who embrace starkly literal readings of the Bible to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's insisting on the narrowest interpretation of legal texts, leading anthropologist Vincent Crapanzano makes a persuasive claim that the attraction to literal certainty that we associate with fringe fanaticism is in fact deeply embedded in American culture.This "disturbing but important" book (The Washington Post Book World) examines our society's very conception of the truth, and poses basic questions about the state of America's mind and soul.

A chronicle of betrayal and abandonment, ostracism and exile, racism and humiliation, this title examines the story of the Harkis, the quarter of a million Algerian auxiliary troops who fought for the French in Algeria's war of independence.

In essays that question how the human sciences, particularly anthropology and psychoanalysis, articulate their fields of study, Crapanzano addresses nothing less than the enormous problem of defining the self in both its individual and collective projections.

It is told that the ancestors of the Navajos journeyed through four worlds to reach the fifth, or present, one. This work offers an ethnographic account of the complexities and underlying wonder of their fifth world of modern reservation life.