Exploring Fields of the Ineffable in Literary Anthropology

Maja Nazaruk offers a panoramic view of Vincent Crapanzano’s anthropologically-poetic thinking about the ineffable aspects of life such as otherness, the outer limits of the body, and chthonic pain. In her view, the signature summation of Crapanzano’s work is to be found in his spell-working ethnographies from Morocco, South Africa, Algeria, and France as well as the United States of America. By parsing the first sections of his opus on imaginary horizons, the Polish scholar unveils the anthropologist’s impulse to resort to the rhetorical device of literary slippage—shifting meaning and the indeterminacy of meaning, in his intention to convey the “irreality of the (native’s) imaginary.” Slippage is the pivot that makes Crapanzano switch between alterity (how the native feels foreign) and the themes of the body and trauma (that are coincidentally perceived as being foreign even to the persons to whom they belong). By bringing them to the common denominator of inquiry-driven prose poetry that underscores cultural critique and literary anthropology, Crapanzano offers a contemplation of the undefined nature of human existence. Delving into the problem of signification and of substance in the works of Judith Butler, Cathy Caruth, Elaine Scarry, Talal Assad, Mariella Pandolfi, Terence Turner, Johannes Herder, and Lacan, takes on special relevance.