Imaginative Horizons: An Essay in Literary-Philosophical Anthropology (review)

I do not envy young people who want to go into anthropology. They are set adrift among icebergs, wondering which to cling to: kinship-social organization, religion-ritual, demography, archaeology, language-culture, symbolism, cosmology, ecology–land use, cognition, gender, primatology, or the very definition of the youth they should be enjoying. Vincent Crapanzano may well be the instructor they need. The attempt of anthropology to declare itself an "interdisciplinary discipline" can only succeed in the hands of scholars like him who feel comfortable ranging over psychology (Sigmund Freud, William James, Jacques Lacan), Western philosophy (Søren Kierkegaard, Plato, Martin Heidegger, Ernst Bloch, Georges Bataille), classical Arab philosophy, Noh drama, and literature (Sophocles, Paul Valéry, Roger Martin du Gard, Marcel Proust, St. Augustine), and who still have attention for art (Ariane Mnouchkine, Ingmar Bergman, Sasha Waltz). Although a reader might feel disoriented at first, Imaginative Horizons models the kind of interdisciplinary study "we" need (whoever we are).

The disorientation is inevitable. The horizons of the title "extend from the insistent reality of the here and now into that optative space or time—the space-time—of the imaginary" (p. 14). Crapanzano aims for "disquiet and even, I hope, a kind of conceptual turbulence in the reader" (p. 3), because the subject is inherently elusive: "the way in which we construct, wittingly or unwittingly, horizons that determine what we experience and how we interpret what we experience. . . . The dialectic between openness and closure is, I believe, an important dimension of human experience and certainly one worthy of anthropological consideration" (p. 2). The book explores a region intellectuals like to ignore, between what can be known and what can be put into words. If there is a key, it is the barzakh, an image Crapanzano's Moroccan informant put before him: a "giant beehive-like structure" where the souls of the dead remain until Judgment Day, but that you must also imagine as a razor-like bridge the dead must cross. "Barzakh is what lies between things—between edges, borders, and events" (p. 17).

By moving easily among his formidable range of sources, Crapanzano does something like what Henry James described in The Art of the Novel (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1941), "the neat figure of a circle consisting of a number of small rounds disposed at equal distance about a central object" (p. 110). Instead of a circle, Crapanzano disposes the dialectic between openness and closure in seven chapters (based on lectures given at the Frobenius Institute in Frankfurt). Instead of James's central object, the author probes the "lure of the threshold," in a phrase of the poet Yves Bonnefoy that urges him to ask why the "beyond" is such a powerful determiner of the accessible (pp. 16–17).

Chapter 2, "The Between," treats "the construction of textual or communicative cohesion with particular emphasis on" (p. 46) gaps and silences. "Body, Pain, and Trauma" takes up the phenomenology of the body, with perceptive comments on Judith Butler (pp. 73–75) and Elaine Scarry (pp. 80–83). An illuminating chapter shows that "Hope"—a subject anthropologists and folklorists do not treat—"always invokes an ever-further horizon—a beyond of a mysterious, transcending, if not transcendental, nature" (p. 104). Beginning in a case study, "The Transgressive and the Erotic" expands to truly philosophical dimensions. The most moving chapter, "Remembrance," looks at how we memorialize and commemorate our past, a subject Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett has importantly treated. Finally, "World-Ending" deals with how we imagine the end that is ultimately unknowable.

Who is "we" in this book? So wide is the range of reference that "we" must mean all human beings, including the author himself. He admits that his ethnographic stance puts him "at a remove, though never free, from . . . the intellectual orientations, rhetorical maneuvers, and argumentative vectors that underlie the chosen theme: body, pain, hope, memory, trauma, transgression, or death" (p. 9). His reader will learn much from the turbulence Vincent Crapanzano...