Vincent Crapanzano is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY).
Crapanzano is an eclectic thinker, a firm believer in rigorous interdisciplinary studies, and severe critique of disciplinary parochialism.
He argues that as social actors we are destined to be bad epistemologists insofar as we have to assume, rightly or wrongly, that we can intuit what the other is thinking and feeling.
In describing his interviews with an illiterate Moroccan tile maker, Tuhami, after whom he named one of his books, considered by many to be his most important, he came to realize how life stories and by extension other ethnographic findings are reformulated by the anthropologist in accordance with literary genre and conventions, rendering them more familiar but losing their unique cultural framing.
There has always been a split between Crapanzano's theoretical interests and his ethnographic writing, which is deeply rooted in fieldwork experience and literary form.
During his research in Wyndal, a conservative evangelical revival occurred among the whites, offering solace and escape to those without international connection and the possibility of flight in the event of a bloodbath.
In From the Pulpit to the Bench, he argued that literalism, was prevailing interpretive style in America, extending well beyond the fundamentalists and the legal conservatism of Bork, Scalia and their ilk to popular understanding of DNA and trauma-centered psychotherapies.
He noted ironically that while the academy was focused on the postmodern future of simulacra and semantical skidding, conservative evangelicalism was on the rise.
He considered the role of forgiveness, destiny, and a sense of being owed (for the sacrifices the Harkis made for France and the losses they suffered) in their self-understanding.
In Recapitulations, a self-reflective memoir – some have called it a meta-memoir – he reflects on the existential implications of both insignificant and significant events in his own life.