The Fifth World of Forster Bennett: Portrait of a Navajo

by Vincent Crapanzano

It is told that the ancestors of the Navajos journeyed through four worlds to reach the fifth, or present, one. The pressing complexities and underlying wonder of their fifth world of modern reservation life are portrayed in this classic ethnographic account by Vincent Crapanzano.

 

As a young, inexperienced anthropologist, Crapanzano spent a summer with a Navajo man he calls Forster Bennett. In his fifties, Bennett was raised during the early reservation years, fought in the South Pacific in the Second World War, and, like many, carried a deep but not always openly expressed resentment toward whites. Crapanzano’s honest and gritty account of his time with Bennett and Bennett's community reveals a stark portrait of the “flat, slow quality of reservation life,” where boredom and poverty coexist with age-old sacred rituals and the varying ways that Navajos react and adjust to changes in their culture.

245 pages, Paperback

First published May 30, 1972

About the author

Vincent Crapanzano (Dist Prof, Anthropology and Comparative Literature, City University of New York) graduated from the Ecole Internationale in Geneva, received his B.A. in philosophy from Harvard, and his PhD in anthropology from Columbia University. He has taught at Princeton, Harvard, the University of Chicago, the University of Paris, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, the University of Brasilia, and the University of Cape Town. He has lectured in major universities in North and South America, Europe, Hong Kong, and South Africa.