Hermes’ Dilemma and Hamlet’s Desire: On the Epistemology of Interpretation

by Vincent Crapanzano

A distinguished anthropologist and a creative force behind postmodern writing in his field, Vincent Crapanzano here focuses his considerable critical powers upon his own culture. 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.

Treating subjects as diverse as Roman carnivals and Balinese cockfights, circumcision, dreaming, and spirit possession in Morocco, transference in psychoanalysis, self-characterization in teenage girls’ gossip, Alice in Wonderland , and Jane Austen’s Emma , dialogue models in hermeneutics, and semantic vertigo in Hamlet’s Elsinore, these essays look critically at the inner workings of interpretation in human sciences and literary study. In modern Western culture’s attempts to interpret and communicate the nature of other cultures, Crapanzano finds a crippling crisis in representation. He shows how the quest for knowledge of “exotic” and “primitive” people is often confused with an unexamined need for self-definition, and he sets forth the resulting interpretive paradoxes, particularly the suppression of any awareness of the play of power and desire in such an approach. What is missing from contemporary theories of interpretation is, in Crapanzano’s account, a crucial understanding of the role context plays in any act of communication or its representation―in interpretation itself.

Genres: Anthropology, Philosophy

400 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

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.

Reviews

[Steven · Rating 5 out of 5]

No way to resist a title such as this. Much more here than one read through can absorb. Fascinating range of topics, particularly on how the self is represented and interpreted. A lot of the writing is pedantic. He loves to use “in-the-know” terminology and that makes it particularly difficult reading. But with some work you can find some unique analyses of literature as he brings the disciplines of anthropology, psychology, and philosophy to bear, ultimately, on Hamlet. Where else can you find Freud, Nietzsche, Shakespeare, Ovid, Jane Austen, and Lewis Carroll all in one place? Also has a great section on Mircea Eliade’s interpretation of myth.