Imaginative Horizons

“This book makes an important contribution to the contemporary remapping of the faculties. Each chapter reads like a meditative journey in which the reader accompanies a well-trained and generous mind as it grapples with the puzzle of human experience. It will appeal to students and scholars of anthropology, literature, philosophy, cultural studies, and especially to those who are looking for innovation in methodology in these disciplines.”<Wlad Godzich, University of California, Santa Cruz

“At last we have an anthropology of the imagination ­not a cultural analysis of imagery, not an essay on imagination as a faculty that varies cross-culturally, but a cultural montage juxtaposing vivid moments in the back country of human experience, the beyond, the elsewhere of passionate existence. Both sensible and sensuous, Crapanzano’s discussion is more than encyclopedic: it is prismatic, refracting and evoking multiple dimensions of imaginative experience ranging from the literal horizon of landscape to the figurative horizon of mythic consciousness, from the abjection of chronic pain to the distant glimmering of hope both transcendent and mundane, from the wanderings of the Navajo hero twins to the self-mutilation of initiates in an Islamic brotherhood, from conventions of flirtation and erotic intimacy to apocalyptic visions in Melanesia.  The book is a string of intellectual pearls brought forth from the depths of the imagination by a brilliant ethnographer and masterful prose stylist.”< Thomas J. Csordas, Professor of Anthropology and Religion, Case Western Reserve University