Crapanzano's Literature

Antidote to Temporal Relegation of the Navajo

Abstract

The American anthropologist Vincent Crapanzano eulogizes the
Navajo and Apache in his work Imaginary Horizons: An Essay in
Literary-Philosophical Anthropology in order to linguistically capture
the essence of Self and Other, in the spirit of mutual celebration.
The difficult path to striking the delicate balance necessary
to speak about the other when he is not always part of the
conversation is delivered in this article by looking at figures of
speech that are used to connect the interlocutors, but which have
in-built distancing power that unfortunately involuntarily temporally
relegates the native (excludes him because his physical
absence signifies that he exists in a not-so-distant past in comparison
to the interlocutor telling the story, in the present). This
is evident in the poetic appropriation of the myth of the noble
savage as well as the hinterland metaphor, which are used for
describing native characters and their geographical origin. This
piece discusses the difficulty to speak about aboriginal subjects
by non-aboriginal researchers. It is shown that imagination is
the work that reconnects, and poetry the work that gives voice.