Vincent CrapanzanoThinkers

Circumcision is a rite which, because of the financial burden of sponsoring a ceremony, actually exacerbates father-son tensions.

Circumcision is not a separation from the mother, but rather a 'rite of return' that in various ways, some even erotic, renews the mother-child bond and equates the boy with women and infants. The rite commemorates nontransition by cutting an absence, gap, or negation into the boy's body.

The Double paradox of the ethnographer is the notion that the ethnographer's task is to render the foreign familiar while preserving its foreignness.

The Ethnographic present is reflective of the ahistorical or synchronic pretense of anthropology.

Ethnography is tasked paradoxically with having to render the foreign familiar and preserve its very foreignness at one and the same time.

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