The Fifth World of Forster Bennett: Portrait of a Navajo (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780803264311)

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.

Author: Vincent Crapanzano
ISBN-10: 0803264313
ISBN-13: 9780803264311
Publisher: Bison Books
Language: English
Published: 05/01/2003
Pages: 245
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.64lbs
Size: 8.18h x 5.30w x 0.55d

Review Citation(s):
Multicultural Review 03/01/2004 pg. 15