Edward Sapir Research Articles

From Culture to Cultures: Understanding Edward Sapir’s Prophecy through Herderian Lenses

In 1934, the American anthropologist, Edward Sapir made a scientific prophecy on the concept of culture which remained largely overlooked but have proved to be surprisingly accurate and relevant in the contemporary era. He was focused on conceptual pluralisation and fragmentation. By predicting the pluralisation of culture, Sapir captured a trend that we can witness nowadays in the continuously growing number of cultures, subcultures, counterculture, and new conceptual interpretations and ramifications. His use of the Herderian concept of culture(s) requires a close inspection facilitated by interdisciplinary methodologies such as historical epistemology. Widely credited as the creator of the term “culture” in its plural sense, Johann Gottfried von Herder played a crucial role for Sapir’s academic formation. In the ruptures and continuities that culture as a concept has experienced, one can find valuable epistemological insights. Sapir did not come up with a daring prediction out of an uninformed position. Putting Sapir’s prophetic statement in the context of his academic and professional journey and in the context of the general research trends of the twentieth century reveals a strong Herderian heritage intensified by the psychologisation of anthropology that has ultimately led to an increasingly powerful and progressively sophisticated pluralisation of culture.

Spread of Ideas: The Legacy of Diffusionism School

This comprehensive analysis explores the concept and development of diffusionism throughout the history of anthropology. Diffusionism, a theory that emerged in the early 20th century, posits that cultural elements are assimilated and disseminated throughout multiple nations, leading to transformative shifts in society. The German and British diffusionist schools were the primary institutions that concentrated on the transmission of cultural characteristics across temporal and spatial dimensions. The notion of "culture circles," first proposed by German diffusionism, led by figures like Wilhelm Schmidt and Robert Fritz Craebner, posited that the cultural traits of ancient civilizations spread to the surrounding regions. British diffusionism, spearheaded by Grafton Elliot Smith and V. J. Perry, emphasized Egypt as the birthplace of civilization and attributed cultural advancements to Egyptian origins. Franz Boas, the founder of the US diffusionist school, advocated for a historical-cultural perspective that opposed the idea of linear progress. Boas emphasized the importance of culture as a unified entity shaped by particular historical circumstances and dismissed notions of cultural advancement. Notable American diffusionists include J. Robert Lowie, Edward Sapir, Clark Wissler, and Alfred Louis Kroeber. Kroeber's examination of women's fashion trends and cultural zeniths demonstrates the multifaceted nature of diffusionist analysis. Lowie's study focused on challenging linear evolution ideas and emphasizing the crucial significance of spatial dispersion in understanding cultural events. Wissler concentrated on the biological components of disperse on, whereas Sapir examined how individual personalities shape cultural patterns. While diffusionism is not as common in modern anthropology, it is important for comprehending the intricacies of cultural transmission and societal progress. Diffusionism provides valuable insights into the dynamics of human culture and civilization by examining historical processes, geographic distribution, and cultural interaction.

Culture, its mode of being: a proposal for reflection following Edward Sapir

Culture, its mode of being: a proposal for reflection following Edward Sapir

Американистика и компаративистика. Комментарии переводчика

In these comments, the author of the translation reconstructs the wide context in which selected works were written, paying close attention to the character of the personal relationships between Franz Boas and his former students, the current scientific agenda and more general discussions of that time. The article uses interviews with experts and archival data from the American Museum of Natural History (New York), as well as two published collections, in particular the correspondence between the main actors of the events described: Edward Sapir, A.L. Kroeber, Waldemar Bogoras et al. Two main conclusions are as follows: by the period under review, a skeptical attitude to both the methodology of European comparativist studies and the value of constructing a genealogical classification triumphed in Boas's views. This shift is explained by the fact that in his struggle against evolutionism, which, in the scholar's opinion, leads to Eurocentrism, it was important for him to emphasize the importance not of origin, but of the influence of the environment on the history of language. The author declares no conflict of interests.

A. Elisabeth Reichel, Writing Anthropologists, Sounding Primitives: The Poetry and Scholarship of Edward Sapir, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict

A. Elisabeth Reichel, <i>Writing Anthropologists, Sounding Primitives: The Poetry and Scholarship of Edward Sapir, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict</i>

The Moral Foreign Language Effect: Do Languages Influence How We Make Moral Decisions?

Both philosophy and linguistics have emphasized the importance of language as a means of dialogue. Despite the fact that Wittgenstein added a new layer of complication to this point of view, the Sapir-Whorf theory, proposed by Edward Sapir and his colleague Benjamin Lee Whorf, helped the impact of language on the mind acquire notoriety. With this idea, language not only continued to be a means of communication but also received recognition in the social science curriculum as a crucial element in the development of personal identities and the process of knowledge assimilation. The effect of language on morality and ethics was the most significant element that philosophers and linguists overlooked in their extensive study. For instance, little is known about how the terms we choose can influence how we understand morality and ethics. The sole subject of this article will be how language influences the moral and ethical decisions we make. To put it another way, how we make choices is greatly influenced by the language or beliefs we use in both public and private life. This means that in order to understand a country’s law or socially accepted norms, it is crucial to closely examine the language that country uses. The options or goals that are publicly acceptable are also closely related to the language, metaphors, and discourses used by a specific society. The contemporary world does not analyze these incidents from a linguistic perspective, but language has contributed to the creation of accepted legal and social standards.

Language, Culture and Worldviews by Twentieth-Century Anthropologists

Twentieth century anthropologists, starting from the 40s-50s were more focused on language and culture. At the turn of the century, Humboldt hypothesized the unique design of each language, which encodes a distinctly distinct view of the world. This idea was further propagated by Edward Sapir, who argued that “the worlds in which different societies live are different worlds, distinct above the world.” Given Humboldt's hypothesis and Edwart Sapir's idea of language and culture, we will try to answer questions such as: Does the language of a people shape the way things are thought and perceived? Is the view of a people coded in its own language and structured by its own grammar unique? The way language is used to communicate in social situations is increasingly becoming the focus of theoretical interest. Thus the theory of transformational linguistics presupposes that the main function of language is that of reference, that is, to make statements about the world. The world is built and operates on cultural diversity and its being. Received: 5 October 2022 / Accepted: 10 November 2022 / Published: 18 November 2022

An Experimental and Experienced Study on Imparting English Language to the Higher Learning Students with Analogies

“Language is a purely human non-instinctive method of communicating ideas, emotions and desires by means of voluntarily produced symbols.”--Edward Sapir (1921) At the outset English language plays a vital role in every walk of life either in home town or in abroad. How a language is created? In the primitive era the monolithic man communicated his matter or message through gestures. Later on, he used sounds. The sounds become words of his-own would be understood by the opponents and the opponents too responded to the voiced words. There by, the process of communication went on. Gradually, it developed in terms of letters, signs, words, sentences etc. These tools paved way to speak or to write anything and to anybody. But it seemed only to be particular language speakers were able to communicate with themselves. The linguists analyze that the one language which should be unique and universal that is only with the English language. The leaning and teaching of English language prospered as it is treated as universal one. The universality leads to aspire for learning the language amongst almost all the nations of the world. Fortunately, more number of countries was colonized by the British people consequently, the English language was influenced in the minds of the people inherently who were colonized, hence the language becomes a second language and the learners are called second language learners. Automatically, it is considered as English as a Second Language (ESL). In turn, most of the western countries treat English Language as a Foreign Language. Whatever it be it is the need of the hour that all should i.e. each and every nation has bounden duty to teach and learn the English language as it is interconnected to all the remains of world especially to the technologists who are otherwise called higher learners and they should have the effective communication skills as the scenario is the whole world is in a small silicon chip.

“Philology’s a Thing of God!”: Edward Sapir and the Jewish Subtexts of American Anthropology

“Philology’s a Thing of God!”: Edward Sapir and the Jewish Subtexts of American Anthropology

Sounding, Historically, Anthropology’s Current Crisis

Sounding, Historically, Anthropology’s Current Crisis Richard Handler A. Elisabeth Reichel. Writing Anthropologists, Sounding Primitives: The Poetry and Scholarship of Edward Sapir, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021. 430 pp. A. Elisabeth Reichel’s meticulously researched and relentlessly argued study is one among several publications resulting from a collaborative project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and focused on “cultural, poetic, and medial alterity” in the work of Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead.1 Like the larger project, Reichel’s book analyzes how these anthropologists described and conceptualized cultural alterity in alternative genres (poetry, film, ethnography), in the process often commenting in one medium (written language) on other media (music, film). Reichel asks how generic and medial alterity reflected or even contributed to the anthropologists’ models of cultural alterity. Her answers lead to her most important argument concerning the degree to which Boasian anthropology continued to rely on some central assumptions of the socio-evolutionary theory it challenged. Reichel frames her analysis with essays by George Stocking on “the dark-skinned savage” (1968) and “the dualism of the anthropological tradition” (1989), Michel-Rolph Trouillot on “the savage slot” (1991), as well as Johannes Fabian’s Time and the Other (1983). In Stocking’s account, both romanticism-primitivism and Enlightenment progressivism haunted Boasian anthropology. At times, Boasian anthropologists romanticized [End Page 185] so-called primitive peoples as “genuine cultures” (Sapir 1924) that presented a healthy contrast to what they saw as the ills of modernity. At other times, they celebrated modern rationality and science even as they mourned what they saw as the inevitable disappearance of their discipline’s object. How, Reichel prompts us to ask, could the anthropology of any school or period escape these tensions, dependent as it has been on Trouillot’s savage slot (encompassing the dual image of the savage as noble and ignoble) and Fabian’s allochronism (the placement of the primitive in a time antecedent to the present) to establish the reality of the phenomenal object that warranted its existence? Also central to Reichel’s analysis is work in sound studies and intermedial studies, areas of research more developed in Europe and Canada than in the United States. Reichel notes that mid-20th century forerunners of contemporary sound studies—who sought to reassert orality’s value in the face of the dominance of the visual in modern culture—were nonetheless ensnared by the kind of noble/ignoble dichotomy that has marked anthropology’s conceptualization of the primitive. They entertained, in her terms, both “sonophilic” and “sonophobic” approaches to sound (35). Sonophilic theorists praised the immediacy of sound and the way it immerses hearers in direct experience in contrast to their contention that sight, especially in “literate” cultures, distances people from that experience. Sonophobic theorists reversed the polarity, imagining people in oral cultures imprisoned in (and sometimes terrified by) sensory immediacy in contrast to the detached, rational observers of visual cultures. Subsequent work in sound studies has tried to transcend that dichotomy by paying attention to the cultural construction and evaluation of acoustic phenomena across time and space without treating any particular relationship of sound to other sensory modes as given in nature or predictable in terms of any purported developmental laws.2 The sonic and intermedial sensibilities of Sapir, Mead, and Benedict, however, were underpinned by the philia/phobia dichotomy that marked early sound studies, which, as Reichel finds, is especially evident in their poetry. Writing Anthropologists, Sounding Primitives includes a 62-page appendix listing “the complete poetry” of the three anthropologists along with “publication details and archival locations” of this corpus that consists of more than 400 published and 600 unpublished poems (6). This is itself a substantial scholarly accomplishment, but it is merely the prelude [End Page 186] to Reichel’s main contribution, which she describes as “the first sustained study” of these anthropologists’ poetry (5). By this, she means that she has brought to bear the methods of literary studies, including “close reading” and “new historicism” (24), to analyze the poems both as discrete literary objects and in relation to the historical conditions of their production. Reichel contrasts her approach with that of the...

Language, Ecology and the Stories We Live By: The Ecolinguistics of Tholkappiyam

The term “ecolinguistics” is relatively a recent discussion with Eliar Haugen (1972) bringing up the concept of “The ecology of Language”. Since then, various methods and approaches to the field have been suggested to study the language-ecology interaction, primarily from the west. As a result, ecolinguistics is conceived as a new-born western discipline. However, Ecolinguistics, as the term suggests is the specialized study of language-ecology interaction. The “feeling” of the existence of the necessary relationship between language and ecology even before makes us ask the question if the concept of ecolinguistics has not been discussed by linguists before 20th Century. The ancient Tamil linguistic treatise called Tholkappiyam (dated between 6th BCE to 8th CE) presents the fundamental nature of the relationship between ecology, language and culture through the theory called Tinai. The paper primarily draws attention to look into the linguistic philosophy of Tholkappiyam through an ecological perspective. From the ecolinguistic perspective, the paper analyses Tinai based on three criteria: Ecosophy, Aspects of Language-ecology-culture interaction and the theoretical framework of Tinai. Having analysed from the aforementioned criteria, the paper advocates that the framework of Tinai can contribute to the ecolinguistic studies parallel to the philosophies of Edward Sapir (1912) and Hagege (1985).

A. Irving Hallowell’s research on the Ojibwe animism

Alfred Irving Hallowell (1892–1974), a seasoned researcher of the Ojibwe culture, is known today primarily as a precursor of the anthropological theory of the “new animism”. A student of Franz Boas and a friend of Edward Sapir, he was not only a prominent figure of the culture and personality school, but also proved to be one of the most interesting psychological anthropologists of the 20th century. His works on the Ojibwe indigenous taxonomy prefigured the achievements of ethnoscience, and those on the evolution ofhuman behaviour adumbrated the development of sociobiology. Conducted in the 1930s, Hallowell’s fieldwork among the Berens River Ojibwe resulted in numerous academicpapers, one of which – the 1960 Ojibwa Ontology, Behaviour, and World View – years later became particularly influential in anthropological research on animism. This article presents Hallowell’s intellectual biography and discusses his research on the Ojibwe culture along with the concepts he used or developed, concepts that for many researchers became the key to unlocking new conceptualizations of the problem of animism.

William COWAN, Michael K. FOSTER, and Konrad KOERNER, New Perspectives in Language, Culture, and Personality: Proceedings of the Edward Sapir Centenary Conference (Ottawa, 1-3 October, 1984). 1986 John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 627 pages

William COWAN, Michael K. FOSTER, and Konrad KOERNER, New Perspectives in Language, Culture, and Personality: Proceedings of the Edward Sapir Centenary Conference (Ottawa, 1-3 October, 1984). 1986 John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 627 pages. An article from journal Culture (Volume 7, Number 2, 1987, pp. 3-79), on Érudit.

Analyzing the Role of English ‘Loan Lexis’ in the Process of Language Change in Contemporary Bodo Linguistic Community

Language grows, evolves and develops over a period of time. Reading through old English writings even the native speakers of today would struggle understanding them. No language (including Bodo) is exempt from this fact. According to Edward Sapir an American Linguist, Language contact is one of the main reasons behind such change in a particular linguistic community. Darwin says that ‘languages tended to change in the direction of having shorter easier forms, and that it could be explained by natural selection.’&#x0D; My close observation lead me to discover that there are numerous English ‘loan words that the ‘Bodos’ use in their conversations. This is a case not only of one linguistic community but of most North East Indian linguistic communities; we can’t deny the fact that English Loan words have found great usage in our conversations, TV shows, songs, films and functions. This practice has to a certain extent ushered in some changes in contemporary Bodo linguistic community.&#x0D; Edward Sapir talks about how one linguistic community borrows vocabulary from another in the process of cultural and social interaction; this he says has been a common phenomenon among linguistic communities in the history and continues to prevail as a common practice till today. In my paper I discuss the causes of such a practice and their possible pros and cons with special reference to Contemporary Bodo linguistic community.

Introduction

Introduction Douglas R. Parks This special issue of Anthropological Linguistics contains ten articles on personal names in Native languages of North America. All but one of these articles are revised versions of papers originally presented at the special session "American Indian Personal Names: A Neglected Lexical Genre" at the annual meeting of the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas (SSILA) in Portland, Oregon, on 7 January 2012.1 There is no modern, comprehensive linguistic description of American Indian naming systems. Published sources of names are primarily lists compiled by anthropologists, linguists, and historians. Even though personal names are an integral part of the languages and cultures of Native peoples, linguists usually do not document names for the languages they study: they do not utilize names as data for their grammars, and they generally do not include names in their dictionaries. The purpose of the special session was to bring together a group of Americanist linguists who have an interest in personal names in the languages they study; contributions were selected to represent the diversity of naming systems found in Native North American language families and to enable the participants to identify major issues in the study of names. The resulting articles describe the salient linguistic and semantic features of the names in these languages, illustrating how names are important semantic and grammatical domains in Native American languages, forming systems within the larger linguistic context, and why their study is essential for language documentation—for morphological and syntactic analysis, and for the compilation of richer dictionaries. They also illustrate how for most North American groups, rich archival corpora of names are available that have rarely been utilized by linguists and exemplify the methods and challenges of studying them. Even though personal names are a relatively neglected subject in North American linguistics and anthropology, significant work has been done over the years; some of the more noteworthy contributions may be mentioned here. The earliest linguist to give notable attention to personal names on the Plains was James Owen Dorsey, who beginning in 1871 devoted more than twenty years to documenting the Dhegiha and other Siouan languages. He recorded hundreds of personal names for each, but he published only one article, "Indian Personal Names" (1890). Although he planned to write a monograph on Siouan personal names, he died before completing it. Today his manuscripts are archived primarily in the National Anthropological Archives. [End Page 1] Other early linguists working on the Plains included C. C. Uhlenbeck; he published "Geslachts- en Persoonsnamen der Peigans" (1912), in which he cites the names of Piegan bands and a representative number of individuals' personal names, and discusses the historical incidents upon which the names were based. Edward Sapir (1924) compiled a list of ninety-four Sarsi names that he published in phonetic transcription, together with literal and free English translations, and then grouped into seven semantic categories: geographical references, tribal names, war names, names referring to horses and riding, names based on incidents or objects, and names referring to personal characteristics. Later in the century, James A. Goss (1973) reported on his attempt to develop a model for the naming practices of the Southern Ute Indians of Colorado that would enable him to predict, on the basis of a set of binary features, the sex, age, kin affiliations, and shamanistic powers from a name itself. Throughout the early twentieth century a small number of linguists and anthropologists who engaged in fieldwork with particular groups recorded lists of names, some of which were published, while others remain unpublished. For example, in the Southwest, the Franciscan Fathers at St. Michael's Mission on the Navajo Reservation documented various aspects of the language. In 1910, they published An Ethnologic Dictionary of the Navaho Language, an innovative linguistic work in which the entries have English head words arranged according to a vast array of cultural topics and activities as well as natural phenomena. Among them is a long entry entitled "Personal Names" that identifies seven categories of names: for boys, for girls, and for women; for men; for distinguished chiefs, treaty signers, and American residents; and tribal names. N. H. Winchell published in The Aborigines of...

The Dimensions of Language and Thought in the Vedic Literature

The present article explores the interrelationships between language and thought in the literature of the Vedic Canon. Whether language shapes thoughts or vice versa has remained a topic pregnant with perpetual discussions, interpretations, and explanations since the beginning of human civilization. Throughout the multiple crossroads of the development in the intellectual tradition, the dimensions of language and thought attracted many scholars and linguists. However, linguists like Edward Sapir and Benjamin L. Whorf in the twentieth century have systematically interpreted and analyzed the language-thought dimensions. Whorf postulated that language shapes thoughts while Sapir projected that language is in the grip of thought. The literature of the Vedic Canon has also logically and systematically projected the multiple dimensional, but agglutinative relationships between language and thought. The hymns of the Rig Veda, myths from Brahmanas, and the lore from Upanishads unravel, interpret, and enrich the language-thought interconnection in such a way that the Vedic literature remains as the classical version of Sapir-Whorf hypothesis written in Sanskrit. In this regard, the Vedic literature and Sapir-Whorf hypothesis play the same tune of music in different lyres. The present paper attempts to reveal this point of unity in diversity between the two seemingly diverse schools of thoughts—classical Vedic literature and modern linguistic theory of Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Being the qualitative research, this paper explores, interprets, and correlates the theoretical concepts, ideas, and phenomena from the Vedic literature and Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

Edward Sapir’s Legacy in Canadian Linguistics and Linguistic Anthropology

Edward Sapir’s Legacy in Canadian Linguistics and Linguistic Anthropology

Sonic Others in Early Sound Studies and the Poetry of Edward Sapir

Characteristically, early research in soundscapes is suffused with a sense of sonophilia; that is, a fascination with auditory perception and sound as the inferiorized Other of sight. Soundscape scholars have thus often conceived of their work as a salvage operation, which is conducted to save what would otherwise be irretrievably lost to a visual regime. This moral impetus to redeem the "sonic Other" is at the center of this article, in which I investigate how notions of sonic alterity interweave with treatments of social and cultural alterity. To explore and interrogate the nexus of social, cultural, and sonic alterity for its political and ethical ramifications, I analyze the acoustics of the poetry of Edward Sapir. Sapir played a key role in the formation of cultural anthropology and the early development of linguistic anthropology. What is far less known is that he is also the author of over six hundred poems, some of which were published in such renowned magazines as Poetry and The Dial. Focusing on the poems "To a Street Violinist" and "Harvest," I probe the dynamics of an anthropo-literary project that sets out to salvage both non-visual sense perceptions and other-than-modern, Western ways of life.

EVLİLİK KURUMUNA TOPLUMSAL CİNSİYET ÜZERİNDEN BAKIŞ: DİLSEL GÖRECELİLİK

Since ancient times, the relationship among language, culture and the mind constitutes one of the main areas of discussion and research aimed at understanding the dynamics of human society and existence. Linguist, Edward Sapir, and his student, Benjamin Lee Whorf, hypothesized that the language we speak could control much of the ways we think about the world around us, as well as our abilities and behavior. According to this hypothesis, language affects a person’s perception of reality and by extension, the way he or she views the world. After this hypothesis was offered, purporting to explain the relationship between language and thought, some predictions were made in relation to it. One of them postulates that gender in language has a semantic role, and that implementation of gender is one of the ways in which languages differ. Like in most ideologies language is effective on gender ideology. In Turkish, gender norms in language is common and sexist ideology is being perpetuated through it. Turkish society has predetermined strict traditional male and female behaviors and roles and has made them central and permanent within its own culture through language. The language, which is a power tool, is in the hands of men, while women are forced to find themselves in this language and create an identity independent of men. The marriage institution in a society is one of the places where gender can be observed saliently. In this thesis, how Turkish language affects the conceptual system of its speakers in terms of gender is investigated. In addition, this thesis attempts to demystify the relationship between language and gender within the Turkish marriage institution.

Revisiting Americanist Arguments and Rethinking Scale in Linguistic Anthropology

The concept of “scales of space and time” (Lemke 2000) has been tremendously influential in linguistic anthropology and related fields, and scalar approaches have proved useful for illuminating connections between what used to be called “micro” and “macro” phenomena. This paper disrupts “rhetorics of discontinuity” (Darnell 2001) in present‐day work, arguing that many of the ideas in contemporary work on scales were already implicit in early Americanist anthropology. Through renewed engagement with the debate among the Boasians A.L. Kroeber, Edward Sapir, and Ruth Benedict on questions of individuality, culture, and social action, we can rethink “scale” and bring forth both the useful and problematic aspects of scale as a heuristic. I argue that linguistic anthropologists’ reliance on scalar metaphors should be examined carefully, since the apparent scalability or nonscalability of talk and social action is, itself, a cultural phenomenon that emerges from decisions to scale our analytic vision in particular ways. Revisiting Americanist arguments about the nature of culture reveals some of the limitations of “scale,” as currently conceived, but also suggests that scalar analysis might be fruitfully integrated with linguistic anthropological understandings of agency, vis‐à‐vis voice, and temporality.