Edward Sapir Research Articles

Southern Wakashan: Descriptive and Theoretical Perspectives

This special volume of CJL/RCL is the first collection of papers devoted specifically to the Southern Wakashan languages Makah, Ditidaht (also known as Nitinat), and Nuu-chah-nulth (also known as Nootka). These three closely related languages form a continuum stretching from the northwest tip of Washington State to northwest Vancouver Island in British Columbia. The Southern Wakashan languages are remarkable for the typologically unusual traits they exhibit in virtually all areas of their grammars. These properties were first illuminated by Edward Sapir in his foundational work on Nuu-chah-nulth (1911, 1915, 1921; Sapir and Swadesh 1939), which helped thrust Wakashan to the forefront of early Amerindian scholarship. The papers brought together in this volume reflect a recent resurgence of interest in Southern Wakashan, and highlight the potential of lesser-studied languages to contribute to linguistic theory, as well as the range of insights that theoretically informed perspectives can bring to the grammatical description of these languages.

Rolling in Ditches with Shamans: Jaime de Angulo and the Professionalization of American Anthropology (review)

Reviewed by: Rolling in Ditches with Shamans: Jaime de Angulo and the Professionalization of American Anthropology Guillermo Bartelt Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz . Rolling in Ditches with Shamans: Jaime de Angulo and the Professionalization of American Anthropology. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. 359 pp. Cloth, $59.95. The subtitle of Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz's biography of Jaime de Angulo (1887–1950) might lead one to think that he was a major player in the professionalization of anthropology, when he actually ended up as one of its casualties. Initially trained in medicine, de Angulo entered anthropological linguistics when the shift from self-taught status to academic training was taking place in the early twentieth century. Linguistics was then still a stepchild of ethnology, and only a handful of universities could offer advanced courses. By 1924, however, the Linguistic Society of America had been founded, with its journal Language appearing the next year. Furthermore, the breakthrough concept of the phoneme in conjunction with Edward Sapir's indifference to ethnology may have accelerated the move towards a separate disciplinary identity. Interestingly enough, though, according to Leeds-Hurwitz it was Franz Boas rather than Sapir who first began to argue for autonomous institutional status. Thus, by the time de Angulo began to study American Indian languages, amateurs were only tolerated if their work was of professional quality and if a particular ethnographic area could not be covered by an academically trained linguist. Nevertheless, as Leeds-Hurwitz points out, de Angulo was not only a member of the "invisible college" of Boasian anthropology, albeit a marginal one, but he also met the then-implicitly-agreed-upon criteria for a professional in anthropology: contributions to journals and conferences based on fieldwork data analysis. Fascinated by speculations about the genesis of the human mind, de Angulo had set himself ambitious research goals dealing with psychology and formal logic from the language angle. An indefatigable fieldworker, he analyzed a total of thirty native Californian, Southwestern, and Mexican languages, and Sapir as well as Boas, both of whom extended him a large number of research grants, regarded his descriptive work as being among the best produced at the time. Notwithstanding de Angulo's idiosyncratic approach to phonetic symbols, which frustrated Boas, he was far ahead of his time in other areas, such as the organization of lexis into semantic fields instead of alphabetical word lists. Since [End Page 191] Boasian linguistics required the collection of oral texts on which grammatical analysis was to be based, de Angulo also became interested in the classifications of myths, and his suggested genres resemble very much those of later folklorists. In addition, he clearly understood the Indian concept of creation as an ongoing process of the remaking of the world, and he recognized the essence of oral tradition in its performance and repetition of narrative details. Unfortunately, Leeds-Hurwitz neglects to connect these insights to the development of Dell Hymes's ethnography of speaking or to the emphasis on performance in folklore studies in the 1960s. Also noteworthy is de Angulo's finding of folk taxonomies for automobile engine parts based on anatomical comparisons among the Pit River Indians. A similar process of linguistic acculturation among the Cibecue Apache of Arizona was reported thirty years later by Keith Basso. Leeds-Hurwitz offers no speculation regarding de Angulo's possible influence on this prominent ethnographer or on Basso's perhaps deliberate ignoring or ignorance of de Angulo's prior discovery. However, the most glaring omission of Leeds-Hurwitz's assessment of de Angulo's possible influence on later generations of anthropologists has to do with de Angulo's proposal that ethnographers should write like artists. It would seem that de Angulo in this case was clearly a precursor of Clifford Geertz, who a few decades later encouraged ethnographers to regard themselves as writers of literature. Regarding fieldwork practices, de Angulo was convinced that "going native" was the best way to discover what a native culture was like. As a Spaniard, he seemed to delude himself into having a special rapport with Native Americans by passing himself off as a "non-white" and claiming to belong to the "Castilian" tribe. Although Leeds-Hurwitz offers textual evidence...

Murray B. Emeneau

Murray B. Emeneau William Bright Murray Barnson Emeneau died peacefully at the age of 101 at his home in Berkeley, California. Perhaps the last surviving student of Edward Sapir, Emeneau was the principal founder of the Linguistics Department at his university and of the Survey of California Indian Languages. He was known in India and internationally as a Sanskritist, as the world’s most distinguished scholar of the Dravidian language family of India, and as the twentieth century’s principal exponent of the concept of ‘language area’.1 1. Overview Emeneau was born on February 28, 1904 in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. In high school he studied Latin, Greek, and German, and distinguished himself so much that he obtained a four-year scholarship at Dalhousie University (in Halifax, Nova Scotia), where he continued his classical studies. The continuing excellence of his performance won him a Rhodes Scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford University. From there he went in 1926 to Yale University, with a teaching appointment in Latin; but at the same time he began to study Sanskrit and comparative Indo-European with Franklin Edgerton and Edgar Sturtevant. His 1931 dissertation was on Sanskrit, and Emeneau was by this time a committed Indologist. With jobs scarce during the Depression, Emeneau stayed on in New Haven, surviving on small research fellowships and attending additional classes—crucially, those of Edward Sapir, who was by then teaching ‘the new linguistics’ at Yale. As Emeneau wrote, ‘I was exposed to methods of fieldwork on non-literary languages, including intensive phonetic practice and analysis of material, but especially to Sapir’s approach to anthropological linguistics, in which language is only part of the total culture, but a most important part, since in it the community expresses in its own way, “verbifies” its culture’ (1980:352). But Leonard Bloomfield, whose book Language was published in 1933, was a presence on the Yale campus at the same time; and it was the school of structural linguistics founded by Bloomfield that became the model for Emeneau’s later teaching and for his descriptive work in Indic and Dravidian linguistics. Another significant influence was Philip Kahclamat, a Wishram Chinook speaker brought by Sapir from Oregon; as Emeneau later wrote, ‘what I learned [from Kahclamat] about massive consonant clusters rid me of any inhibitions I might have had when I came to deal with similar material in the Toda and Kota languages of South India’ (1991:94–95). In later years, Emeneau was fond of citing Wishram forms like /ƚtpčkt/ ‘they are coming this way from the water’. By 1935, with no job prospects in the US for the anthropological Indological linguist that Emeneau had become, his teachers raised funds to send him to India for three [End Page 411] years. Sapir recommended that he study Toda, a little-known ‘tribal’ language of the Dravidian family, spoken in the Nilgiri Hills of South India; and Sapir specifically suggested that this might lead to a study of comparative Dravidian. Emeneau in fact did major fieldwork on four Dravidian languages during this period—Toda, Kota, Kodagu (Coorg), and Kolami, as well as briefer work on Badaga and Brahui—and comparative Dravidian was indeed the field in which he was to become a world leader. After teaching linguistics at Yale for a year, Emeneau was hired in 1940 as Assistant Professor of Sanskrit and General Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. (In 1941 he became a US citizen.) He rose to full Professor by 1946, and retired to Emeritus status in 1971. He was Chair of the Linguistics Department from 1953 to 1958, and of the Classics Department from 1959 to 1962. In 1948, when I first became his student, he was regularly teaching the undergraduate courses in general linguistics, phonetics and phonemics, morphology and syntax, comparative Indo-European, and Sanskrit; he also had a course in the Classics Department entitled simply ‘India’. Among the academic honors that came his way were the presidency of both the Linguistic Society of America and the American Oriental Society; two Guggenheim fellowships; election to the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; and honorary doctorates from the University of Chicago, Dalhousie...

Murray Barnson Emeneau

28 FEBRUARY 1904 * 29 AUGUST 2005 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS BORN IN LUNENBURG, Nova Scotia, Emeneau had an unusually long and productive career as professor of Sanskrit and linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was a founder of the linguistics department and of the Survey of California Indian Languages; he was elected to the APS in 1952. He died peacefully at his home in Berkeley on 29 August 2005, aged 101. In his later years, he was often asked whether he owed his longevity to any particular regimen of life; he always answered, No, just genes. In fact, medical researchers have discovered in recent years that Emeneau's hometown of Lunenburg produces the highest percentage of centenarians in North America. Emeneau was first trained in classics at Dalhousie University, Halifax, and at Oxford University. In 1926 he began the study of Sanskrit and comparative Indo-European at Yale, where he received his doctorate in 1931 with a dissertation on Sanskrit. From then until 1935, he did postdoctoral study at Yale under the direction of the leading anthropologist and linguist Edward Sapir. From him Emeneau eagerly absorbed not only the then-new structural linguistics, but also Sapir's distinctive approach to what was later called linguistics. As he wrote in later years, I was exposed to methods of fieldwork on non-literary languages, including intensive phonetic practice and analysis of material, but especially to Sapir's approach to anthropological linguistics, in which language is only part of the total culture, but a most important part, since in it the community expresses in its own way, 'verbifies' its culture. With Sapir's help and guidance, and with grants from sources including the APS, Emeneau spent the years 1935-38 doing fieldwork on unwritten Dravidian languages of India, in particular on Toda. Back in the U.S., after teaching linguistics at Yale for a year, Emeneau was hired in 1940 as assistant professor of Sanskrit and general linguistics at Berkeley; he rose rapidly, becoming full professor by 1946, and later chair. He was a prolific interdisciplinary writer throughout his career, in areas ranging from Sanskrit philology to Dravidian linguistics to cultural anthropology, and he constantly urged his students to begin their own publication records. In 1971 he retired to emeritus status, but he continued his research, publication, and participation in academic activities well into his nineties. …

In the Beginning was the Word

In the early part of the twentieth century, The Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company was one of the largest insurance companies in the country, employing scores of accountants, adjusters, and actuaries. It was also home to two great American intellectuals1. The more renowned of the pair was Wallace Stevens. Stevens was a lawyer and a vice president at Hartford, but he stands in the history books as a poet. In 1955, he received the National Book Award for The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Less well known, but formidable in his own right, was a fire-prevention specialist at Hartford, Benjamin Lee Whorf. Whorf trained at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a chemical engineer; his avocational pursuits included anthropology, archaeology, and linguistics. It is for his contributions to linguistics that he is remembered. Whorf, along with Edward Sapir of Yale, developed the theory of linguistic determinism. This theory asserts that the words we use determine—and constrain—the way we think. As Whorf put it, “We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages... and ascribe significances as we do largely because we are parties to an agreement that... is codified in the patterns of our language.”2 Eskimos, Whorf stated, can have more nuanced thought about snow than non-Eskimos because they have a greater variety of words for the types of snow they encounter. George Orwell, in his novel 1984 , expounded on this idea that language could control thought. In Newspeak, the language developed by The Party, words such as “free” and “equal” were stripped of their original meanings to the point that concepts like political freedom were made to be “literally unthinkable, at least as far as thought is dependent on words.”3 Happily, many of the scary notions …

An interview with Elizabeth Closs Traugott

In this interview, Elizabeth Closs Traugott, the world's leading authority on grammaticalization and the history of English syntax and Stanford University Professor Emerita, speaks candidly about her long and distinguished career as professor, former President of the Linguistic Society of America, former President of the International Society for Historical Linguistics, and Stanford University administrator (Vice Provost). Among the topics covered are: her influence over the past 40 years in (1) linguistics in general and (2) in English linguistics and philology in particular, and her evaluation of the writings of Leonard Bloomfield, Zellig Harris, Dwight Bolinger, and Edward Sapir for the contemporary linguistic scene.

Jumptown: The Golden Years of Portland Jazz, 1942-1957 by Robert Dietsche

Culver road near Juniper Butte, we were pulled over by threepolice cars and about six police officers. Uncle Henry was thedriverandUncle Alvin, who was holding one ofhis infantchildren, was told to get out of thevehicle.One of thepolice officersjerked thechild fromhis arms and prac ticallythrewhim intoGrandma s lap,while the other officersbegan interrogatingthe brothers as tohow theygot thewhiskey. With one of the police officer's frustration came an upper-cut blow tothestomach,andUncle Alvin crumbled to thehard pavement.This was followedby several brutalwhacks with a nightstickon his back_ The uncles were taken to the cold concrete 10-by 12-footJefferson County jail,where they remained for some time. To get home toWarm Springs, Idrove the1938FordTudor car about 25 miles in second gear. Itwas my first experience driving a vehicle_ Aguilar admits that his first-hand knowl edge of Indian customs and religious beliefs ? such as those of the W?ashat or seven drums? is limited because of the great loss of traditional knowledge suffered since Indi ans were removed to reservations. For these topics, he relies heavily on a rather select few sources, including Leslie Spier and Edward Sapir's 1930 Wishram Ethnography (University of Washington Publications inAnthropology 3:151-300; absent fromhis "Selected Bibliogra phy"), Robert Boyd's People ofthe Dalles (which is based on themissionary Henry Perkins's papers), Robert H. Ruby and John A. Brown's several volumes on Northwest Indians, and thePlateau volume of theHandbook of North American Indians. He makes excellent use of several unpublished and largely unknown sources, such as the papers of H.C. Coe, who settled atHood River in 1854.Coe's papers are preserved at theColumbia Gorge Discovery Center atThe Dalles, Oregon. Aguilar's insider account offersa uniquely valuable Native perspective on our region's history. It should be noted, however, that it is a particular Indian perspective. Although Aguilar's ties are about equally apportioned between the two dominant mid-Columbia Indian linguistic traditions, theKiksht/Wasco Chinookan and the Sahaptin, and he is actu ally somewhat more likely to cite a Sahaptin name than a Chinookan one for a particular plant, animal, place, or activity,his allegiance seems to lean toward the Wasco rather than the Sahaptin. Aguilar paints a ratherunpleas ant picture, based on his early experience, of theSahaptin traditional religion, the W?ashat, which perhaps reflects his particular position in Warm Springs Indian society. Helen Schuster's studyof the W?ashat atYakama paints a rather differentpicture ("Yakima Indian Traditional ism," Ph.D. diss., University ofWashington, 1975). This isnot meant to criticizeAguilar's finework, but simply to note that there can be no purely objective account of anyone's history. Eugene S. Hunn University of Washington, Seattle JUMPTOWN: THEGOLDEN YEARS OF PORTLANDJAZZ, 1942-1957 byRobert Dietsche Oregon State University Press, Corvallis, 2005. Photographs, notes, bibliography, index. 242 pages. $24.95 paper. This lively historyof the jazz scene inPortland's "LittleHarlem" onWilliams Avenue is not a model of fastidious scholarship,but itisa color ful read, chock-a-block with vital information one otherwise might never have discovered, and awelcome addition to the literatureof regional history.Dietsche is a deejay who used to own Django Records, a popular used record store. Organized in nineteen chapters, one for each nightclub (orothervenue), Jumptown includes a handy referencemap and "Who's Who" of the Williams Avenue neighborhood, dozens of richvintage photographs, a bibliography, a dis cography, endnotes, and a useful afterwordby Portland jazzwriter LynnDarroch, who swiftly carries the story into the present. 302 OHQ vol. 107, no. 2 Drawn largely from oral histories with musicians and characters on the scene (un fortunatelynot itemized in thebibliography), Jumptown has a more socially grounded feel thanmost jazz histories,which tend to con centrate on musical style and personality. In itspages, readerswill meet Kenny Hing, who spenthis hours away fromTigard High School combing through thebins at Madrona Records, thenwent on toplaywith Count Basie; Tommy Todd, the retiringpianist who wrote forArtie Shaw and was so confident about his own tal ents that"hewouldn't walk across the streetto meet thePresident of theUnited States"; and George Lawson, "the greatmight have been" alto saxophonistwho "was intobop before any one" but "lost out due tohis livinghabits" (p. 91).Readers will also get...

Rolling in ditches with shamans: Jaime de Angulo and the professionalization of American anthropology

Rolling in Ditches with Shamans charts American anthropology in the 1920s through the life and work of one of the amateur scholars of the time, Jaime de Angulo (1887-1950). Although he earned a medical degree, de Angulo chose to live on an isolated ranch in Big Sur, California, where he participated fully in the lives of the people who were his ethnographic informants. The period of his most extensive research coincides almost perfectly with the professionalization of anthropology, and de Angulo provides a link between those who are generally recognized as the most important figures of the day: Franz Boas, Alfred Kroeber, and Edward Sapir. The fields of salvage ethnography and linguistics, which Boas emphasized, were aimed at recording the culture, language, and myths of the Native groups before they became completely acculturated. In keeping with these dictates, de Angulo recorded data from thirty groups, mostly in California, which otherwise might have been lost. In an unusual move for that time, he also wrote fiction and poetry describing the modern lives of the people he studied, something of little interest to Boas but of great interest today. His most enduring work is Indian Tales, a fictional synthesis of myths learned from various California Indians. De Angulo's range of interests, originality, and expertise exemplified the curiosity and brilliance of those who pioneered American anthropology at this time.

Aspects of Richness and Degeneration in Languages and the Panaroma of Turkish

Edward Sapir has asserted that something existed as substance and concept in a society is reflected likewise in its language. Cultural and historical heritage is only transferred by language to further generations. Language is something like the encyclopaedia, or treasure, or dictionary of cultural contents. In order to understand the richness of a language, as it depends on that of culture to a great extent, it is necessary to study it carefully. Turkey, for instance, has carried the vestiges of East-Asian culture historically and linguistically. The three Turkish linguists and scientists, Prof. Dr. Sayili, Prof. Dr. Aksan and Suer Erdem, agree mostly on some of the criteria to prove the richness of language. The criteria are respectively: The richness in vocabulary, The richness in concepts, having the most ancient written works having been spoken in large geographical area. Changes in language and culture can be considered natural. Nevertheless, the borrowed rules from other languages spoil the structure of the language in which it is applied in terms of reading, writing, pronunciation, morphology, phonetics and semantics. Such a fact brings the degeneration into a language. The recent borrowed words from European countries and mostly from English and rules seen in Turkish mar Turkish and causes degeneration.

The Peirce Seminar Papers: Essays in Semiotic Analysis, vol. 5 (review)

Reviewed by: The Peirce seminar papers: Essays in semiotic analysis by Michael Shapiro Liang Chen The Peirce seminar papers: Essays in semiotic analysis, vol. 5. Ed. by Michael Shapiro. New York: Berghahn Books, 2002. Pp. 224. ISBN 1571814191. $69.95 (Hb). This fifth volume of The Peirce seminar papers is a selection of nine papers originally presented at the Colloque International, Sémiotique peircienne: Etat de lieux/Peircean Semiotics: The State of the Art, held 27–30 June 2001 in France. Nils B. Thelin (1–68) seesbiology as the very foundation of cognitive-pragmatic models of language semiosis (and thus the notion ‘biopragmatism’). The categories of space and time are argued to correlate with ‘the biological-regulative motive of reticular rhythmization’ (58). João Queiroz Sidarta Ribeiro (69–78) presents an Peircean semiotic analysis of the meaning processes underlying the interpretation of alarm calls in vervet monkeys. He proposes a new research paradigm, ‘comparative neurosemiotics’, which should ‘permit the profitable study of many different cases of animal communication’ (76). Dan Nesher (79–107) argues that Peirce’s work ‘Our senses as reasoning machines’ quasi-proves our perceptual judgments as our ‘simple truths’ and the basis of all of our knowledge (101). Michael Shapiro (108–25) outlines as pects of neo-Peircean linguistics and argues language history as linguistic theory. This is accomplished through critical comparisons of Charles Peirce and Edward Sapir in their treatments of the telos of linguistic change, semeiosis and linguistic change, and diagrams and diagrammatization in language. Tony Jappy (126–51), via three case studies of gonna, that, and metaphors, argues for the essential role of the Peircean category of secondness in our understanding of indication and grammaticalization. Joëlle Réthoré (152–64) differentiates le langage from la langue and argues that the category of feeling is attached to the former, where as the category of cognition is related to the latter. Therefore the provocative title ‘The sense of languages (as langage) versus the nonsense of languages (as langues): Iconicity versus arbitrariness’. Laura A. Janda (165–88) examines instances of the Russian case system that enable the speaker to express the same ‘perception of reality’ with alternative case constructions (170). The systematic and coherent choices of various case constructions are argued to be motivated and determined by the speaker’s construal of the physical realia. Victor A. Friedman (189–203) talks about the intersection of interrogation and nonconfirmativity from a Peircean semiotic perspective. Examples from Albanian, Macedonian, and Aromanian are taken to show the intersection between expressive past and present. Jørgen Dines Johansen (204–24), starting from the Peircean tripartite distinctions of iconic signs (i.e. images, diagrams, and metaphors), proposes imaginative reading, diagrammatic reading, and metaphoric reading as the three ways of iconizing the text, and argues that their interplay determines the nature and pace of the reading process. This volume merits the same praise as the previous ones, namely that they are excellent collections ‘reflecting the ever-widening appeal and potential of Peirce’s logic of signs’ (Peirce project newsletter), particularly with respect to the modern study of language structure. Liang Chen University of Louisiana, Lafayette Copyright © 2005 Linguistic Society of America

Juan Bobo and the Riddling Princess: A Puerto Rican Folktale

Translator's Introduction Bobo and the Riddling Princess is one of the tales that J. Alden Mason (1885-1967) brought back from his monumental field trip to Puerto Rico in 1914-15. Mason was born in Orland, Indiana, but grew up in Philadelphia's Germantown (American Philosophical Society 2). He discovered anthropology when as sophomore in 1904 he took the first anthropology course ever offered at the University of Pennsylvania (Satterthwaite 871). He went on to be trained in linguistics and fieldwork under Edward Sapir in 1909 and to complete PhD at Berkeley under Kroeber in 1911. He spent much of the next two y ears working in Mexico as part of the International School of Archaeology and Ethnology, under the direction of Franz Boas. So when the New York Academy of Sciences, in cooperation with the insular Government of Puerto Rico, secured Boas to do survey of that island, it was natural for him to select Mason to oversee the collection of Puerto Rico's folklore (see Mason, Riddles 423; Butler; Satterthwaite). Mason spent more than year on the island and brought back an amazingly diverse and rich collection. The ballads were major find. The riddles constituted the second-largest Spanish American collection yet made. The songs included carols, children's songs, and other genres as well as some 375 examples of the decimas, the poetic and partly improvised response to daily life and love of the Puerto Rican village singers. But the folktales, numbering in the hundreds, were the most impressive find of all. As Aurelio M. Espinosa says in introducing the collection as whole, a large number are new creations, with traditional elements confused and mingled. special cycle, the Juan Bobo, or John the Simple, tales, the traditional nddle-tales have been especially (Mason, Riddles 423). Introducing the tales in particular, Espinosa says, In our Porto-Rican collection we find many new and important developments. The 'Juan Bobo' tales, which are the most numerous of this group [i.e., picaresque tales, the most popular group], absorb many versions of European folk-tales (Mason, Folk-Tales [1921] 143). The rich development of the Juan Bobo tales is then one of the characteristic features of this Puerto Rican folktale repertoire. The Juan Bobo tales continued to develop in Puerto Rican oral tradition in the decades following Mason's collection visit, as Sarai Lastra has demonstrated. Mason apparently utilized two principal collecting methods to gather this wide array of folk materials. For his own field collecting he concentrated on the mountain town of Utuado, with its peasant jibaro population, and the coastal town of Loiza, with its black population. these towns adults wrote out material for him, and he recorded mostly adult men on wax cylinders (Lastra 534-38). The bulk of the collection, however, came from schoolchildren all across the island. Working with E. M. Bainter and the Puerto Rican Department of Education, Mason coordinated massive effort in which teachers in the various municipal districts had their students write out the material. Mason himself oversaw this project, traveling to towns and villages and up mountainsides to talk with teachers and students in schools all over the island and to listen to their riddles, songs, and tales (Mason, Riddles 423; Mason, Folk-Tales [1922] 103). Aurelio M. Espinosa, editor for many years of Hispanic issues of the Journal of American Folklore, supervised publication of the collection. Espinosa edited the material and published it in ten issues of the Journal between 1916 and 1929. fact, the fall issue of 1926 was devoted entirely to the collection. Mason was good Boasian, more interested in the text than in the context. The tales, riddles, and songs are published with no information about the performers or the performances, not even clarification as to whether the particular pieces were collected orally or in writing. …

Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Language of Mysticism

problem of is crucial for the understanding and interpretation of most religious poets. Certainly is not to say that every religious poet is a mystic but rather that a relation to as a problem inevitably structures religious poetry and plays an important role in the creation of poetic identity. (1) This relation can vary from an enthusiastic acceptance of as internal revelation, which renders unnecessary both the scriptural and sacred traditions, to its total rejection as self-deception or a purely psychiatric phenomenon. In most cases, however, problem as such cannot be avoided. Indeed, a possibility of the direct contemplation of God or His perceptible (not strictly transcendent or intelligible) manifestations is hardly compatible with indifference the part of those poets who believe that articulation of the relationship between God and humanity must be a preeminent poetic goal. To put it another way, the centrality of as a possibility and a problem depends the relative significance of religious questions in general. And, correspondingly, radical faith makes the problem of inescapable. Gerard Manley Hopkins was a poet of radical and self-conscious faith. Most Hopkins critics today tend to assume that his poetry is completely bereft of mysticism, but was not always the case. It is precisely the mystical component of Hopkins' writings that attracted the attention of his first readers. Shortly after the first publication of his poems in 1918, for example, a reviewer wrote in Westminster Gazette that meant for him an intensification, not a denial, of life (qtd. in Gardner 1:222). A year later, in Essentials of and Other Essays, Evelyn Underhill mentioned Hopkins in a chapter titled The Mystic as Creative Artist. She stressed that in unlike most mystics, the impersonal mystical aspect is interwoven with personal elements; as a result, we come nearest to an understanding of the full experience he is trying to express (71). According to her, Hopkins is the greatest mystical poet of the Victorian era, in support of which claim she quoted two stanzas from Wreck of the Deutschland (72). A year after Underhill, in 1921, Edward Sapir also underscored Hopkins' consuming mysticism (68). In 1930, in the first book devoted to Gerald F. Lahey suggested that Hopkins' sonnets of 1885-86 (the so-called Terrible Sonnets) describe and epitomize the darkest, and perhaps the most sublime, part of the mystical ascent, which is conventionally referred to as the Dark Night of the Soul and Senses of Juan de la Cruz. Lahey wrote that Hopkins, smiling and joyful with his friends, was at the same time the bleak heights of spiritual night with his God. After enumerating several writers mysticism (St. Teresa, St. John of the Cross, Poulain, Maumigny, etc), he concluded: The celebrated 'terrible' sonnets are only terrible in the same way that the beauty of Jesus Christ is terrible. Only the strong pinions of an eagle can realize the cherished happiness of such suffering. It is a place where Golgotha and Thabor met (104). This passage has been often quoted by Hopkins critics. In 1933, for example, Herbert Read cited Lahey's description of the Terrible Sonnets with approval and concluded that this absence of spiritual complacency is of the very essence of Christian Mysticism (105). Similarly, fifteen years later, K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar quoted the same passage as Read did and then described Hopkins' last years as God's special favour, mystical ordeal, and divine blessing (145-46). Already in the 1930s, however, the attitude of critics toward Hopkins' supposed had undergone a significant change. Simultaneously with the publication of Lahey's book, Charles Williams was ready to admit only that Hopkins was on the verge of mystical vision (xii), thus seriously minimizing the claims of his predecessors. …

International encyclopedia of linguistics

Comprising more than one million words, the 2nd edition of the International Encyclopedia of Linguistics encompasses the full range of the contemporary field of linguistics, including such areas as historical, comparative, formal, mathematical, functional, and philosophical linguistics. Special attention is given to interrelations within branches of linguistics and to relations of linguistics with other disciplines. Areas of intersection with the social and behavioral sciences-ethnolinguistics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and behavioral linguistics-receive major coverage, as does interdisciplinary work in language and literature, mathematical linguistics, computational linguistics, and applied linguistics (particularly as it is concerned with language education). The International Encyclopedia of Linguistics is available in four print volumes and as an e-reference edition at www.oxford-linguistics.com. Longer entries in the International Encyclopedia of Linguistics, ranging up to four thousand words, survey the major fields of study-for example, anthropological linguistics, history of linguistics, semantics, and phonetics. Shorter entries treat specific topics within these fields, such as code switching, sound symbolism, and syntactic features. Other short entries define and discuss technical terms used within the various subfields or provide sketches of the careers of important scholars in the history of linguistics, such as Leonard Bloomfield, Roman Jakobson, and Edward Sapir. Line drawings, maps, tables, and diagrams are generously employed to illustrate the text of many articles. A major emphasis of the work is its extensive coverage of languages and language families. From those as familiar as English, Japanese, and the Romance languages to Hittite, Yoruba, and Nahuatl, languages from all corners of the world receive treatment. Languages that are the subject of independent entries are analyzed in terms of their phonology, grammatical features, syntax, and writing systems. Language lists attached to each article on a language group or family enumerate all languages, extinct or still spoken, within that group and provide detailed information on the number of known speakers, geographical range, and degree of intelligibility with other languages in the group. In this way, virtually every known language receives coverage. For ease of reference and to aid research, the articles are alphabetically arranged, each signed by the contributor, supported by up-to-date bibliographies, and readily accessible via a system of cross-references and a detailed index and synoptic outline. Authoritative, comprehensive, and innovative, the 2nd edition of the International Encyclopedia of Linguistics will be an indispensable addition to personal, public, academic, and research libraries and will introduce a new generation of readers to the complexities and concerns of this field of study.

Invisible Genealogies: A History of Americanist Anthropology (review)

Reviewed by: Invisible genealogies: A history of Americanist anthropology by Regna Darnell James Stanlaw Invisible genealogies: A history of Americanist anthropology. By Regna Darnell. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2001. Pp. xxviii, 373. $24.95. When I was in graduate school at Illinois, the linguistics students and the linguistic anthropology students would meet in a bar a block away from our respective departments. This often happened after a particularly grueling thesis defense or guest lecture by some eminent alum coming back to tell us how much better things were in Massachusetts. Sometimes, depending on the talk and the amount of beer consumed, we would play games—the kind that only occur to insecure and slightly inebriated Ph.D. candidates. Sometimes we looked at each others’ bloodlines, tracing our scholarly pedigrees as far back as we could, much like the owner of a famous race horse or pure-bred poodle. A wealth of stories was always told about the ancestors—many apocryphal, though some no doubt true. Tales were passed on judiciously as beer and conversation flowed freely. I often wondered, however, just how much of this institutional history was known outside of these informal contexts, and more importantly, how significant this knowledge in the growth and development of the disciplines of linguistics and anthropology was. Darnell’s exciting new book explores exactly how the invisibility of these intellectual genealogies affects present day practitioners (whether slightly tipsy grad students or full-fledged professionals). D is well-known as a Sapir scholar (1990) and editor (e.g. Darnell & Irvine 1994; Darnell, Irvine, & Handler 1999) and is one of the foremost historians of anthropology of our times. Here, D argues that during the first half of the 20th century a group of scholars associated with Franz Boas developed a collective paradigm centering around ‘the cross-cultural study of meaning, based on participant-observation fieldwork and collection of linguistic and ethnographic texts’ (xviii). These included Edward Sapir, Benjamin Lee Whorf, Alfred Kroeber, and others, as well as Boas himself (perhaps his own most articulate spokesman). This paradigm, sometimes called the ‘Americanist tradition’ (Valentine & Darnell 1999), refers to not only scholars of Native American languages and cultures but also—knowingly or not—to most linguists and anthropologists who have been trained in North America in the last 80 years. D suggests (7) that anthropologists now have often turned away from language—and linguists have dismissed ‘the older Boasian philology’—as both disciplines have gradually turned to more global, post-modernist, or formal concerns. The histories of these disciplines, and their common heritage, are forgotten or ignored, and their genealogies rendered invisible. [End Page 778] D challenges the problem of how to reclaim these lost connections by examining in close detail a number of critical theoretical issues faced by a dozen or so prominent Americanists. All, however, come from the ‘key conceptual site of the Boasian version of the Americanist tradition’ (30). It is often said that Boas single-handedly founded the discipline of anthropology in the United States. While this claim is a bit of an overstatement, it is certainly true that Boas was responsible for assuring that linguistics would always be part of that discipline. And before World War II it was very hard to label any particular individual. Sapir, for example, not only is known as the greatest specialist on Native American languages of his day, he was also one of anthropology’s finest theoreticians. Boas was the most vociferous proponent of the separation of race, language, and culture as analytic categories, and in this starting point all Americanists agreed. Still, for all their unanimity and common assumptions, Boas and his students had major—very often substantial—quarrels among themselves. D is at her best in tracing how these apparently picayune disagreements among insiders actually had important and theoretical long-term repercussions. And as Boas held fast to his ideas with ‘the tenacity of a dog with a particularly juicy bone’ (37), these stories are as entertaining as they are enlightening. For example, Sapir—the most technically skilled field linguist and analyst of the lot—was having great success at reconstructing Native American language families and cultural relationships (e.g. Mandelbaum 1949...

Notes for a Cultural History of Family Therapy*

The official history of family therapy describes its beginnings as a daring technical and philosophical departure from traditional individual treatment in the 1960s, inspired especially by the "system thinking" of Gregory Bateson. This celebrated origin story needs to be supplemented with a longer and larger history of both practice and thought about the family, and that is the subject of this article. The longer history goes back to the founding of social work by Mary Richmond, of pragmatism by William James, and of the organic view of social systems intervention by John Dewey. Seen against this background, family therapy is, among other things, a consequence of the development of persistent elements of American professional culture, experience, and philosophy. The taking of this historical-anthropological view discloses also the origins of two other histories that have made their contribution to the development of family therapy: a science of observing communication processes that starts with Edward Sapir and leads to contemporary conversation analysis, and a history of mesmerism in the United States that culminates in Milton Erickson and his followers.

Reflections on the Legacy of Pierre Bourdieu

Pierre Bourdieu wasn't fond of the honour and mundane ritual of celebration. However, his death certainly doesn't give us the opportunity to escape such rituals. I would like to recall a few personal memories, and present some theoretical reflections about Bourdieu's legacy. Pierre Bourdieu the Professor In the Fall of 1970,1 was a doctoral student at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes etudes in Paris. Pierre Bourdieu was my supervisor. He had just published Metier de Sociologue (The Craft of Sociology) with J. Chamboredon and J.C. Passeron in 1968, and La Reproduction (Reproduction in Education) with J.C. Passeron in 1970. One of his projects at that time was to finish his theoretical reflections on sociological practice in a book called Esquisse d'une thorie de la pratique (Outline of a Theory of Practice), which would eventually be published in 1972. His two leitmotivs were, in his own words: 1. My academic project is to train the best sociologists in the world; and 2. My intellectual project is to elaborate a theory of practice. I am, as you can understand, enthusiastic. Every week, at the rue de Tournon and, later, boulevard Raspail, he met with his students. He preferred the formula of the seminar, where he presented the results of his research to a smaller audience. While he always had a written paper in front of him, he liked to improvise, introducing questions and injecting comments into his own work. Reflexivity was very much apart of his work. His classes were a kind of laboratory: he presented new ideas, and tested new hypotheses. His objective was to transmit to his students the habitus of the researcher: intellectual rigor, seriousness, and teamwork moving back and forth from theory to empirical investigation. He liked to say that the sociologist walks with big boots, and that most of his own experiments dealt with things that appeared visible and obvious. And he was right! While he certainly had philosophical leanings (such as Merleau-Ponty and Witgenstein) and epistemological concerns -- as his work affirms --, Pierre Bourdieu never disconnected his theoretical reflections from the study of concrete problems or objects (as seen in his examinations of the Kabile household, matrimonial strategies in the Bearn, workers in Algeria, and European Museums, photography and the school system in France). He liked polemics (as illustrated by his opposition to Levi-Strauss, structural Marxism, symbolic interactionism, and, later, postmodernism), defended eclecticism (in Marx, Durkheim and Weber, for instance), and supported interdisciplinarity (in disciplines such as anthropology, linguistics, economics, history and political science). He also rejected canonical dichotomies (such as determinism/liberty, subjectivism/objectivism, and structure/history). One of his most important works during this period was the translation and the publication of his collection Le sens commun at the Editi ons de Minuit. This text included the work of many American, English and German authors: Panofsky, Cassirer, Bateson, Goffman, Labov, Bernstein, Richard Hoggart, Marcuse, Ralph Linton, Edward Sapir, Joseph Schumpeter, and Radclife-Brown. Pierre Bourdieu's Last Lecture at the College de France. Pierre Bourdieu's last lecture at the College de France was on March 27, 2001, at the Rue des Ecoles, Amphi. Marguerite-de-Navarre. More than five hundred people were in attendance, including some former students and collaborators: Patrick Champagne, Remi Lenoir, Bernard Lacroix, Jean-Claude Combessie, and Francien Dreyfus. Bourdieu's talk was entitled Sociology of the scientific field and reflexivity. With his last lecture at the College de France, Bourdieu the sociologist returned to the study of knowledge, the most prestigious object in philosophy, but with a twist: he discussed the structural perspective that he introduced in the field of sociology. …

AWARDS ALERT: New Edward Sapir Book Prize

AWARDS ALERT: New Edward Sapir Book Prize

The Collected Works of Edward Sapir, III: Culture (review)

The Collected Works of Edward Sapir, III: Culture (review)

Edward Sapir's Thought Experiment in the Interdisciplines of Cultural Anthropology and Psychiatry

Edward Sapir's Thought Experiment in the Interdisciplines of Cultural Anthropology and Psychiatry

Theorizing the Americanist Tradition (review)

Reviewed by: Theorizing the Americanist tradition ed. by Lisa Philips Valentine, Regna Darnell James Stanlaw Theorizing the Americanist tradition. Ed. by Lisa Philips Valentine and Regna Darnell. (Anthropological horizons series 13.) Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. Pp. xi, 397. For many reasons, this book is an absolute must read, not the least of which is that it reveals for a wider audience of linguists aspects of the discipline’s past which still resonate today. More than a history, it is a vital reassessment of a contemporary paradigm which influences all scholars of language trained in North America. Many anthropologists and linguists are loath to admit it, but—along with old bones, colorful costumes, and lost phonemes—many dark skeletons are in the proverbial closet. The development of British anthropology, for example, had a close connection to that nation’s nineteenth century imperialism (Harris 1968:134–36). Someone, after all, had to give advice on how best to handle the local natives, be they East Indians, West Africans, or the central highlanders of whatever place the sun was not setting on at that moment. The United States and Canada, too, had their own native problem: the quarter of a million people speaking some 600 languages (Powell 1891), whom Columbus and his cohorts named Indians. And at this time, both in America and on the Continent, the common way to explain the great linguistic and cultural diversity that was becoming increasingly apparent was to reduce things to biology (that is, race and evolution). Both the disciplines of anthropology and early descriptive linguistics burst forth in this climate. One response to these late nineteenth century prejudices was the Americanist tradition, the topic of this especially timely collection edited by Lisa Philips Valentine and Regna Darnell. D is probably best known to linguists for her definitive biography of Edward Sapir (1990) as well as for her editing in the Sapir collected works series (e.g. Darnell & Irvine 1994). She is, however, also one of the most knowledgeable historians of anthropology. V is an Ojibwe specialist and ethnographer of communication; both teach at the University of Western Ontario. I suppose Americanist tradition must be defined at the outset. Some see it as a site of research, that is, native North America. In less sensitive times, then, an Americanist would be someone who studied American Indian languages and cultures, prayed to Franz Boas or Leonard Bloom-field, and subscribed to the International journal of American linguistics. Today, many would probably take a different view: An Americanist tradition incorporates a very particular theoretical perspective resulting from training in, as well as study of, North America. In fact, D even suggests that not working with Native Americans is even ‘beside the point in terms of intellectual affinities and continuities’ (39); the Americanist tradition is a ‘theoretical substratum, for virtually all sociocultural anthropologists trained in North America’ (38). But what exactly constitutes this Americanist tradition? This book, actually, is a treatise on just this subject, and therefore it is probably worthwhile to elucidate some of the main tenets. Though such tabular summaries are always very dangerous, the following points are a start (most are taken directly from D’s contribution [45–48] or extrapolated from other places in the volume, though a few are my own suggestions): 1. Language, thought, and reality are presumed to be inseparable, that is, cultural worlds are constructed from linguistic categories. 2. Culture is seen as—indeed, is defined in terms of—a system of symbols; in turn these symbols reify and legitimate the culture. 3. Discourse and ‘texts’ of various kinds are the primary basis for both linguistic and ethnographic study. 4. An intimate, intensive, and long-term working relationship with a number of key informants, using the native language, is an absolute necessity. 5. A link exists between linguistics and what anthropologists sometimes call ‘culture and [End Page 156] personality’ studies (i.e. the integration of the internal personality with external cultural events, as expressed in language; in other words, culture and the individual are inseparable). 6. Culture is mutable and historic; that is, traditional cultures are not static, to be preserved for some future archeologist; native peoples—like Euro-Americans...