Contributions From Twenty-Five Distinguished Scholars Are Brought together here to provide a comprehensive, accessible, state of the art appraisal of interdisciplinary research at the boundaries of anthropology, linguistics and Native Studies. The collection seeks to correct the prevailing notion that the Americanist tradition in anthropology. (typified by Franz Boas and his colleagues) is a theoretical.Participants in this dialogue accepted the challenge of making their underlying theoretical assumptions explicit. The papers range from the history of anthropology and linguistics to present innovations within this tradition. Issues of authenticity lead to examination of changing traditions in text and literacy in linguistics and education, and in emerging contemporary discourse spanning the Americas.The volume is framed by Coyote, the quintessential American trickster who is the inspiration for much of the volume's play with tradition and change, with the construction of identity through discourse, and with the interaction of Americanists and First Nations/Native American communities. Remarks on the future of the Americanist tradition forms a critical part of this collection.The collection pioneers in juxtaposing Canadian and American theoretical work on language and revitalizes a shared tradition centred around the study of meaning. Readers are invited to enter this open-ended and vibrant Americanist discourse.
The advent of Franz Boas on the North American scene irrevocably redirected the course of Americanist anthropology. This volume documents the revolutionary character of the theoretical and methodological standpoint introduced by Boas and his first generation of students, among whom linguist Edward Sapir was among the most distinguished. Virtually all of the classic Boasians were at least part-time linguists alongside their ethnological work. During the crucial transitional period beginning with the founding of the Bureau of American Ethnology in 1879, there were as many continuities as discontinuities between the work of Boas and that of John Wesley Powell and his Bureau. Boas shared with Powell a commitment to the study of aboriginal languages, to a symbolic definition of culture, to ethnography based on texts, to historical reconstruction on linguistic grounds, and to mapping the linguistic and cultural diversity of native North America. The obstacle to Boas's vision of anthropology was not the Bureau but the archaeological and museum establishment centred in Washington, D.C. and in Boston. Moreover, the "scientific revolution" was concluded not when Boas began to teach at Columbia University in New York in 1897 but around 1920 when first generation Boasians cominated the discipline in institutional as well as theoretical terms. The impact of Boas is explored in terms of theoretical positions, interactional networks of scholars, and institutions within which anthropological work was carried out. The volume shows how collaboration of universities and museums gradually gave way to an academic centre for anthropology in North America, in line with the professionalization of American science along German lines during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The author is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Centre for Research and Teaching of Canadian Native Languages at the University of Western Ontario, Canada. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
Infrastructures are material forms that allow for the possibility of exchange over space. They are the physical networks through which goods, ideas, waste, power, people, and finance are trafficked. In this article I trace the range of anthropological ...Read More
Reviewed by: Linguistic relativities: Language diversity and modern thought Regna Darnell Linguistic relativities: Language diversity and modern thought. By John Leavitt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Pp. x, 245. ISBN 9780521767828. $99 (Hb). John Leavitt presents an elegant and persuasive revisionist history of the variable responses of linguists to the question of linguistic relativity in light of contemporary theoretical concerns, and explores the misreading of this position over the half-century since its classic anthropological formulation. He argues that the time is ripe for reassessment in light of the resurgence of relativist thought since the 1990s, following a long dry spell in which caricatured views of the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis dominated both the postwar positivism of structural linguistics and the militant revisionism of Chomskyan universalism. Although linguistic relativity has garnered increasing respectability, historical perspective is now necessary to situate the recurrent debate within its original context, establish the intellectual continuity of its modern origins, and clear away the legacy of multiple reductionisms. L privileges the Americanist tradition that arose around the seminal figure of Franz Boas and the study of the American Indian as providing a successful balance, a recognition of the plurality of languages without embracing essentialism. That is, linguistic diversity need not entail incommensurability. From this position, he suggests, contemporary linguistics can move forward. L’s historicist method reanimates conventional debates by returning to ‘the writings of the protagonists themselves, their assumptions and strategies, their favorite examples, their surprisingly stereotypical tones of voice’ (3). In an ethnographic mode, he deploys the protagonists of binary positions as informants in his search for a productive middle ground. Language universals, for example, can be arrived at by way of human species capacity or by comparison of diverse languages—alternatively, and preferably, we can acknowledge the utility of both approaches and their potential to yield convergent evidence. L treats Western modernity as a subject ‘amenable to anthropological study’ (8). He begins by setting out ‘the modern Western options and their extensions throughout the nineteenth century’ (13). His initial chapters deal with rationalism and empiricism as the presuppositional baseline of modern science, in tandem with an essentialist celebration of cultural and linguistic diversity now associated primarily with the humanities; competing French and British versions of universalism and human rights; and the rise of positivism and evolutionism as explanatory paradigms. Although none of these paradigms were exclusively about language, the study of language imbibed the zeitgeist of a larger theoretical climate. The universalist paradigm of René Descartes and John Locke, continuing today in Noam Chomsky’s universalism and its cognitive science derivatives, vies with the essentialism of Gottfried Leibniz, Johann Herder, and post-Renaissance Romanticism. L argues that the oppositional character of these positions is cultural or cultural-historical rather than logical. He reads Franz Boas and his students as refusing the dichotomy of these ‘thought-forms’ and seeking ‘different metaphors’ (9). What Boas referred to in his ethnographic studies as ‘the native point of view’ and Whorf called ‘habitual thought’ adopts a metaphor of standpoint taken quite directly from the commitment of Einstein’s physics to calibrate multiple ontologically real positionalities. Building on the distinctive integrity of mother tongue, culture, and territory postulated by German Humboldtian Romanticism, Boas destabilized this opposition of relativity and universalism by mediating the standpoints of the natural and historical or spiritual sciences and arguing that anthropology, in which he included linguistics, could move across the dichotomy by changing the standpoint (role of the observer) or (inductive or deductive) method of the science. There is a ‘back and forth’ movement between ‘the likelihood of universals’ and the ‘respect for specifics’ characteristic of ‘Boas’ phonetics’, ‘Sapir’s poetics’, and Whorf’s ‘use of Gestalt psychology’ (191). L attributes ‘the fall of Boasian linguistics’, with its accompanying emphasis on language diversity, in good part to positivist attacks on the linguistic relativity ‘hypothesis’ (a term invented in critique and never used by Boas, Sapir, or Whorf) that began in the 1950s and remains largely unexamined by contemporary linguists and anthropologists. Boas has been criticized by the very [End Page 905] same positivists as atheoretical for his objections to the premature generalizations of evolutionary theories borrowed from biology into the sciences...
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