And Along Came Boas: Continuity and Revolution in Americanist Anthropology (review)

This fascinating contribution to the history of linguistics focuses on the central role of language and linguistics in the development of American anthropological theory and practice in the early process of professionalization of anthropology in the US.

The earliest professional work in American anthropology began around 1880, centered around John Wesley Powell in the Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE), its theoretical basis in an evolutionary paradigm. Disciplinary conventional wisdom has a revolution taking place in 1900 when Franz Boas began teaching at Columbia. Darnell finds that Boasian anthropology, which rejected evolutionary theory in favor of detailed ethnographic description, certainly constituted a scientific revolution in the Kuhnian sense. However, D documents that the process of change was gradual and that the central theoretical importance of language and particular focus on the study of Native American languages represented a crucial continuity across the paradigm shift.

Working from archival material, primary sources, and solid grounding in the discipline, D vividly depicts a group of anthropologists of diverse personalities who knew each other well, were aware of the importance of their work, worked hard at both scholarship and politics, and had as a shared goal the professionalization of the discipline while not always agreeing on the means.

D’s findings regarding the centrality of language before, during, and after the Boasian revolution are both fascinating and historically significant. As a US government program, the BAE was charged with surveying, mapping, classifying, and providing guidelines for national policy toward Native American peoples. Language comprised the major basis for the determination of groups because Powell believed that linguistic classification could be established more systematically than cultural classification while linguistic characteristics were also interrelated with social and cultural characteristics. This research program also recognized that study of American languages could make important contributions to general linguistics.

The mapping and classification of indigenous languages was also important for the Boasians. ‘Linguistic classification had ethnographic implications for both P and B, although P envisioned a useful classification of Indian tribes and B an aid to description of particular culture histories’ (56). Boas’s approach rejected evolutionary postulations and stressed intensive work on particular languages or cultures. The Boasian revolution took place with the professionalization of anthropology in universities, emphasizing rigorous academic training of anthropologists; by the 1920s, Boas’s students were teaching in most American universities. While his students often disagreed with him and with each other, they took care to present a self-consciously uniform larger vision of a revolutionized approach.

D traces the Boasians’ debates and consolidations of theory about language classification and analysis. One of the many delicious details is D’s account of Boas chairing a committee of the American Anthropological Association consisting of Pliny Goddard, Edward Sapir, Alfred Kroeber, and J. P. Harrington, who was later dropped because he was not a member of the AAA (Boas et al., ‘Phonetic transcription of Indian languages’, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Collections 66, 1916). Although Kroeber denounced Harrington’s ‘[r]iotous inclination to indulge in the expression of fine shades of sounds’, Sapir dominated the committee, and Boas agreed that the ‘learned and elaborate’ transcription system he advocated advanced ‘professional standards’ (196).