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PERSONALITY AND CULTURE The Fate of the Sapirian Alternative REGNA DARNELL In 1930, Edward Sapir invited his junior colleague Robert Redfield to come with him to the annual Hanover Conference of the Social Science Research Council. The Conference had its origins in 1925, when the Committee on Problems and Policy of the newly founded Rockefeller-funded Council met in Hanover, New Hampshire, with a group of psychologists to discuss research alternatives; Sapir's own involvement followed from his acceptance that same year of a Rockefeller-funded position as the second anthropologist in the world's premier department of sociology at the University of Chicago. During the intervening years, Redfield had completed his own training in that department , entered its ranks as assistant professor of sociology, and then joined Sapir and Fay-Cooper Cole in forming an independent Rockefeller-funded department of anthropology in 1929. Invited now for the first time into the brave new world of interdisciplinary social science, Redfield sent his wife, Margaret (daughter of the eminent Chicago sociologist Robert Park), a vivid account of the creatures that inhabited it: The place is overrun with pedants and potentates. The potentates are the executive secretaries of the big foundations-collectively they represent hugestaggering -amounts of money that has been set aside for research. The pedants have invited the potentates so that the potentates may see how pedants do their most effective thinking, and how they arrange to spend that money. . . . There are about seventy here in all. The Social Science Research Council pays their fares, and boards them, and feeds them and washes their clothes, and gives them cards to go to the golf club, and then expects them to produce Regna Darnell is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Alberta. She is the editor of Readings in the History of Anthropology and the author of various articles on the history of Boasian anthropology and linguistics. She is currently working on a biography of Edward Sapir. 156 THE FATE OF THE SAPIRIAN ALTERNATIVE 157 Significant Results.... There was much conversation last night, and after Kimball Young and I left, Sapir and Lasswell kept it up till midnight. How those two can talk ... !They are so wise in the ways ofthe academic world, and make so many brilliant suggestions.... This morning was held the first session of the "Committee on Research in Acculturation and Personality." ... I understand that all the members of this committee were selected by [Robert) Lynd, except Young and myself, whom Sapir added. [Since) my scheduled remarks on the Yucatan project were postponed till tomorrow ... Sapir asked me to take notes.... It is rather amusing to watch the Effective Minds in action, but also a little depressing, like watching Shaw's he-ancients. Besides the psychological-psychiatric-anthropo-sociological committee of mine, three visitors were there, distinguished educators.... The discussion centered around the W. 1. Thomas project to study crime and insanity among the Scandinavians , and the Lawrence Frank proposal to bring foreign students to a great seminar to train them to make standardized studies of their own cultures.... The session of the Committee this morning was quite interesting, especially a rather sharp conflict between the psychometric-statistical viewpoint on the one hand, and the psychiatric-sociological view on the other. The principal psychiatrist present is Harry Stack Sullivan ... another one, like Sapir and Lasswell, with the gift of tongues. When the three of them get together, the polysyllabic confluences are amazing ... (As quoted in Stocking 1978) In the process of thus gaining "glimpses into a field I [knew] nothing about," Redfield provided a number of leads into the influence of Edward Sapir on the early history of that field. For although Sapir's impact on the development of culture-and-personality research is widely attested, it is difficult to document. Forestalled by the failure of potentate funding, by institutional competition, by the dispersal of his own energies, and by premature death, Sapir's "brilliant suggestions" led to no published body of"Significant Results." But conveyed informally to students by his "gift of tongues"-and wrapped in the mantle of disciplinary myth-they remain to this day an inspiration for those who are doubtful of results once deemed Significant. Sapir's Entrance on the Center Stage of Interdisciplinary Social Science Sapir's move to Chicago in 1925 marked the end of a major phase in his life. Although recognized by Boas as his most brilliant student, he had received his Ph.D. (1909) at a point when...

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