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BOASIAN COSMOGRAPHIC ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE SOCIOCENTRIC COMPONENT OF MIND MICHAEL SILVERSTEIN Six years after his Kiel dissertation on psychophysics, Franz Boas, at the age of 29, and inspired by Alexander von Humboldt, announced in his famous 1887 paper, “The study of geography,” the epistemological program of Boasian “cosmographic ” anthropology.1 This “anthropo-geography” took as its discursive object the individual-in-society’s unique consciousness of phenomena in the world—“the native’s point of view,” as Malinowski would later (1922:25) call it. It situated that outlook on experience at the intersection of two kinds of frameworks. One is the macro-social framework of societies, namely their Michael Silverstein is currently Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of Anthropology, Linguistics, and Psychology, and in the Committee on General Studies in the Humanities at The University of Chicago. He has long been interested in the historical sociology of knowledge of anthropology and of linguistics, on which he has published a continuing series of articles and chapters in such places as International Journal of American Linguistics, Language, Historiographia Linguistica, and American Anthropologist 131 1. Boas himself (1940) reprinted the paper as one of three “miscellaneous” early writings “because they indicate the general attitude underlying [his] later work” (1940:vi). It is the very last paper in the volume, perhaps a last-minute decision (Boas’s preface actually referred to “two” such miscellaneous papers). Presuming its fundamental nature (see Stocking 1996:5), Stocking, too, reprints it (1996:7–16) as the very first item of Volksgeist as Method and Ethic: Essays on Boasian Ethnography and the German Anthropological Tradition. Many of the paper’s somewhat slogan-like formulations were realized only gradually, as Boas could transform the personnel and central intellectual issues of American anthropology. For some of its institutional aspects as Americanist anthropology , see now Darnell 1998. history—not their functionally or universally determined evolution. The other is the micro-social framework, in which individual “psychic processes”—revealed in perception, conceptualization, and affect—provide the basis for the individual human organism to be goal-directed in its context of being. The realm of Boasian “psychology” lies at the intersection of these two frameworks, where native subjectivity lies and gives intensional, categorial coherence to phenomena at least in part as “culture.”2 For some decades, as is well known, the predominant Boasian discourse developed in the first mode, the historical.3 In certain areas, for example, the sound systems of languages, such Boas students as Edward Sapir began to develop innovatively its intersection with the second realm as well, founding phonology, the “psychology” of speech sounds on this basis (Silverstein 1986, 1992). For the most part, however, there was a 30-year period of predominantly North American collecting, classifying, and comparing in every anthropological realm from material culture to human phenotypic physical form to kinship to mythology to linguistic grammar and lexis. The material was used to constitute negative theoretical arguments against universal, unilinear social evolutionism in both its pre-Darwinian and Darwin-inspired forms. By demonstrating the relative independence of race, culture, and language as they varied across North American time and space, such phenomena were used to show the out-of-synch localizations, the contingencies, of their historical development. In this way, Boas and his students showed again and again that processes of culture-history are counterarguments to any would-be evolutionary scheme. Thus, a (mere) typology in any one of these areas could not be interpreted as a transparent picture of its diachrony, and even less so of the overall history of peoples in all these respects. In extending the critique to ever more fundamental levels, Boas and his students repeatedly attacked the very constitutive notions of received typologies in all of these areas. In this mode of work, one studies the coming-into-being in time and space of “complexes” of racial, linguistic, or cultural “traits,” defining and locating 132 Michael Silverstein 2. Hence we can understand Boas’s critique (1889) of the “alternating sounds” phenomenon, discussed so (ap)perceptively by Stocking (1968:157–60), and the relationship of Boasian “anthropo-psychophysics,” as we might term it, to Helmholtz, Wundt et al. (see Mackert 1993, 1994; Silverstein 1986, 1992). 3. We differentiate here history—causally connected specificities, no matter on which scale they must be described—from “evolution.” Boas’s fierce critiques of the older social evolutionism were sometimes directed against his own students. Boas’s Columbia first-“born,” Kroeber, strayed to what for Boas...

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