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Chapter 10: The Postmaturity of Sociolinguistics: Edward Sapir and Personality Studies in the Chicago Department of Sociology
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172 10 The Postmaturity of Sociolinguistics Edward Sapir and Personality Studies in the Chicago Department of Sociology An academic discipline is at once a group of men in persisting social relations and a method of investigation. . . . The two kinds of relations, social and methodological, are mutually influential, but neither determines the other. —ROBERT REDFIELD, “Relations of Anthropology to the Social Sciences and to the Humanities” (1953:728) In launching the sociology of science from the rostrum of an American Sociological Association (ASA) presidential address in 1957, Robert Merton focused the specialty on the timing of discoveries. Merton’s earlier discussions of the sociology of knowledge (e.g., 1941, 1945) had drawn out implications of the notion of zeitgeist, and still earlier work with Sorokin (1937) had dealt with sociological aspects of time and the hospitality of a zeitgeist for some theories and discoveries rather than others, but these earlier works did not inaugurate a research tradition as the 1957 address did (see J. Cole and Zuckerman 1975). In the decade that followed, Merton (1961, 1963, 1968) pursued specification of simultaneity of discoveries and began to discuss “premature” discoveries (also see Westrum 1982), that is, theoretical formulations or empirical discoveries that were too far “ahead of time” to be understood or built upon by sciences preoccupied with other problems and proposed solutions. In 1974 Harriet Zuckerman presented the first, fascinating fruits of the research of a multidisciplinary team of scholars (including Merton) attempting to define empirically the other logical category to accompany on time and early: late. “Postmature contributions,” according to Zuckerman , are “those which competent judges say could have been made The Postmaturity of Sociolinguistics 173 substantially sooner if only their cognitive ingredients were required for the outcome” (Zuckerman 1974). As an operational definition, this leads all too easily to “credentialism”: Who is “competent” to judge? And what if other judges disagree? Rather than be caught up in such squabbles, I would suggest that “postmaturity” is an essentially contestable interpretation for which there is no final solution. The concept may, however , be valuable if the explanations for cases of postmaturity suggest that scientific progress is not linear and broaden the understanding of the role of noncognitive processes in the history of science. Responses merely to the provocation of asserting a specific “might have been” may yield interesting historical data. One generalization Zuckerman made from the case of recombinant bacteria—”The opportunity to work on high risk investigations is not distributed equally, but falls to the comparatively well established in science or those in deviant career paths” (1974)— makes the case of postmaturity to be discussed here all the more striking, because it involved central figures in interwar American social science, some of whose career paths were quite deviant (Robert Park, W. I. Thomas , Ellsworth Faris, Harry Stack Sullivan, and to a lesser extent, Edward Sapir), who clearly could “afford” to innovate, both because they frequently did and because social science disciplines were less ossified into distinct entities during the 1920s. The postmaturity problem is that given the importance of language in the work of George Herbert Mead and the “symbolic interaction” that claimed intellectual paternity from him, the interest evidenced by Robert Park on retention of immigrant languages (namely, non-English presses in the United States), the earlier anthropological interest of W. I. Thomas in language (discussed in chapter 9), and the location in the Chicago sociology department of the scholar to whom the founders of sociolinguistics accord their intellectual paternity, some convergence would seem to have been possible at Chicago in the late 1920s, rather than involving Sapirian anthropologists and Everett Hughes during the mid-1960s (see Murray 1994b:310–14, on the Social Science Research Council Sociolinguistics Committee). The explanation proffered here is that although Chicago sociologists’ work influenced later “culture and personality” work in anthropology by way of Sapir’s exposure to their work, Sapir failed to show Chicago sociologists how to analyze language variety. To claim that there was a possibility of convergence requires showing that Chicago sociologists were interested in language, culture, [54.157.61.194] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 08:50 GMT) 174 The Postmaturity of Sociolinguistics and personality. This demonstration deconstructs “the Chicago School” into three groups: (1) social psychologists led by Ellsworth Faris and inspired by George Herbert Mead, (2) the followers of William Fielding Ogburn pursuing cultural explanations of social change and of mental illness, and (3) the urban ethnography tradition usually traced ThomasPark -Burgess-Hughes. Faris and Ogburn were...