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Introduction
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xv Introduction Collecting some of my writings about research on the history of American anthropology and its social science neighbors (history, linguistics, psychology, and at greatest length, sociology) provides the opportunity to reflect on how they came about and to see some relationships between a range of research projects aiming to answer questions about some things that happened and some that did not but seemingly could have along the relatively unfortified borders of twentieth-century American anthropologies. Having had no undergraduate sociology or anthropology course but having read books about scientific communities by Herbert Butterfield and Don Price, I wandered into the history of social science stimulated by Thomas Kuhn’s (1962) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which I read in 1972, during the summer after I graduated from college. At the University of Arizona two years later, Keith Basso stimulated my interest in social influences on language use. When my sociologist mentor Robert Nisbet told me he was leaving Arizona and that I needed to find a different PhD program, I migrated to the University of Toronto, intending to do dissertation research about power in spoken interaction, building on the work we did in Keith’s seminar. William Samarin took over my education about sociolinguistics, and I picked up some ideas about ethnohistory from him as well. The summer after my first year in graduate school I attended my first annual meeting of the American Sociological Association—at which I heard some very unimpressive presentations by many of the biggest names in the field. However, I also went to a sociology of science session in which I heard a paper by Nicholas C. Mullins (published in 1975) that provided the model of revolution-making in science that I would test and refine in my doctoral dissertation and one by Harriet Zuckerman (1974, never published, though the main example for it was, as Zuckerman and Led- xvi Introduction erberg 1986) about how lines of work can be postmature as well as premature , which bore fruits especially evident in chapters 10 and 12 of this volume. I proposed a dissertation testing the bipartite (functionalist and conflict ) Mullins model of group formation and rhetorics of continuity or of making revolutions. I quickly realized that context-free measures of the amount of discontinuity in practices or in theories did not exist and would be essentially contested were any proposed, whereas intercoder reliability about proclaiming continuity or revolution was obtainable. What I proposed eventually became American Sociolinguistics (Murray 1998), but the dissertation reached beyond anthropological linguistics to unanthropological linguistics (the purported “Chomskian revolution” in particular: see Murray 1980d) and back through centuries of North American work describing and attempting to explain language(s): what became Theory Groups in the Study of Language in North America (Murray 1994b). The case studies (including theorizing that did not lead to “theory groups”) contained a lot of detail, but were being deployed to test Mullins ’s model. I have included none of this line of work here. Indeed, only two chapters in this collection (2 and 10) deal with linguistic anthropology . Both focus on Edward Sapir’s years (1925–31) in the University of Chicago Department of Sociology (of which an anthropology program was a junior partner before becoming a separate department in 1929). I feel that as a linguistic anthropologist (which I sometimes think I am) I am in the Sapir tradition, but am aware that I would probably not have gotten along with him had I been his student or colleague. I feel that opportunities for interdisciplinary integration were missed at Chicago of the late 1920s (for which there is plenty of blame to go around!) and that Sapir was the person there with the knowledge about languages to supplement Chicago sociologists’ experiences doing ethnography. I also think that anthropological research on peasantries by American anthropologists was late, if not fully “postmature.” When it was done, it was done primarily by students of Robert Redfield at Chicago and those who had studied with Alfred Kroeber at Berkeley. This turn is explicable in expanding the subject matter as the supply of “tribal”/“primitive” people was rapidly waning. Kroeber supervised and encouraged work on peasants, though his own ethnographic work was “salvage anthropology ” of severely disrupted California indigenous groups, along with [44.197.251.102] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 13:05 GMT) Introduction xvii archaeology in Peru and analysis of cultural changes over centuries within large-scale civilizations. It is difficult not to notice that anthropologists and...