2. Significant Form: Sapir's Phonemic Poetics

Rhythm must have a meaning.

—Ezra Pound (1916:322)

Anthropologists often assume that culture theory and the history of anthropology occupy mutually exclusive spaces in our field.¹ We might even construe them as poles of a continuum running from pure empirical work at one end (history of anthropology, along with certain types of ethnography) to pure theory building at the other. Those who hold a less dichotomous perspective might blur such boundaries by pointing out that the historical contextualization of theory sometimes facilitates a creative reengagement with "old" theory—that is, the history of anthropology may occasionally lead to theoretical "progress." The work of George Stocking (1968, 1974), Regna Darnell (1998, 2001), and their students suggests a case in point: all those "symbolic" or "interpretive" anthropologists, trained in the last quarter of the twentieth century, found it congenial to trace their intellectual genealogy back to Franz Boas, despite the fact that their more proximate intellectual ancestors are more likely to have been such people as Claude Lévi-Strauss, David Schneider, Clifford Geertz, or Victor Turner (cf. Handler 1997, 1998).

But there is an even more robust reading of the relationship between history making and theory making, to be explored in the present paper. What if it is more useful to conceive of the "life" of theory in the social sciences in terms of cyclical repetition, not progressive development? In other words, what if particular theoretical positions wax, wane, and wax again—more like "three centuries of women's [and, presumably, men's] dress fashions" (Kroeber and Richardson 1940) than "industrial takeoff" or modernization itself? In Kroeber and Richardson's paradigmatic example, features of women's fashions such as skirt length and width varied regularly, over about a 150–year period, between culturally specific minima and maxima. This might be compared to specific theoretical emphases in the history of anthropology—antagonistic "paradigmatic traditions" or enduring antimonies (Stocking 1989, 1990) that wax, wane, and wax, in competition with one another, over the decades and even centuries. From this latter perspective, the history of anthropological theory is less a story of nonlinear development than of recurring salience and irrelevance. You can be sure, in other words, that today's hot theoretical discourse was hot at an earlier moment, and eclipsed at an earlier moment as well (on the culture concept itself, see Brightman 1995).

Perhaps the most basic of all theoretical terms in the social sciences that cycle in and out of fashion, in relation to one another, are "individual," "society" (or "culture"), and "action" (or "process"). There are theoreticians who see the individual as the primary locus of reality in human life, and, correspondingly, society (or culture) as a secondary or even residual phenomenon. There are others who reverse the emphasis, seeing individual existence as a function of social or cultural formations. For both, action links the two, such that in the first perspective, individuals create social forms through their more or less autonomously motivated actions; in the second, action is first of all a collective (social or cultural) phenomenon that can be said to realize itself through the lives of human individuals. In the history of social-scientific theory, the permutations provided by this basic set of elements are legion. We can imagine theoretical fashion swinging back and forth between individualistic and collectivist orientations. Another way to imagine this history is to track the moments when "action," or "process," is offered as the key to resolving the antinomy between society and the individual.

The present essay focuses on one such moment in the history of American anthropology. The moment is the late 'teens and early twenties of the last century, a time when Boas and his students were grappling with "culture," specifically with cultures as unified patterns or totalities emergent from historical processes of diffusion and psychological processes of invention or creativity. As the Boasians were learning to work with this version of the culture concept, the relationship between culture and the individual came to the fore. And in thinking about that relationship, many of these anthropologists drew on the discourse of aesthetic modernism, specifically literary modernism...