Theorizing the Americanist Tradition (review)

For many reasons, this book is an absolute must read, not the least of which is that it reveals for a wider audience of linguists aspects of the discipline’s past which still resonate today. More than a history, it is a vital reassessment of a contemporary paradigm which influences all scholars of language trained in North America.

Many anthropologists and linguists are loath to admit it, but—along with old bones, colorful costumes, and lost phonemes—many dark skeletons are in the proverbial closet. The development of British anthropology, for example, had a close connection to that nation’s nineteenth century imperialism (Harris 1968:134–36). Someone, after all, had to give advice on how best to handle the local natives, be they East Indians, West Africans, or the central highlanders of whatever place the sun was not setting on at that moment. The United States and Canada, too, had their own native problem: the quarter of a million people speaking some 600 languages (Powell 1891), whom Columbus and his cohorts named Indians. And at this time, both in America and on the Continent, the common way to explain the great linguistic and cultural diversity that was becoming increasingly apparent was to reduce things to biology (that is, race and evolution). Both the disciplines of anthropology and early descriptive linguistics burst forth in this climate.

One response to these late nineteenth century prejudices was the Americanist tradition, the topic of this especially timely collection edited by Lisa Philips Valentine and Regna Darnell. D is probably best known to linguists for her definitive biography of Edward Sapir (1990) as well as for her editing in the Sapir collected works series (e.g. Darnell & Irvine 1994). She is, however, also one of the most knowledgeable historians of anthropology. V is an Ojibwe specialist and ethnographer of communication; both teach at the University of Western Ontario.

I suppose Americanist tradition must be defined at the outset. Some see it as a site of research, that is, native North America. In less sensitive times, then, an Americanist would be someone who studied American Indian languages and cultures, prayed to Franz Boas or Leonard Bloom-field, and subscribed to the International journal of American linguistics. Today, many would probably take a different view: An Americanist tradition incorporates a very particular theoretical perspective resulting from training in, as well as study of, North America. In fact, D even suggests that not working with Native Americans is even ‘beside the point in terms of intellectual affinities and continuities’ (39); the Americanist tradition is a ‘theoretical substratum, for virtually all sociocultural anthropologists trained in North America’ (38).

But what exactly constitutes this Americanist tradition? This book, actually, is a treatise on just this subject, and therefore it is probably worthwhile to elucidate some of the main tenets. Though such tabular summaries are always very dangerous, the following points are a start (most are taken directly from D’s contribution [45–48] or extrapolated from other places in the volume, though a few are my own suggestions):

1. 1. Language, thought, and reality are presumed to be inseparable, that is, cultural worlds are constructed from linguistic categories.

2. 2. Culture is seen as—indeed, is defined in terms of—a system of symbols; in turn these symbols reify and legitimate the culture.

3. 3. Discourse and ‘texts’ of various kinds are the primary basis for both linguistic and ethnographic study.

4. 4. An intimate, intensive, and long-term working relationship with a number of key informants, using the native language, is an absolute necessity.

5. 5. A link exists between linguistics and what anthropologists sometimes call ‘culture and personality’ studies (i.e. the integration of the internal personality with external cultural events, as expressed in language; in other words, culture and the individual are inseparable).

6. 6. Culture is mutable and historic; that is, traditional cultures are not static, to be preserved for some future archeologist; native peoples—like Euro-Americans...