The Collected Works of Edward Sapir, III: Culture (review)

Back in the days when an earlier Bush was running for President, besides television ads admonishing voters to ‘read my lips . . .’ another commercial depicted an older woman standing before a mystified cashier in a fast food restaurant holding her tiny hamburger up to his face. Soon her lament ‘Where’s the beef?’ became as common in the popular vernacular as its contemporary prevarication, ‘no new taxes’. For a while, like millions of others, I used such catch phrases myself. My introductory linguistics students would laugh when I would ask them “Where’s the English?” But they grew puzzled when it soon became clear that I meant questions like “Who has English?” not to be rhetorical. I argued, apparently rather too abstractly, that we could not ignore the cultural factors involved in the social construction of language nor could we dismiss the social factors involved in the linguistic construction of thought. Perhaps all I should have said was go read Sapir: Before there was ‘competence and performance’, almost before there was ‘la langue and la parole’, there was his ‘unconscious patternings of behavior in society’. It is these issues—the relationships between language, culture, thought, and individuals—that are addressed in this new collection of Sapir’s classic writings.

Edward Sapir (1884–1939) was recognized by most linguists as the finest Americanist of his day. His investigations of Takelma, Yana, and Wishram are definitive, and his other work on Native American languages—which touched just about every family from Athabaskan to Uto-Aztecan—has only been augmented, never superseded. He was also thought by anthropologists to be one of the most profound theorists. His work on culture, personality, and psychology continue to be widely read, and Sapir-Whorf debates—the extent to which language determines thought or perception—still occupy the time of many linguists, anthropologists, and cognitive scientists. Sapir was president of both the LSA and the American Anthropological Association, an obvious indication of his extensive influence.

This massive collection covers a vast range of topics, from the representation of speech as a personality trait to book reviews on Yiddish-English dictionaries and Jean Piaget’s The language and thought of the child. Well-known Sapir classics are included as well as some of his more obscure writings (such as his essays on literary aesthetics). The time frame covers the whole breadth of his career, from early 1916 commentaries to remarks on cultural psychiatry written just before his death. The volume has been painstakingly edited by three eminently qualified scholars: Darnell has written the only complete intellectual biography of Sapir to date (1990), Irvine has been a key Sapir editor (1993), and Handler has written some seminal articles on Sapir’s place in the history of anthropology (e.g. 1983). All three, of course, are renowned for their other work as well.

I should mention at the onset that even though this book mostly consists of Sapir’s writings on culture, there is much of great interest here for all linguists, especially those using a sociological or anthropological hyphen. Even Sapir’s ethnological work had primarily a linguistic focus, with language resources being his ultimate authority. That said, I must also admit that it is impossible to summarize the three dozen articles, 60 book reviews, two dozen pieces of criticism, and complete book that appear in this volume (and I have no doubt miscounted). I will only mention three pieces that I think are still extremely pertinent today.

The unconscious patterning I mentioned at the beginning is discussed by Sapir in a 1928 multidisciplinary conference paper (156–72). To be sure, the unconscious aspects of language had been discussed previously, in particular by Sapir’s teacher, Franz Boas (the founder of modern American anthropology). Sapir, however, was the first to locate this unconsciousness in the social as well as the individual realm. Social behavior is merely the ‘arrangements’ (157...