Invisible Genealogies: A History of Americanist Anthropology (review)

When I was in graduate school at Illinois, the linguistics students and the linguistic anthropology students would meet in a bar a block away from our respective departments. This often happened after a particularly grueling thesis defense or guest lecture by some eminent alum coming back to tell us how much better things were in Massachusetts. Sometimes, depending on the talk and the amount of beer consumed, we would play games—the kind that only occur to insecure and slightly inebriated Ph.D. candidates. Sometimes we looked at each others’ bloodlines, tracing our scholarly pedigrees as far back as we could, much like the owner of a famous race horse or pure-bred poodle. A wealth of stories was always told about the ancestors—many apocryphal, though some no doubt true. Tales were passed on judiciously as beer and conversation flowed freely. I often wondered, however, just how much of this institutional history was known outside of these informal contexts, and more importantly, how significant this knowledge in the growth and development of the disciplines of linguistics and anthropology was. Darnell’s exciting new book explores exactly how the invisibility of these intellectual genealogies affects present day practitioners (whether slightly tipsy grad students or full-fledged professionals).

D is well-known as a Sapir scholar (1990) and editor (e.g. Darnell & Irvine 1994; Darnell, Irvine, & Handler 1999) and is one of the foremost historians of anthropology of our times. Here, D argues that during the first half of the 20th century a group of scholars associated with Franz Boas developed a collective paradigm centering around ‘the cross-cultural study of meaning, based on participant-observation fieldwork and collection of linguistic and ethnographic texts’ (xviii). These included Edward Sapir, Benjamin Lee Whorf, Alfred Kroeber, and others, as well as Boas himself (perhaps his own most articulate spokesman). This paradigm, sometimes called the ‘Americanist tradition’ (Valentine & Darnell 1999), refers to not only scholars of Native American languages and cultures but also—knowingly or not—to most linguists and anthropologists who have been trained in North America in the last 80 years.

D suggests (7) that anthropologists now have often turned away from language—and linguists have dismissed ‘the older Boasian philology’—as both disciplines have gradually turned to more global, post-modernist, or formal concerns. The histories of these disciplines, and their common heritage, are forgotten or ignored, and their genealogies rendered invisible.

D challenges the problem of how to reclaim these lost connections by examining in close detail a number of critical theoretical issues faced by a dozen or so prominent Americanists. All, however, come from the ‘key conceptual site of the Boasian version of the Americanist tradition’ (30). It is often said that Boas single-handedly founded the discipline of anthropology in the United States. While this claim is a bit of an overstatement, it is certainly true that Boas was responsible for assuring that linguistics would always be part of that discipline. And before World War II it was very hard to label any particular individual. Sapir, for example, not only is known as the greatest specialist on Native American languages of his day, he was also one of anthropology’s finest theoreticians.

Boas was the most vociferous proponent of the separation of race, language, and culture as analytic categories, and in this starting point all Americanists agreed. Still, for all their unanimity and common assumptions, Boas and his students had major—very often substantial—quarrels among themselves. D is at her best in tracing how these apparently picayune disagreements among insiders actually had important and theoretical long-term repercussions. And as Boas held fast to his ideas with ‘the tenacity of a dog with a particularly juicy bone’ (37), these stories are as entertaining as they are enlightening. For example, Sapir—the most technically skilled field linguist and analyst of the lot—was having great success at reconstructing Native American language families and cultural relationships (e.g. Mandelbaum 1949...