Linguistic relativities: Language diversity and modern thought (review)

John Leavitt presents an elegant and persuasive revisionist history of the variable responses of linguists to the question of linguistic relativity in light of contemporary theoretical concerns, and explores the misreading of this position over the half-century since its classic anthropological formulation. He argues that the time is ripe for reassessment in light of the resurgence of relativist thought since the 1990s, following a long dry spell in which caricatured views of the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis dominated both the postwar positivism of structural linguistics and the militant revisionism of Chomskyan universalism. Although linguistic relativity has garnered increasing respectability, historical perspective is now necessary to situate the recurrent debate within its original context, establish the intellectual continuity of its modern origins, and clear away the legacy of multiple reductionisms. L privileges the Americanist tradition that arose around the seminal figure of Franz Boas and the study of the American Indian as providing a successful balance, a recognition of the plurality of languages without embracing essentialism. That is, linguistic diversity need not entail incommensurability. From this position, he suggests, contemporary linguistics can move forward.

L’s historicist method reanimates conventional debates by returning to ‘the writings of the protagonists themselves, their assumptions and strategies, their favorite examples, their surprisingly stereotypical tones of voice’ (3). In an ethnographic mode, he deploys the protagonists of binary positions as informants in his search for a productive middle ground. Language universals, for example, can be arrived at by way of human species capacity or by comparison of diverse languages—alternatively, and preferably, we can acknowledge the utility of both approaches and their potential to yield convergent evidence. L treats Western modernity as a subject ‘amenable to anthropological study’ (8). He begins by setting out ‘the modern Western options and their extensions throughout the nineteenth century’ (13). His initial chapters deal with rationalism and empiricism as the presuppositional baseline of modern science, in tandem with an essentialist celebration of cultural and linguistic diversity now associated primarily with the humanities; competing French and British versions of universalism and human rights; and the rise of positivism and evolutionism as explanatory paradigms. Although none of these paradigms were exclusively about language, the study of language imbibed the zeitgeist of a larger theoretical climate.

The universalist paradigm of René Descartes and John Locke, continuing today in Noam Chomsky’s universalism and its cognitive science derivatives, vies with the essentialism of Gottfried Leibniz, Johann Herder, and post-Renaissance Romanticism. L argues that the oppositional character of these positions is cultural or cultural-historical rather than logical. He reads Franz Boas and his students as refusing the dichotomy of these ‘thought-forms’ and seeking ‘different metaphors’ (9). What Boas referred to in his ethnographic studies as ‘the native point of view’ and Whorf called ‘habitual thought’ adopts a metaphor of standpoint taken quite directly from the commitment of Einstein’s physics to calibrate multiple ontologically real positionalities.

Building on the distinctive integrity of mother tongue, culture, and territory postulated by German Humboldtian Romanticism, Boas destabilized this opposition of relativity and universalism by mediating the standpoints of the natural and historical or spiritual sciences and arguing that anthropology, in which he included linguistics, could move across the dichotomy by changing the standpoint (role of the observer) or (inductive or deductive) method of the science. There is a ‘back and forth’ movement between ‘the likelihood of universals’ and the ‘respect for specifics’ characteristic of ‘Boas’ phonetics’, ‘Sapir’s poetics’, and Whorf’s ‘use of Gestalt psychology’ (191).

L attributes ‘the fall of Boasian linguistics’, with its accompanying emphasis on language diversity, in good part to positivist attacks on the linguistic relativity ‘hypothesis’ (a term invented in critique and never used by Boas, Sapir, or Whorf) that began in the 1950s and remains largely unexamined by contemporary linguists and anthropologists. Boas has been criticized by the very same positivists as atheoretical for his objections to the premature generalizations of evolutionary theories borrowed from biology into the sciences...