Regna Darnell

A really interesting, intricate look at the culture surrounding the students of Franz Boas (mostly Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and Sapir's student Benjamin Lee Whorf) in the 1920s and 30s, and the move from "ethnography" (conceived as the charting of different peoples) to "anthropology" ("people" as a whole, and therefore implying cultural and/or psychoogical universals), and the role of linguistics therein (apparently, the ethnographers saw it as mostly merely an adjunct, a way to gather info on material practices and the like, and the antropologists started to really get interested in lifeworlds as conceived through language). It's interesting the way we use these reductive schemata--Sapir and Whorf are of course purported to be "relativists," who don't believe in cultural or psychological universals, but in fact this "relativism" involves the recognition that reality as perceived through a language is reality as perceived from a particular position, and the idea then becomes to understand as many positions as throroughly as possible to get a sense of what that language is from as near to an objective position--made up of many subjective positions--as possible. As has been noted, Sapir modelled the term on Einstein's relativity--thus, reality is still absolute, and our efforts to measure it that are limited and small but still beautiful. This orientation is suffused with the sense of the universal and the effort to achieve it. It's the avowed universalists who are lazy, who just take English or neoliberalism or whatever as transcendentally apt.

These are the stakes these guys were dabbling in, and we get a sense first of their physical conditions--Whorf as den mother to a bunch of Sapir's post-docs and students, because it was the Depression and they were living off scarce grants, and Whorf was an engineer and could afford to keep the homestead going while they went to and from the field. (Some of the unfairness that's been dealt to Whorf is combatted here--he taught, and did research, and was recognized as a world authority on the Mayan writing, and if people since have pooh-pooed him to discredit him because he didn't have a professorship, unlike the generativist acolytes who came of age when academies were being massively expanded and linguistics programs massively funded in part because of the development of the field by guys like Whorf, it seems that he was offered many professorships and preferred the freedom that being a well-heeled workin guy and independent scholar gave him).

So one thing this means is that interpretation is shall we say transcendentaly necessary. There is no way to fill gaps between positions without hermeneutics. Another weird thing it means is that sometimes we have to choose between universalist and relativist essentialisms--at the extremes, totalitarianism (we are all the same!) and racism (we are all different!). More practically, it means that sometimes we stress difference too much to avoid doing dishonour to other ways of seeing, and end up exoticizing and primitivizing them. There is a related tension between culture and individual bioogy or psychology. And another between "tolerance of intolerance" and "intolerance of (excessive) tolerance"--a moral element that intrudes at unexpected moments. Benedict had great trouble valuing competitiveness, whether she saw it in the Kwakwakawakw of British Columbia or in Middletown USA, and found it very difficult to understand how best to orientate herself to studying both a Dobuan society where a friendly person was seen as a simpleton and a Zuni society where an aggressive person was seen as a witch.

And linguistics as a cognitive science has spent a lot of time trying to get out from under these anthropological issues and as a result has relegated these guys to a simple-minded empiricism, but they were rationalists in a lot of ways too, trying to identify the common linguistic patrimony of humanity as much as Chomsky was, but in a much more reasonable way. Chapter appeared in Invisible Genealogies.… (plus d'informations)