Linguistic diversity

3.1Language in culture: the Boasian tradition

To understand how the issue of linguistic diversity arose in North American scholarship, we must go back to when linguistic anthropology was conceived as part of the “four fields approach” in anthropology. Starting with the founding of the American Ethnological Society in 1842 and the American Anthropological Association in 1902, which was launched by members of Section H of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences (AAAS), anthropology in the United States was conceptualized and in many respects practiced as a holistic discipline that studied the physical (now “biological”), linguistic (first referred to as “philological”), cultural, and archaeological records of human populations. In contrast to Europe, where ethnologists had their own departments, separate from archaeologists, paleontographers, and philologists (the earlier incarnation of today’s “linguists”), in the United States anthropology students were required to have some knowledge of all four fields, in addition to an in-depth knowledge of their own field of specialization. The scholar who more than anyone else represented in theory and practice this holistic view of anthropology was Franz Boas.

3.1.1Franz Boas and the use of native languages

One of the founders of American anthropology, the German-born Boas (1858–1942) was attracted to the study of language by his experience among the Eskimos and the Kwakiutl Indians of the Northwest Coast.1 He argued that one could not really understand another culture without having direct access to its language. Such a need for linguistic study was not only a practical one, but, he insisted, a theoretical one, due to the intimate connection between culture and language:

In all of the subjects mentioned heretofore, a knowledge of Indian languages serves as an important adjunct to a full understanding of the customs and beliefs of the people we are studying. But in all these cases the service which language lends us is first of all a practical one – a means to a clearer understanding of ethnological phenomena which in themselves have nothing to do with linguistic problems ... It seems, however, that a theoretical study of Indian languages is not less important than a practical knowledge of them; that the purely linguistic inquiry is part and parcel of a

1For discussions of Boas’s role in the development of the field of anthropology in general and in the US in particular, see Hatch (1973: 37–73), Langness (1987); on Boas’s views on language, see Hymes (1964b), Lucy (1992a), Stocking (1974).

52

3.1 Language in culture: the Boasian tradition

thorough investigation of the psychology of the peoples of the world. If ethnology is understood as the science dealing with the mental phenomena of the life of the peoples of the world, human language, one of the most important manifestations of

mental life, would seem to belong naturally to the field of work of ethnology.

([1911]n.d.: 52)

Boas’s interest in American Indian languages was transmitted to his students, some of whom, like Edward Sapir, went on to make important contributions not only to American Indian linguistics but to the study of language in general (see below). More importantly, however, Boas’s view of the necessity of language for human thought and hence for human culture became a basic thesis of American cultural anthropology in the first half of this century, as shown in this passage by another of his students, A.L. Kroeber ([1923]1963: 102):

In short, culture can probably function only on the basis of abstractions, and these in turn seem to be possible only through speech, or through a secondary substitute for spoken language such as writing, numeration, mathematical and chemical notation, and the like. Culture, then, began when speech was present; and from then on, the enrichment of either meant the further development of the other.

Methodologically, this view of the role of language in culture meant that linguistic systems could be studied as guides to cultural systems. In Boas’s case, his fascination with language led to the publication of numerous volumes of ethnography almost exclusively based on recorded “texts,” that is, transcriptions of what (usually bilingual) key informants would recall about past traditions, including ceremonies, art, etc. These transcriptions were sometimes done by Boas himself, at other times directly by his key informant (see Sanjek 1990c: 107; Stocking 1974). Many, for example, were done by his Kwakiutl collaborator George Hunt who learned Boas’s transcription techniques (Boas 1966: 4–5; Sanjek 1990b: 199).

Transcribing native descriptions of ceremonies and other aspects of traditional culture was part and parcel of the “salvaging anthropology” practiced by Boas and had obvious implications. Like other anthropologists of his time, Boas was concerned with the rapid disappearance or dramatic alteration of Native American languages and cultures and wanted to preserve them by documenting them while there were still people who spoke the languages fluently and could describe their cultural tradition. A positive side of this process was the

53

Linguistic diversity

realization that many of the ideas about “primitive languages” found in the literature were empirically unsound, including the claim that in American Indian languages sounds were not pronounced as accurately as in European languages. This view, Boas showed, was based on the limitations of the observers who had difficulties recognizing sounds that were uncommon in European languages (Boas 1911). A less positive consequence was that, by concentrating on narratives about the past, the method used by Boas created an ethnographic present that was empirically questionable (Fabian 1983). Ethnographers concentrated on informants’ recollections of past customs and ignored a century or more of European contact, even when such contact had quite striking consequences in the life of the people they were studying. Furthermore, the texts were often produced by one “key informant” and were not checked against other sources or versions (see chapter 5 for a discussion of transcription).

Despite these limitations, however, Boas’s methods became a landmark of what became linguistic anthropology. He insisted on the publication of verbatim native accounts of ceremonies and other aspects of their cultural heritage. Publications of the texts used by the ethnographers in formulating their accounts should allow readers to have access to some of the sources from which the ethnographies were based. This is the same logic that is used today in providing detailed transcription of verbal interaction (see chapters 5 and 8). Readers can see with their own eyes what the discussion is based on. Although not all information can be shown on a transcript, there is in it much more than can be found in descriptions that offer no textual sources. When participant-obser- vation (see chapter 4) was introduced and accepted as a standard method in ethnography, it replaced the so-called “armchair anthropology.” Direct experience of cultural practices – “being there” (Geertz 1988) – became the source of most descriptions and the collection. At the same time, however, the practice of publishing texts with the informants’ accounts was largely abandoned. Paradoxically, although participant-observation was meant to be a more empirical method for collecting information on a community’s customs, once ethnographers started to give their own descriptions of the social life of the people they studied, the empirical validation of fieldwork experience suffered a considerable blow: readers no longer had access to the textual sources of such descriptions (Tedlock 1983).

While transcribing native texts and translating them, Boas became fascinated by the different ways in which different languages classify the world and the human experience. He used this observation as another argument in favor of cultural relativism – the view that each culture should be understood in its own terms rather than as part of an intellectually or morally scaled master

54

3.1 Language in culture: the Boasian tradition

plan, in which the Europeans or those of European descent tended to be at the top.2

Boas used his knowledge of American Indian languages to show that the way languages classify the world is arbitrary. Each language has its own way of building up a vocabulary that divides up the world and establishes categories of experience. What in English might be represented by different words (water, lake, river, brook, rain, etc.), in another language might be expressed by the same word or by derivations from the same term (Boas 1911/n.d. 19). It is in this context that he mentioned what is now the famous example of the different words for “snow” in Eskimo:

It seems important ... to emphasize the fact that the groups of ideas expressed by specific phonetic groups [read “words” or “morphemes”] show very material differences in different languages, and do not conform by any means to the same principles of classification. To take again the example of English, we find that the idea of WATER is expressed in a great variety of forms: one term serves to express water as a LIQUID; another one, water in the form of a large expanse (LAKE); other, water as running in a large body or in a small body (RIVER and BROOK); still other terms express water in the form of RAIN, DEW, WAVE, and FOAM. It is perfectly conceivable that this variety of ideas, each of which is expressed by a single independent term in English, might be expressed in other languages by derivation from the same term.

Another example of the same kind, the words for SNOW in Eskimo, may be given. Here we find one word, aput, expressing

SNOW ON THE GROUND ; another one, qana, FALLING SNOW ; a third one, piqsirpoq, DRIFTING SNOW ; and a fourth one, qimuqsug,

A SNOWDRIFT .

As shown by Laura Martin (1986), the “words for snow in Eskimo” became a standard reference in the popular and scientific discusssions of the relationship among language, culture, and thought, with the number of words escalating from

2It is important to understand Boas’s cultural relativism in the context of the types of evolutionary models of societies common at the time. It is also important to remember that culture for him was a mental or psychological concept. Hence, he was especially a relativist with respect to intellectual achievement (he criticized the view that there were living people who were less intelligent than others) and moral standards (he ridiculed the use of the term “savages” when talking about people, like the American Indian tribes he studied, who in many respects, like, for example, hospitality, seemed to Boas much more gracious than “civilized” Europeans).

55