Frederickson 1 Sonia Frederickson Professor McNeil Anthropological Theory 7 February 2012 Reaction Paper 1 My favorite theorist we have covered

so far has been Boas. The first paragraph of our reading talks about how he developed the four-field approach to anthropology and a more holistic view of anthropology. Although he was writing in the early 1900s, not all schools have fully approached this holistic, (and in my view, best) approach to anthropology. However, that theory has had an important effect on American anthropology. British anthropologists separate the linguistics, physical anthropology, archaeology, and cultural anthropology, treating each as a separate entity. I think in doing this, they lose many pieces that apply to all four and affect the others. In order to understand history, it is necessary to understand not only how things are, but how things came to be, is my favorite quote from The Methods of Ethnography, as it ascribes a certain amount of importance to archaeological study. He was the first theorist we read to do so, and to link it to modern anthropological study. Boas is obviously writing in direct response to Tylor and especially Morgan. He argues for individual cultural histories instead of trying to categorize and analyze all of humanity. He explicitly refers to Morgans evolutionary theories when he says, ...it would be quite impossible to understand, on the basis of a single evolutionary scheme, what happened to any particular peo-

Frederickson 2 ple, and, It is clear that if we admit that there may be different ultimate and co-existing types of civilization, the hypothesis of one single general line of development cannot be maintained. Sapirs ideas on language also intrigued me. It is surprising to realize how long ago he he lived, and how important he still is in the study of linguistics. I also find it interesting that even though he is a linguist, his vocabulary is very much a product of his time, even if his theories are comparatively progressive. For example, he says, The lowliest South African Bushman speaks in the forms of a rich symbolic system that is in essence perfectly comparable to the speech of the cultivated Frenchman. He than goes on to describe their languages as language of the savage and that of higher culture, respectively. While his biases are quite obvious, his argument doesnt inherently suffer. This theory of languages being equal, if different, was an important point in his day, when colonialism and ideas of white superiority were at their heyday. It is an interesting theory to apply to archaeology and philology as well. It is undeniable that languages evolve, but I think Sapir would argue that evolution does not make any form of a language better than another. He even says, Many primitive languages have a formal richness, a latent luxuriance of expression, that eclipses anything known to the languages of modern civilization. I tend to agree with this statement (though not necessarily with his use of the word primitive). Modern languages that have existed for long periods of time in a similar form such as Arabic and ancient languages such as Akkadian seem to have a particular flowery quality that many modern languages dont have.

Frederickson 3 Another section of Sapirs writing that I found insightful is where he mentions that Language is a particular how of thought. National Geographic, in coordination with linguists, has been on a campaign, in the last 4 years or so, to save dying languages. The documentary The Linguists is a great introduction to this, but the book When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World's Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge by David Gregory is a direct explanation of Sapirs theory. It is a major movement in linguistics today, and can be linked back to Sapir.