EDWARD SAPIR (1884-1939)

Edward Sapir

C[arl] F. Voegelin

American anthropology has enjoyed a number of giants disproportionate to the number of its practitioners. The brightest of these in the memory of living anthropologists is Edward Sapir ; his brightness was so conspicuous that hypercritical contemporaries would sometimes question whether so brilliant a light could last long. No one questioned his solidity, however. Both in terms of solid training and in terms of solid publications, there was nothing ‘ light’ about Sapir ; he was a ‘ heavyweight’ in the best sense of the term. It may have been felt as something of a contradiction that any mortal could—at the same time—be so much of a ‘ heavyweight ‘ and so very, very bright, with a brightness that we associate with youth and poetry and innocence.

Long ago, when we were discussing these qualities, the present writer was told by an older colleague that Sapir (who had just then accepted a job at Yale in both Anthropology and Linguistics) was overcommitted by his double-barreled iob, that he had indeed overresponded to the opportunities of his job while at Chicago, that he would never recover the productive phase of the life he had led in Canada. My older colleague concluded comfortably that ten years after Sapir’s death, graduate students in anthropology would question why Sapir’s contemporaries were so enthusiastic about him ; they would ask what all the excitement was about. . . Now more than ten years have elapsed since Sapir died (February 4, 1939), and now graduate students in anthropology read The Selected Writings of Edward Sapir (published by the University of California Press in 1949), wishing, as many have told me, that they might have known Sapir in person. The peculiar power of stimulating intellectual excitement which Sapir possessed is, as the record shows, still preserved in his writing.

Graduated from Columbia University in 1904 at the age of twenty, Sapir’s first graduate work was in Germanics specifically, and more generally in the ancient Indo-European languages. It was Franz Boas who gave him the opportunity to study American Indian languages. For some half dozen predoctoral and postdoctoral years, Sapir studied the Wishram language, spoken in Washington ; Takelma, spoken in Oregon (the subject of his Ph.D. dissertation) ; Yana, spoken in California ; and Paiute, spoken in Utah. These half dozen student years were marked by great phonetic virtuosity, enormous bursts of energy, great hopes. Since the first fresh years of his linguistic experience were spent among languages spoken in the Western states, it is no wonder that the young Sapir longed for an academic post in the West. The middle-aged Sapir always spoke of California with a certain nostalgia—California, the center of more linguistic diversity than was to be found in any other part of the world then available to an academic linguist. How Sapir could be delighted with linguistic diversity is shown in his most readable (and only) book, a decade later—Language, published in 1921.

If Sapir viewed his West Coast experience as something he would like to have continued most of his life, it forms a strange contrast to the next phase of his life—his Canadian years. They were sad years, the years from 1910 to 1925 spent as chief of the Division of Anthropology in the Canadian National Museum at Ottawa—years of scholarly solitude and hard though not frustrating work—years of yearning for friendship. The yearning was reflected in long visits from former fellow graduate students, such as Paul Radin, and in frequent visits to New York friends and to that stern teacher, Franz Boas. This yearning may also have been an indirect stimulus for Sapir’s poetry and for his musical studies, most of which were done in Ottawa.

Sapir’s life was not episodic but rather integrative. Once he had experimented with poetry and music, the subtle and the dramatic never left him. For example, his early work in comparative UtoAztecan was as conservative as any work in comparative Indo- European and also, it was stated in a conservative, scholarly style. After his intensive and deeply personal experiences in writing poetry, Sapir made dramatic comparisons among widely (or as some thought, wildly) divergent languages. Where his predecessor, Powell, counted a half hundred separate language families in North America, Sapir counted a half dozen. His observations were subtle as well as dramatic ; he could discover identities in forms marking personal actors among Algonquian languages of the Great Lakes and in Yurok and Wiyot of California. Though these languages showed few other immediate similarities, Sapir boldly postulated a genetic relationship.

During these personally unhappy but professionally productive years, Sapir’s early liking for the West Coast was continued in the languages he chose to study—all west of the continental divide (Nootka as well as Na-dene languages) ; yet all about the Great Lakes and within sight of Ottawa were Algonquian languages which were certainly relevant to Sapir’s wide-flung comparisons. He scarcely looked at these. Often, he would stay in his study to write methodological papers, such as the early reviews of psychoanalysis, or his monograph called the Time Perspective, which attempts to transfer techniques used in historical linguistics to the advantage of cultural data.

When Sapir left his Ottawa study in 1925, he went to the Great Lakes—to the University of Chicago. But he continued his field trips to western Indians—to the Navaho of the Southwest and to the Hupa of California. All the energy of Sapir’s youthfulness, his playful virtuosity, and his pleasure in exhibiting it, returned to him in Chicago. For example, he transcribed for the edification of graduate students a most difficult African language, and solved tonal problems with breath-taking accuracy and speed. Here in Chicago (surrounded for the first time by students) was Sapir at the beginning of his middle age but no longer sedate as in his Canadian years. With a wide audience in literary circles as well as in anthropology, with a national reputation as the most brilliant of all living anthropologists (both for his linguistic work and his fresh theoretical writings), Sapir regained the exuberance of his student days, and their hope.

Sapir went to Yale in 1931 and was followed by most of his Chicago students, and by students from other universities, most of whom already had their doctorates. A small company of postdoctoral fellows in New Haven appreciated Sapir in a more subdued but no less sincere fashion than did his beginning graduate students in Chicago. Such beginners were conspicuously absent at Yale ; and though Sapir continued presenting linguistic seminars for his postdoctoral fellows, his large seminars were devoted to his innovations in anthropological theory—to the impact of culture and personality. The published papers from this period are, in certain parts, unrhymed poems. His theory was not limited to culture and personality, but included semantics. Sapir returned to the ancient Indo-European and Semitic problems of his youth also. It was during the Yale period, particularly, that Sapir became consciously interdisciplinary.

At Yale, Sapir was stimulating as well as stimulated, but no one has seriously suggested that he was happy in New Haven. If he was unable to recapture all his youthful and Chicago exuberance all the time, he could nevertheless be momentarily exuberant—as when his old friend Harry Stack Sullivan would come up from Washington. If he was unhappy, we have much to blame besides the town and gown ; the economic depression was unabated from 1931 to 1939, and Sapir suffered emotionally perhaps more than did postdoctoral fellows at the meager job opportunities for young scholars. If a New England Indian were brought to New Haven for linguistic study, Sapir would be only mildly interested ; even when western Indians, Nootka or Navaho, were brought to town, he was too busy to give as much time as he formerly did to his special field. The theoretical direction of Sapir’s thoughts were away from pure linguistics toward culture and personality. Convinced that we live in a semihostile world, Sapir could not escape the conclusion that it is a median number of personalities which make it hostile. As for culture, Sapir could never bring himself to embrace her visible forms as he could those of language. No one has quite understood why, but all are agreed that a man who was by nature exuberant and boyishly happy was less than happy at the end of an extraordinarily brilliant and extraordinarily short life.

Source : C. F. Voegelin, ‘ Edward Sapir,’ Word Study 27.1-3 (1952). By permission from Word Study, copyright 1952 by G. & C. Merriam Co., publishers of the Merriam-Webster Dictionaries, and the author.