Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, and the Americanist text tradition

The collection of native texts was foundational to the practice of Boasian anthropology and linguistics because it preserved for posterity the understanding of a culture by its members – not just the ethnographic facts but their integration into the lives of particular individuals. Edward Sapir went far beyond his mentor Franz Boas, however, in exploring the connection between text collections from which grammatical and ethnological information could be extracted and the integration of cultural information by the individual narrator of a given text. Revision of the text tradition, then, provides a link between Sapir’s conventionally Boasian early career in linguistics and ethnology and his later theoretical work on the interrelationship between language, personality and culture. Because linguistic and cultural theory are presently considered very far apart, this continuity in Sapir’s thinking has-been eclipsed in professional memory.