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.
Boas, Franz. 1911. The Mind of Primitive Man. New York: Macmillan.
Boas, Franz. 1916. Tsimshian Mythology. (= Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology for 1909–1910). Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office.
Canizzo, Jeanne. 1973. “George Hunt and the Invention of Kwakiutl Culture”. Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 201.44–58.
Darnell, Regna. 1986. “The Emergence of Edward Sapir’s Mature Thought”. New Perspectives in Language, Culture and Personality ed. William Cowan, Michael Foster & Konrad Koerner, 553–588. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Darnell, Regna. 1990. Edward Sapir: Linguist, anthropologist, humanist. Berkeley & Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press.
Fowler, Catherine & Donald Fowler. 1986. “Edward Sapir, Tony Tillohash and Southern Paiute Studies”. New Perspectives in Language, Culture and Personality ed. William Cowan, Michael Foster & Konrad Koerner, 41–66. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Leeds-Hurwitz, Wendy. 1985. “The Committee on Research in Native American Languages”. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 1291.129–160.
Murray, Stephen O.1986. “Edward Sapir and the Chicago School of Sociology”. New Perspectives in Language, Culture and Personality ed. by William Cowan, Michael Foster & Konrad Koerner, 241–292. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Sapir, Edward. 1912. Review of Kwakiutl Tales by Franz Boas (Columbia University Contributions to Anthropology 21.1–495, 1910). Current Anthropological Literature 11.193–198.
Sapir, Edward. 1917. “Do We Need a ‘Superorganic’?”. American Anthropologist 191.441–447.
Sapir, Edward. 1922. Review of American Indian Lives edited by Elsie Clews Parsons (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1922). The Dial 731.568–571.
Sapir, Edward. 1925. “Sound Patterns in Language”. Language 11.37–51.
Sapir, Edward. 1927. Review of Crashing Thunder by Paul Radin (New York: D. Appleton, 1926). American Journal of Sociology 331.303–304.
Sapir, Edward. 1933. “La realité psychologique des phonèmes”. Journal de Psychologie Normale et Pathologique 301.247–265. (Cited from Selected Works of Edward Sapir, ed. David G. Mandelbaum, 46–60. Berkeley & Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press. English title: “The Psychological Reality of Phonemes”.)
Sapir, Edward. 1938. “Foreword”. Left-Handed: Son of Old Man Hat by Walter Dyk, iv–x. New York: Columbia Univ. Press.
Stocking, George W., Jr.1974. “The Boas Plan for the Study of American Indian Languages”. Studies in the History of Linguistics ed. by Dell Hymes, 454–484. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press.
Voegelin, C[harles] F[rederick]. 1952. “The Boas Plan for the Presentation of American Indian Languages”. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 961.439–451.
2002. Languages: Linguistic Change and the Study of Indian Languages from Colonial Times to the Present. In A Companion to American Indian History, ► pp. 173 ff.
Darnell, Regna
2021. The Boasian Text Tradition and the History of Anthropology. Culture 12:1 ► pp. 39 ff.
[no author supplied]
2013. Stories in the Moment of Encounter. In Lessons from Fort Apache, ► pp. 113 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 5 january 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.