Edward Sapir (1884-1939)
Sapir was a linguist who shaped interdisciplinary studies of human relations and the field later known as “culture and personality.” His major insight was that the study of another culture’s language is more than an investigation into how they speak: it’s “an inquiry into how cultural existence is created.”
Sapir and his student Benjamin Whorf (1897-1941) are credited with The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis:
1. All thinking is in a language – English, Chinese, Finnish, Sanskrit, whatever.
2. Each language structures a view of reality.
3. The views of reality structured by (families of) languages differ.
Sapir did pioneering research into American Indian languages and replaced the then-standard classification (due to John Wesley Powell) of Indian languages into 55 different “linguistic stocks” with a mere 6 linguistic stocks for North America:
Culture and the Individual
Sapir opposed Kroeber’s view of culture as superorganic, stating: “there as many cultures as there are individuals in a population.”
A particular case that prompted this view was the mercurial Two Crows of the Omaha tribe who disputed practically every generalization (including how many clans there were) made about the Omaha:
The truth of the matter is that if we thing long enough about Two Crows and his persistent denials, we shall have to admit that in some sense Two Crows is never wrong… The fact that this rebel, Two Crows, can in turn bend others to his own view of fact or theory or to his own preference in action shows that his divergence from custom had, from the very beginning, the essential possibility of culturalized behavior. [“Why Cultural Anthropology Needs the Psychiatrist,” 572]
Thus, contra Benedict, both normative and deviant behaviors are equally cultural behaviors. According to Sapir, rather than being superorganic, and having causal power over individuals, culture is simply a consensus brought about by individuals, where all voices are influential, and none can be marginalized as “deviant”:
A healthy national culture is never a passively accepted heritage from the past, but implies the creative participation of members of the community…it is just as true, however, that the individual is helpless without a cultural heritage to work on. [“Culture, Genuine and Spurious,” 104]
Language
According to Sapir:
Language is a purely human and noninstinctive method of communicating ideas, emotions, and desires by means of a system of voluntarily produced symbols.
Furthermore, words always attach to concepts (i.e., they’re general, rather than particular) which are shaped by the environment the culture inhabits. For example, an animal name only comes about if an animal is both known and useful to the people using the language. That means there will be a diversity of underlying concepts in any language that reflects the concerns of its users. For example:
Even the type of word used to express apparently similar concepts can vary between languages. Hopi language does not treat spaces as things (“dining room”, “hall”, etc.) but as “purely relations concepts of an adverbial type”
Summary
For Sapir (and Whorf), we cannot assume that different languages just use different labels for the same concepts, but rather that different language users have a different conceptual scheme and live in different worlds.
There is a tension in Sapir’s work between individualism (culture is just whatever is the consensus – every individual has a voice, and there can be many disagreements within a “culture”) and holism (every person who shares the same language shares the same conceptual scheme which imposes structures on the way they see the world, and will limit the possibilities of disagreement.)