Essays in the history of linguistic anthropology

436 Pages·1983·22.48 MB·English

by  Dell H Hymes

ESSAYS
AMSTERDAM STUDIES IN THE THEORY AND
HISTORY OF LINGUISTIC SCIENCE
General Editor
E.F. KONRAD KOERNER
(University of Ottawa)
Series III - STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF LINGUISTICS
Advisory Editorial Board
Ranko Bugarski (Belgrade);Jean-Claude Chevalier (Paris)
H.H. Christmann (Tübingen);Ceorge Cardona (Philadelphia)
Boyd H. Davis (Charlotte, N.C.) ; Rudolf Engler (Bern)
Hans-Josef Niederehe (Trier);R.H. Robins (London)
Aldo Scaglione (Chapel Hill)
Volume 25
Dell H. Hymes
Essays in the History of Linguistic Anthropology
ESSAYS IN THE HISTORY
OF
LINGUISTIC ANTHROPOLOGY
DELL H. HYMES
University of Pennsylvania,
Philadelphia, Pa.
JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY
AMSTERDAM/PHILADELPHIA
1983
® Copyright 1983 - John Benjamins B.V.
ISSN 0304 0720 / ISBN 90 272 4507 X
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint,
microfilm or any other means, without written permission from the publisher.

CARLVOEGELIN
who provoked it all

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Table of Contents vii
Introduction ix
1. Notes towards a History of Linguistic Anthropology 1
2. Lexicostatistics and Glottochronology in the 19th Century 59
3. The Americanist Tradition in Linguistics 115
4. Linguistic Method in Ethnography 135
5. Alfred Louis Kroeber: Linguistic Anthropologist 245
6. Morris Swadesh: From the First Yale School to World Prehistory . 273
7. The Pre-war Prague School and Post-war American Anthropological
Linguistics 331
8. Tradition and Paradigms 345
Index of Authors . 385
Index of Subjects 393

INTRODUCTION
There is not such a thing as sustained study of the history of linguistic an­
thropology, and indeed, there is hardly a broad conviction that such a topic
exists to be studied historically. The history of linguistics has developed sub­
stantially as a scholarly enterprise in the past decade or two, not least due to
the efforts that have created the series in which this volume appears. The his­
tory of anthropology has serious practitioners, qualified historians, now. The
intersection of the two has a history, but not historians.
Clearly I am not myself properly a historian of science, but a scholar
whose interests in linguistics and anthropology have a historical dimension.
The genres represented in this volume show as much. There is the essay on a
specific subject, such as the use of linguistic method in ethnography, and
lexicostatistics and glottochronology; there is the obituary of a valued pre­
decessor (Kroeber, Swadesh); reflections on a chosen field (the Americanist
tradition, American anthropological linguistics). Only the first and last essays
may be said to be essays for the sake of history itself, the first to call attention
to a missing dimension of a chosen field, the last to address conceptions of his­
tory that play a part in current debate.
Parts of these essays may be of use to historians as such, inasmuch as they
involve persons and activities that are part of larger currents. Comte de Mur-
ville and Broca, for example, in chapter 2; the relation of American scholar­
ship to the American Indian (ch. 3); interdisciplinary influence and align­
ment, and the methods proper to the human sciences (ch. 4); the distinct
perspective that analysis of a personal career brings to one's understanding of
the institutionalization of new disciplines (chs. 5,6); international influence
and alignment (ch. 7). I venture to hope that the discussion of Kuhn's concept
of paradigm (ch. 8) will be of interest to historians of science and ideas, as well
as to linguists affected by its ideological use.
Acknowledgement and Contexts
It seems quite appropriately historiographic to embed the sources of the
studies brought together in the present volume in accounts of the contexts
within which they arose. For each chapter, then, there follows citation of its