Culture, Language, and Personality: Selected Writings

by Edward Sapir, David G. Mandelbaum

"For sheer brilliance Edward Sapir is unsurpassed by any American anthropologist, living or dead."—Cylde Kluckhohn, Harvard University

Genres: Linguistics, Anthropology, Language, Sociology, Nonfiction

617 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1949

About the author

Edward Sapir was born in Pomerania, Germany, in 1884, and came to the United States at the age of five. He first made his reputation as an expert on languages of the Native American. He taught at the University of Chicago and later at Yale, and was one of the first to explore the relations between language studies and anthropology. He died in 1939. Language, first published in 1921, is his only full-length book for a general audience. He published a great many articles and some verse in periodicals.

Reviews

[K · Rating 3 out of 5]

Did not finish-- not for a lack of trying, but I was only interested in the linguistics topics so I didn't care to broach the personality, religion, and culture essays.

Initially, when I started reading I thought it was quite good. I thought it might be out of date, and to a degree I'm sure it was, but Sapir supplied plenty of examples of languages where "x phenomenon" or "y feature" is exemplified, so it gave his airy rambling a bit of meat and substance. Otherwise, I thought that the essays were just a lot of talk. If you don't have a linguistic background or have had experience studying foreign language, some of the topics are likely to be unfamiliar.

I gave it three stars for the point in the book where Sapir references "primitive" people and "cultured" groups. He even goes so far as to suggest that certain languages (many of which are indigenous) are "primitive", not acknowledging the unique and VERY complex morphological features that most employ. I felt like it was misguided and racist to describe a people and a language this way, since linguistics has never been about assigning values to one language over another. All are equally fascinating and deserve the same amount of respect, which I don't think Sapir gave.

[Hein Mheink]

good

[Tom Schulte · Rating 3 out of 5]

I gave this three stars for how it struck me, but it probably deserves four or more. While Sapir never puts forward a conclusion or deep insight that wows me, he assays into deep and meaningful topics like Montaigne. Probably the nine essays here would bear up on repeated readings; maybe even years later. They are very well organized and build from one to the other, starting with a long essay on language, his principal field of study. Not really an illuminating exploration, he does telegraph an awe and wonder of this hard to define and categorized subject that is universal in the human experience. Mixing in with the wonder is some linguistic science, such as a classification of languages:

Four stages of synthesis may be conveniently recognized; the isolating type, the weakly synthetic type, the fully synthetic type and the polysynthetic type.

This helps to explain why Chinese can be seen as so old (along with its many exports to other languages) and how we can see a taxon in Algonquin and other Native American languages that fit so much into a single word. This flows nicely into "The Function of an International Auxiliary Language", but comes to now conclusion. Sapir puts forward English as the example of promoting an existing language, and Esperanto for a manufactured one without opting for either or neither. But, no discussion of which previously identified type would be best.

Similarly, "The Meaning of Religion" is a courageous undertaking, but the cleverest observation was not even his own:

Tylor believed that the series: soul, ghost, spirit, god, was a necessary genetic chain. "God" would be no more than the individualized totality of all spirits, ...

Maybe this floundering in essays like "Cultural Anthropology and Psychiatry," and "The Statue of Linguistics as a Science" is from the great mind admitting ideas as disparate as the "human spirit" and the taxonomy of languages and ending up not knowing whether he wants to philosophize or analyze.

[Adrian Australia · Rating 4 out of 5]

wide ranging and thought provoking

[tomas p · Rating 5 out of 5]

phenomenal tbh

[Niratisaya · Rating 3 out of 5]

Terima kasih Pak Sapir. Rampung sudah tambahan teori, tinggal memasukkan pendapat dari M.P Tatara.