Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 A passage to modernity
- 2 One reason, one world, many monads
- 3 The world at war with reason: Britain and France in the eighteenth century
- 4 Multiplicity and the Romantic explosion
- 5 Essences and universals through the nineteenth century
- 6 Boas and the linguistic multiverse
- 7 Linguistic relativity: Sapir, Lee, and Whorf
- 8 The other side of the mirror: a twentieth-century essentialism
- 9 The rise of cognition and the repression of languages
- 10 The return of the repressed
- Conclusion
- Notes
- References
- Index
6 - Boas and the linguistic multiverse
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 April 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 A passage to modernity
- 2 One reason, one world, many monads
- 3 The world at war with reason: Britain and France in the eighteenth century
- 4 Multiplicity and the Romantic explosion
- 5 Essences and universals through the nineteenth century
- 6 Boas and the linguistic multiverse
- 7 Linguistic relativity: Sapir, Lee, and Whorf
- 8 The other side of the mirror: a twentieth-century essentialism
- 9 The rise of cognition and the repression of languages
- 10 The return of the repressed
- Conclusion
- Notes
- References
- Index
Summary
The birth of a new concept is invariably foreshadowed by a more or less strained or extended use of old linguistic material … In most cases the new symbol is but a thing wrought from linguistic material already in existence in ways mapped out by crushingly despotic precedents.
Sapir (1921: 17)The generation of the 1850s
At the end of the nineteenth century, two options were available in the human sciences. On one side, a natural-science model that sought explanations and universal laws; on the other, a pluralist, essentialist option that sought to interpret multiple wholes. For the first, language differences were epiphenomena to be ignored or corrected. For the second, they were the sign of the multiplicity of worlds constituted by different peoples and cultures. All agreed that peoples, cultures, languages, and, for most, races could be ranked, thus saving even the essentialists from drifting into absolute relativism. All agreed that their domains had clear centers in regard to which others could be ranked, whether it be the conscious speaking subject, the highly evolved (male) European, or the worthy (male) representative of his Volk.
Early in the twentieth century, these centers were displaced with the rise of new disciplines with different assumptions. To a large degree, these were the creations of scholars born during the second half of the 1850s. Boas (born 1858) was a near contemporary of other revolutionaries: Freud (1856–1939), Saussure (1857–1913), Durkheim (1858–1917), Planck (1858–1947), Husserl (1859–1938).
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- Information
- Linguistic RelativitiesLanguage Diversity and Modern Thought, pp. 113 - 132Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010