We’ve had a fair bit of discussion, here at Savage Minds, about the role of anthropologists during wartime, an issue which has troubled American anthropologists as far back as Boas. There has also been a lot of discussion as of late about the shortage of Arab speakers in the US military and intelligence community. (The policy on gays in the military makes it unlikely that there will be an American T.E. Lawrence.) So, within this context I’ve been meaning to link to Mark Liberman’s Language Log post on Mary Haas, who had studied with Edward Sapir and gone on to head the Linguistic Society of America.
For Haas, as for most of the other linguists of her generation, the watershed of her career was the onset of the Second World War. In 1940-41, as the United States moved toward entering the war, a cadre of field linguists was recruited to learn and teach the lesser-known languages of the European and Pacific theatres. … Recruited to study Far Eastern languages — and ordered to produce practical handbooks, teaching grammars and vocabularies — were such scholars as William S. Cornyn, who was assigned Burmese; Murray Emeneau, who was channeled into the study of Vietnamese; and Haas, who got Thai. Given the near total lack of teaching materials on Thai in those days, Haas, like Cornyn and Emeneau, had to learn her language from scratch, through direct elicitation from native speakers…
Haas spent 1941-43 at the University of Michigan acquiring a knowledge of Thai phonology and syntax through intensive fieldwork with Thai speakers, one of whom, Heng R. Subhanka, became her second husband. … in 1943 she went to Berkeley where the Army Specialized Training Program had been set up, under the direction of A. L. Kroeber, to teach strategic languages to servicemen.
Liberman, noting without comment the contrast between the eagerness to help with the war effort back then, and the greater suspicion that exists now, wonders whether it was Kroeber himself who organized this effort? (Mark also notes that Kroeber was Ursula K. Le Guin’s father, but fails to mention that he is also from my hometown, Hoboken NJ!)
It is true that wartime Thai studies played a major role in reshaping Haas’ personal and professional life. Oral history among her students and her student’s students paints a reasonably clear picture of Kroeber’s non-support of (hostility toward?) Haas at Berkeley. This seems to have been a factor in the emergence of a separate linguistics program there. Before the war Haas was un/under-employed doing (important) field research on Southeastern Indian languages in Oklahoma and elsewhere in the Southeastern U.S. She suffered greatly before the war as a woman academic (getting passed up for jobs she wanted and was clearly qualified for), particularly when she was married to Morris Swadesh. She wanted an academic job but could not break in. (The Swadesh tie also opens a connection to discussion (a la Price’s book Threatening Anthropology) of the government (esp. FBI) persecution of progressive anthropologists.) More robust biographical information on Haas is available in volume 39, number 4 (winter 1997) of the journal Anthropological Linguistics–a special issue devoted to Haas’ work, life, and influence. A table of contents for this is available online. Her NAS biographical sketch by Kenneth Pike is available in full online.
Several months ago I read sections from the final manuscript of David Price’s soon to be published next book (is it released in the U.S. yet?) on anthropologists in the second world war. His chapter on linguistic anthropologists in the war has more on Haas, Swadesh and others, and I was surprised to learn just how widespread such relationships were.
I’m part of a group who is very interested in early trans-Atlantic contact. We’re actively arranging what we hope will become an all-encompassing conference including the best individuals to discuss their work in any field that might impact current thinking on early trans-Atlantic contact.
We’re calling it the Atlantic Conference. It’s scheduled for August 15-17, 2008 in Halifax, Nova Scotia. We’re getting great interest from very qualified individuals including Dr. Dennis Stanford, Chairman of the Anthropology Department at the National Museum of Natural History of the Smithsonian Institution. Dr. Stanford has done groundbreaking work on pre-Clovis exploration of North America; Dr. Benjamin Olshin, Professor of Philosophy, History, and History of Science at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia. And many others.
Please visit our website at –
http://www.AtlanticConference.org
to learn more.
We’re actively seeking experts to share their latest research from any area that might impact the area of early trans-Atlantic contact – Linguistics, Archaeology, Ancient Seafaring, Pictographs, Native Studies, DNA Genetics, etc.
If you can suggest any speaker from your group, I would be much indebted to you. And, of course, if anyone from your group would wish to attend, you’re very welcome.
Kind Regards,
Steve St. Clair
The Atlantic Conference