The open access source for this entry is the massive, 400+ page PDF of the Sapir-Kroeber correspondence. It’s a massive source of information about the two authors, especially if you are interested in American Indian linguistics. Kroeber comes off as informal and, to my ear, played by Rassilon-era Timothy Dalton, full of “by Jove”s and “look here old man”s. Sapir, on the other hand, is much more distant and meticulous in a wonky kind of way typical of the linguist or, perhaps, an accountant. For instance, In 1913 Sapir mentions the birth of his first child to Kroeber in a postscript to a letter on phonetics thus: “P.S. Note following addition to anthropometric material on hand:- March 14th, 8lbs. 1 oz. of infant humanity (male) presented to me by Mrs. Sapir.”

At one point in his career, Sapir was angling for a faculty position at Berkeley which didn’t come through. Kroeber, who had much to do with the hire, sent a very diplomatic note buttering Kroeber up and dressing Berkeley down. I did not pass you over lightly,” Kroeber begins:

“You would not want the job as it is. You work with etcher’s tools, and the wide-sweep frescoes we do would irritate you. Every time you took the three-inch brush in hand you would resent it, and each time our mob remained indifferent to one of your subtle nuances, it would disgust you. Nor are we big enough to have a place for you as a cameo carver. There are 600 high school students to be fed every semester and 100 so-called upper-division ones. Whatever of this work the other man doesn’t shoulder, falls on me.

You should realize, also, that pleasant as it is to live here, you would probably be discontent at having to student following of any quality. There just isn’t any clientele of people of highly refined and purely intellectual interests. We turn out some good chemists, etc., to be sure, but that is because their laboratory problems have a certain kinship with industrial problems. As to the man that wants to be a pure scholar, he doesn’t grow here, except for half-baked individuals not even capable of recognizing their own incapacity. You offer a rare and precious commodity, and the place to sell it is where rarities of the spirit are sufficiently gathered to establish a market. Harvard, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, perhaps Chicago — that is where you would build a school.

Still, if you’re really willing to forego, and Berkeley looks good to you, I’d like to see you here, and I’ll do what I can in that direction.”

Sapir never did end up at Berkeley, and their correspondence continued. I bet a lot of emails on this topic and with this tone are still sent today. Although they probably have more emoticons.

Wisconsin and the Amazon

RG: Thanks so much for agreeing to talk. I really enjoyed How Forests Think. When I started it I was a little on the skeptical side, but I ended up thinking it was a mind-blowing book. I thought we could begin by discussing the background for the book and your training. I see the book as mixing biology, science studies (especially Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour), and then some sort of semiotics. It seems like there are a lot of influences there. You got your PhD at Wisconsin, so how did that work out? Can you tell me a little about your background?

EK: The way I got into anthropology was through research, by which I mean fieldwork.  And I was always trying to find ways to do more fieldwork. I saw Wisconsin as an extension of this. When I was in college I did some field research in the Ecuadorian Amazon, I had a Fulbright to go back and do research after college, and only then did I go to grad school.   Although How Forests Think aims to make a conceptual intervention in anthropology, I think of our field as a special vehicle for engaging intensely with a place in ways that make us over and help us think differently. The preparation I got at Wisconsin was geared toward that. It immersed me in area studies in the broadest and most positive sense of the term. My advisor Frank Salomon is well versed in many facets of Andean history, prehistory, and ethnography, as well as in the Quechua languages including those spoken in Ecuador (where they are known as Quichua). I worked with, among others, the tropical botanist Hugh Iltis, the Latin Americanist geographers Bill Denevan, and Karl Zimmerer, the Latin American historian Steve Stern, and I studied Ecuadorian Quichua with Carmen Chuquín. There was a real sense that I was preparing myself intensely for an engagement with the field in terms of a multifaceted project which was going to include ecology, anthropology, history, and a serious appreciation for local languages. Of course I had graduate training in social theory and the history of anthropological thought, but I wasn’t trying to get training in a particular body of theory, it was more that I was trying to engage with a place.

I was also inspired by the way my advisor approached scholarship –particularly his sensibility to language; his sensibility to writing; how one can find ways to see the world afresh and capture that in writing. For example, he is very conscious not to adopt rhetorical styles, theories, or jargon from other people and he consciously tries to use writing as a way to create his own sort of engagement.  He’s a poet. I was very much influenced by this.

RG: I had no idea that Wisconsin had such a specialty in your area. Could you tell me more about your advisor’s work?

EK: Frank Salomon is a historical anthropologist with a broad specialty in Native Andean worlds and their relation to the colonial encounter. I knew him through his archival and ethnographic work in Ecuador (I had actually met him in Ecuador when I was a child and he was a PhD student!). Most of his work is now in Peru on khipus (knotted cords) and other non-written forms of representation.

RG: I thought perhaps there was some influence on your work there, in his work on unfamiliar forms of representation and your work on semiotics?

EK: There is, but when I was at Wisconsin in the early 90s, one of the big turns was historical anthropology and I was working with a historical anthropologist. Marshall Sahlins’ Islands of Histories had just come out. This was the thing to do, and I was doing it. I ended up having to choose between two field sites: one was in a cloud forest area that had a tremendously interesting colonial history, a history that was visible in oral traditions (and I was fascinated by the connections between those stories and the past). The other was an ecological project in the village where I ended up doing the work that became How Forests Think. It was Frank Salomon who said “Look, your heart is in this ecological stuff.” Frank is an historical anthropologist, you’d think he’d want to train his students in his thing. But he recognized that my real passion was for the forest and he allowed me to see that that’s where I really wanted to go.

RG: I’m not sure that every advisor would be so generous to a student.

EK: It was a real gift. He allowed me to do my thing, and ultimately this is what I try to give to my students. We’re motivated in the work we do by passions we don’t fully understand, and part of what we need to do as advisors is to allow our students to tap into that without losing a sense of what others around them are doing and thinking.  Frank got what I was into, and he saw that even in my historical work I was trying to answer the same fundamental question: I’ve always been dissatisfied with the culture concept, broadly defined, and I’m always trying to find ways to get beyond it without losing a sense for the reality of culture. All my projects have had that as their focus, and this concern has just been growing more explicit, which has forced me to be much more precise conceptually about what I’m doing.

The problem with culture

RG: I have to say, How Forests Think is theoretical and abstract at times, but there’s a clear awareness of history and of colonialism in the book, which is not necessarily what you would expect from high Francophone theory. It was refreshing to see you foregrounding colonial processes, especially towards the end of the book, where they became central to your argument. Could you tell me a little bit more about that critique of culture? How does that work? What makes you unhappy about culture?

EK: Some of my French colleagues think that they’re beyond culture and have never had to deal with the problems that the American culture concept has created; they feel that they can sidestep it completely. But what I mean by “culture” is a much broader thing and it applies to just about every approach in the social sciences. The social sciences as we know them are based on what I would call a “linguistic turn” (though it isn’t always explicitly phrased as such).

Think of Durkheim (who wasn’t especially oriented towards language).  Society for him was a relational system: One institution can only be understood in terms of another; social facts are to be understood only in terms of other social facts; you can’t, for example, explain social reality psychologically. The Boasian approach of course is much more overtly linguistic. But in both you get a system with the same kinds of properties. Certain things can only be understood in terms of their contexts.

I was just rereading Boas’s famous article “On Alternating Sounds,” which was published in American Anthropologist in 1889.  It’s a brilliant essay in which he says, “look, philologists think Native American languages are primitive because their speakers use different sounds when pronouncing the same words.” And he was able to go back and say, “You can see that this is actually the effect of a lack of training in specific Amerindian languages.  The philologists are perceiving the sounds not based on the native phonemic context, but in terms of the languages they already know.”  Boas is making a profound argument about context.  We only “hear” those sounds that fit the phonemic contexts we know.

The goal of linguistic anthropology for Boas was to learn to get these contexts that are not necessarily our own.  And of course you can extend this argument to cultural and historical context as well.   And then, if you think about Saussure and the influence he had on structuralism and post-structuralism, and combine that with Durkheim and Boas, you get just about everybody who’s doing social theory in some way or other informed by concepts that have to do with how language works. The special realities that we’re dealing with in anthropology and related fields are relational ones, they’d say, and you can only understand them in terms of the complex networks that make them what they are. So any kind of relatum, whether we are talking about a social fact or cultural meaning –or even an actor in Actor Network Theory– is the product of the relationships that make it.

RG: Right. In the case of sounds, phonemic contrast is the result of the phonemic structure of the whole language, and it is internal to those structures. In Saussure, each sign has its meaning in relation to other signs, rather than anything outside the system.

EK: Yes. All of these approaches hold that the fundamental human reality is symbolic thinking, it structures our world, and it’s different from all the other things that one might study. It requires its own kind of science, a human science. This is not biology, and it’s not chemistry.

This is all good.  But the problem is that there’s no way to understand how these kinds of relational systems connect up to things that are not like them. That’s the big question: how are these open to the world? My engagement with culture is about addressing this problem. The STS literature, the animal studies literature and multispecies ethnography are all wonderful and profound, and are obviously finding ways to get outside of culture. But they often fall back analytically on something that I would still call “culture” in a formal sense. That’s clearest in Actor Network Theory. The relata may happen to be material things, but the formal system that’s mapped out, the network and the ways in which entities are made through the relationships that emerge there – well, no surprise, it exhibits the relational properties of human language.

My goal is to try to leave the human, to try to get beyond that kind of thing. So when I say “culture” I refer not only to the traditional anthropological concept but also to the sets of assumptions about relationships that inform Foucault, so much of Science Studies, as well as other posthumanist approaches.  They all explore the properties of what I would call culture in this formal sense even when they aren’t dealing explicitly with humans or the culture concept.

RG: It’s interesting you should mention Boas. I would just note that for some Boasians, culture is a unique object, which requires a unique science. That’s Kroeber’s argument. But that’s not the argument of Sapir, and it’s not the argument of Boas. I think it’d be interesting if we focused a little bit more on the Sapirian alternative, which is to understand science as defined by its level of particularity, rather than its object of study. Boas also takes this line in The Study of Geography: He doesn’t think that there’s something called “culture,” and we have a unique science, which must study it. He’s doing something much weirder. I feel like we should take a look at this again.

EK: You’re absolutely right. I didn’t get into the technical semiotic stuff until my post doc. Before that one of the major sources for me to get outside language (along with the work of the anthropological linguist Janis Nuckolls) was Sapir. He’s got these beautiful essays on sound iconism. He would interview children about invented words and ask “which of these refers to the big table and which refers to the little table?” And words that have very elongated vowels would invariably be linked to the larger object.  And of course Sapir was interested in poetics. Boas, on the other hand, took evolution very seriously. I remember in grad school I wrote an essay about Boas as an evolutionary anthropologist, and one of my teachers criticized me: “How can you say that! He was fighting against scientific racism!” But Boas clearly was in profound ways dealing with humans as biological organisms, and I appreciate that tradition.

But the Boasian legacy as it’s been taken up has ended up moving from a focus on a context that includes the environment to studying contexts that are much more restricted to humans, like meaning systems.  And then you get Margaret Mead’s concept of culture, which we still adopt, even when we reject her approach, or when we bring in historical process.

RG: I think that’s really true, and it speaks to the kind of fieldwork that gets done. Maureen Molloy points out that Mead was one of the first problem-based fieldworkers. Her ethnographies were not appreciated by Kroeber because they weren’t particularistic. She would go into a place, do the ethnography, move somewhere else. You kind of wonder, maybe if she’d hung around a little bit longer she would have started asking “what are these bugs?”

Anyway, you were just now talking about how you got interested in biology. Was that as a post-doc?

EK: I’ve been apprenticing myself to tropical biologists since I was in college. I did a tropical ecology graduate course in Costa Rica as part of my graduate training. I took plant systematics classes and forestry statistics. I was always interested in finding ways to get into forest ecology without necessarily going through humans.

RG: Your book doesn’t speak the language of evolutionary biology, but it seems informed by a deep awareness of the forest that comes both from doing fieldwork with Runa people and having that science background. It’s necessary for your project.

EK: And different projects require different kinds of skills, but yes, that’s what I needed for this project.

Terrence Deacon and Charles Sanders Peirce

RG: The work of Terrence Deacon is a major influence on your book. How did you come across him? Was that during your post-doc?

EK: Basically, I’d done this research in the Amazon. I wrote a dissertation, got thinking about articles, and was formulating an article that was to stake out what I would be doing in the book.   This was “How Dogs Dream,” which came out in American Ethnologist in 2007. I was working on that at Berkeley, and the year that I came there Terry arrived from the Boston area and we had offices right next to each other. We started talking. I would go into his office at four in the afternoon and come out at nine at night…

Terry’s life project has been to understand the origins of mind. His first book was about the evolution of symbolic capacities in humans and his most recent book Incomplete Nature is about the emergence of mind from matter.  So when I was at Berkeley I got very much involved with that, and it was the most intellectually exhilarating thing I’ve ever done.   Academically, that is.  Of course doing fieldwork in the tropical world was exhilarating in its own right.  But in terms of the academic world, I’d never been exposed to such an interesting set of ideas that was so new to me but that fit so completely with what I was already doing. I don’t get to California that much, but he has an ongoing seminar and whenever I can, I try to participate in it and it’s still very exciting to me.

RG: Peirce is a major part of your book. I think of Peirce as someone who informs semiotic anthropology, for instance the circle that includes Michael Silverstein and others. But you don’t let Silverstein own Peirce, you’re drawing on… Deacon talking about Peirce? Is that where you got him? Or do you read Peirce alongside Deacon?

EK: Deacon has been thinking about Peirce for a long time. When anthropologists use Peirce they tend to collapse certain things and not deal with certain elements of Peirce, like his interest in evolution, and they tend to frame a lot of his work in terms of something you can think of as culture.

RG: For people who aren’t super familiar with Peirce’s biography, he was a favored son of Boston Brahmins and then ended up going off on his own way, and I think at one point had to earn a living by drawing mazes for people to do in the back of newspapers. He had a very strange life. His work is really a whole philosophy of the universe, it’s not just about language, it’s very philosophical and I guess bizarre in some sense.

EK: It’s an architecture of the universe. It’s a huge opus.  He’s got 80,000 manuscript pages out there. But there are some really consistent questions that come up over and over again. He has a “continuist” framework, so he thinks that everything in the universe is related to everything else and philosophical frameworks that posit radical breaks are problematic. Dualisms of all kinds are problematic. So any attempt to understand humans without relating humans to other entities that aren’t human is a problem for Peirce. He’s worked out all sorts of ways to move across those kinds of boundaries.

The other thing that’s really important is that his philosophy is directional. By which I mean that he sees certain processes as nested within other more basic processes.  And this is very problematic for us as anthropologists because we want to see complexity and freedom and indeterminacy. Peirce also makes space for spontaneity, but he’s very much interested in the formal qualities of things. One of the places to see the nested nature of his approach is in his semiotics. You can have indexical reference without symbolic reference (as is manifest in the biological world) but you can’t have a symbolic system without indices. Symbols are nested within indices, and a Peircean framework can allow you to see that. These are the kinds of things that are unpopular. In fact, they get collapsed in a lot of the ways in which Peirce is used in anthropology. Anthropologists tend to think about icons and indices within the context of cultural systems.  Now, of course you do get iconic and indexical processes that are framed within historically contingent systems, but what’s interesting to me are the things that can move in and out of symbolic systems, and how outsides connect to insides.

So when I was at Berkeley I was reading a lot of Peirce, and I was talking about it with Terry but also with Bill Hanks, Lawrence Cohen, and others. The standard way to domesticate Peirce is: “Peirce, he’s your theoretician, you apply him to your field site.” Or you say, “Oh yeah, Peirce, he had his own social context just like everybody else.” Both of these statements are true, but Peirce is also in some ways more like a mathematician. He is extracting things from properties in the world and he’s predicting formal properties that the world will exhibit. If he’s correct you will see these properties in the world. And in fact what happened is that I realized that the ethnographic problems I had isolated were already semiotic problems and they were also about the connections we humans have with processes that are not fully circumscribed by humans. The Runa were dealing with other kinds of communicative worlds, the worlds of spirits and animals.  This is a problem for them as it was for Peirce. The material I was dealing with was semiotic. The reason why Peirce and the Runa meet is because they’re being made over by the same world.

RG: So you’re doing explanatory work in two directions: first, you’re using Peirce to explain the Runa. But you also use Runa ethnography to help explain Peirce as a thinker. One of the things you’re doing in the ethnography is saying: “All of that stuff in Peirce that we had to ignore in order to make him a linguistic theorist, it makes sense and can be used.” The book helps us see Peirce as a complete figure and makes sense of him intellectually rather than just having a massive part of him that we ignore or that we don’t find interesting or think it’s too weird to deal with.  You give us a more complete picture of him.

EK: That’s right. In fact, one of our colleagues at the University of Toronto, Alejandro Paz, calls this other part, “the weird Peirce.”

The other thing that’s interesting is how concepts can acquire lives of their own.  For example, go back to Darwin. Darwin had profound insights about how you get designs without a designer. It doesn’t matter whether or not he believed in God. It doesn’t matter if he didn’t understand genetics or got some things wrong. It doesn’t matter because he discovered a property of evolutionary dynamics that has a life of its own.

You can say the same thing about Peirce. Somebody can say, “you see, Peirce thought that crystals think’” or whatever. And he may have said that. But I can show you in Peircean terms and on Peircean grounds how that doesn’t necessarily make sense. He’s no longer the owner of these concepts. I don’t want to out-Peirce Peirce. There’s a lot of stuff about him that I don’t understand, and there are many experts on him, and I’m not necessarily one of them. But there’s a way in which there’s a fundamental logic about certain things I can get because the world is doing it, and Peirce was able to tap into that and I’m also able to tap into that. What we’re tapping into exceeds both of us.

RG: Right, and the animals tap into that as well, and plants tap into it too. I was so surprised at the end of the book to find that you were critical of the culture concept. I thought: “This is it! This book provides a scaffold to understand how culture articulates with biology and biological science, and it provides an argument about the reality of cultural phenomena even though they’re immaterial.” So much of our idea of reality is tied up in materiality, right? There are things that are real and emergent (for instance form, or what Sahlins would call structure) even though they don’t have physical bodies. That is a powerful way to talk about culture as a force without reifiying it as a substance.

EK: I am not anti-culture. I think culture is a real thing. But there are two problems with how we deal with culture. First, it’s very difficult to see how culture relates to the non-cultural. Second, we tend to make culture the only domain where generality and abstraction occur. What I’m trying to show is that there are other areas where generalities are produced. This is an anti-nominalist book. Humans are not the only producers of generals in the world. It doesn’t mean that culture isn’t a unique phenomenon that creates unique realities and unique kinds of structures and categories. But I don’t think that, for example, these spirits of the forest who I discuss in chapter six are necessarily only cultural phenomena. In some ways they’re a product of culture, but they’re an emergent product of other things, including the semiosis of the forest, which is not fully subsumed by a cultural or symbolic framework.

RG: And you have a way to understand culture as real without having to fall back on some weird 19th-century spiritualist position. You connect it with the framework of modern biology.

EK: I lay this out in the first chapter. It’s called “the open whole,” in contrast to the traditional Tylorian definition of culture as a “complex whole.” I want to say, yes, it’s a complex whole, but it’s also an open one. That opening is what’s so interesting to me. Culture has the real effect and property of closure, but it’s also open, and how this works is one of the things I’m trying to write about in the book.

RG: You mentioned the masters of the forest in chapter six. I would gloss them as a structure of the longue durée that exists at the conjuncture of a bunch of different causal forces that include things like the natural environment –the stuff colonialism just kind of gets sucked into. Since, you know, colonialism is only 400 years old.

Theory, fieldwork, and ethnography

One of the things that strikes me about you in the course of this interview is that you’ve really learned and grown and developed throughout your intellectual career. You’ve taken on new influences at times when some other people would say, “I have my framework and I’m done.” Do you have any tips for students about how to stay active intellectually and remain able to embrace new ideas when the ideas that you already have might seem good enough for you?

EK: I think one of the things that helped, and this was a real luxury and it’s difficult for me now because I can’t do the kind of fieldwork I used to do, is to have ethnographic problems that are interesting to you, that you can’t fully resolve, that force you to ask questions.

That’s the beauty of our field that somehow it’s the ethnographic work that is making us over, and we then develop theories that might help us. We have problems that trouble us, and we don’t know how to talk about them, but we know that they’re important. I was interested in the human-animal relationships in the forest and all of a sudden I was then involved in this multi-species turn and having conversations with people like Donna Haraway. But I wasn’t a savvy graduate student, I didn’t even know who Donna Haraway was when I was in the field! I didn’t know what the trends were.  It was the world that eventually led me to Donna Haraway, not the other way around.

It’s the same with the “ontological turn.” It’s my work that leads me to pose questions ontologically (at a moment when people happen to be doing this) rather than a current trend driving my work. This is the advantage that we have as anthropologists. We are thinking with the world. That’s what’s going to keep our thinking fresh. What’s difficult for me now is that I need to go back and think with the world myself.

RG: I think there is something strange about the structure of our anthropological careers: there’s a period of intense immersive research, and then teaching and family, and then never going back to the field again. Sometimes, it feels like no matter how hard you try, that’s the sort of political economy of the professoriate. I think it has a tremendous effect on how anthropological theory works. When you can’t get back to the field, suddenly you’re interested in elaborating coherent theoretical frameworks from the top down, since you don’t have fresh data to lead you from the bottom up, like you were saying.

Is How Forests Think an ethnography? Is that the genre?

EK: That’s a great question. It’s not the standard ethnographic monograph –it’s not bounded by the Runa.  It’s not about getting their context.  So, it’s not an ethnography in that sense. Although after reading it I hope you do get some sense of having had an ethnographic immersion. But it doesn’t have that kind of boundedness in the sense that my concerns are not necessarily their concerns. My analytical framework is not restricted to their analytical framework. It’s not that mine is bigger, but just that my project only partially intersects with theirs. In that sense it’s not an ethnography.  Although it is a form of thinking that grows from ethnography.  And so it is empirical, or experiential.  So in this sense it is extremely ethnographic.

RG: I’m just trying to understand whether you’re using the ethnography to elaborate the theory, or using the theory to elaborate the ethnography. What’s the relationship between the theoretical intervention and the descriptive material?

EK: In the actual writing there’s a lot of back and forth. If one were to look at my dissertation, which has none of the theory, no engagement with semiotics, no engagement with multispecies ethnography or any of that stuff, one would find many of the same examples that I’m dealing with in the book as conundrums that allow me to explore the larger question of how to situate the human in some sort of larger non-human domain.

It really is driven by ethnography in that sense.  Ethnographic problems suggest a certain kind of conceptual thinking. But there were also moments in writing the book when I had an idea that grew out of a non-ethnographic settings, and I was like, “let me find an ethnographic example to illustrate that.” So there is a certain amount of artifice in crafting something like this, where you tack back and forth. But the general movement of this book is that the ethnography is demanding a certain kind of conceptual framework, and the ethnography and conceptual frameworks are coming together because they’re drawing on a shared world.

Is theory political?

RG: A lot of anthropologists in the States would insist that there has to be a political intervention in ethnography. You close the book making the argument that Michael Scott and other thinkers, like Latour, would make: that it’s politically important to think outside of our established frameworks. I just imagine there are anthropologists out there who would say, “that’s the lousiest definition of politics that I’ve ever heard!” How would you respond to that kind of position?

EK: There’s a passage in Marilyn Strathern’s The Gender of the Gift where she says that radical politics is always linked to intellectual conservatism because to act radically you have to have agreement on what you’re taking a stand on, and radical intellectual thought creates a certain kind of political conservatism because once you’re taking all sorts of things apart, it’s very hard to act based on shared established categories.

It’s a real problem. On the one hand I feel I can isolate ways of thinking about political agency that are different. I can contribute to conversations about things like resistance, and I can think about problems of environmental politics in different ways, but ultimately, I’m not necessarily doing a kind of political work like….

RG: …Terry Turner?

EK:  Yes. Or some form of witnessing a kind of injustice to which I have to find some way to attend. I’m not doing that.  Yet, the question for me politically is, how are we going to create an ethical practice in the Anthropocene, this time of ours in which futures, of human and nonhuman kinds, are increasingly entangled, and interdependent in their mutual uncertainty? This is where I’m headed.  And in the book I begin to think about this political problem.  But how does that articulate with what’s happening on the ground in terms of environmental politics? Who might be doing something like this? I don’t know. It’s very abstract right now, but that’s where the political part of this would go.

RG: It’s funny, I can’t remember who said this; I think it was June Jordan? She said that the way that it works is that you do the activism first, and then the theory comes afterward –that the theoretical work comes out of the concrete political work of activism and social change. That position sounds Peircean to me, Eduardo Kohnian to me, because it emphasizes the process of being in the world, and is committed to the idea that praxis leads to theoretical innovation. That claim, I think, may run counter to the idea that there’s something intellectually conservative about radical politics.

EK: I like your formulation. There is some way in which I share affinities with activism, in the sense that I’m being made over first by the world and then finding ways to account for that, but it doesn’t necessarily fall into the category of politics in terms of addressing oneself to social injustices, per se, as the central focus.

RG: What are your future projects?

EK:  Well, thinking about an ethical practice in the Anthropocene through the logic of thinking forests is one. I plan to work with Amazonians but also with environmentalists, lawyers and biologists in Ecuador, and I don’t know where that will go. We all share this problem of how to live in the Anthropocene, how to reorient our lives with respect to this. But I don’t know what that means on the ground.

The other project I’ve been working on –and this is with Lisa Stevenson– is also related to thinking forests. Well, for me at least.  Lisa is coming to it from a different place and she’s been working on it for much longer than I have.   But in terms of my work on thinking forests I’m interested in forms of representation that are non-language-like and non-symbolic. One of the areas where this crops up is in forms of ethnographic representation that are non-language like.  I’ve always been interested in photography (you can see a bit of this through the images in the book) and I’ve become increasingly interested in ethnographic film.  We’ve been working together on a few films that are trying to bring out some of this non-discursive representational logic and this is one of the directions I find the most inspiring at the moment.

RG: Right, Eduardo. Thanks very much for this interview!

EK:  Thank you!

Cultural Anthropology and Psychiatry
, by Edward Sapir, edited and with an introduction by Alex Golub

Sapir begins his essay discussing anthropology’s main problem: anthropologists claim to study intersubjectively held beliefs, but alway do so through the testimony of individuals — and often, only one or two key informants. But can we generalize about what ‘The Haida’ believe on the basis of talking to one Haida person? What is the relationship between a single individual’s belief and the culture of the group as a whole?

He then moves on to the flaws of psychiatry. Psychiatry has never located the organic basis of the mental illness it claims to treat, and clearly lacks the efficacy of other branches of medicine. Sapir this is because human relationships, rather than biological constitution, are the source of ‘mental’ illness: the death of a loved one causes depression, abuse as a child makes one paranoid, and so on. Indeed, social relationships can produce ‘purely organic’ (biological) illnesses — for instance job stress at work can lead to an upset stomach. To be effective, then, psychiatry must understand these relationships.

Sapir then criticizes the Freudians for arguing that the mentally ill regress to the mental level of primitive people. This can’t be true, says Sapir, since all human beings share the same basic psychological makeup. Rather, he claims, anthropology is valuable to psychiatry because it shows that the definition of ‘normal’ varies within and across cultures and enables a more accurate and generalizable theory of culture and personality.

Sapir then enters into a remarkable and dense discussion of the nature of culture itself, a discussion which anticipates much of the argument of Berger and Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality by forty years. He begins by claiming that we cannot speak of the opposition of ‘individual’ to ‘society’ since ‘society’ is not a real thing, but an abstraction made by anthropologists to cover a wide range of concrete behavior. What we call ‘a culture’ or ‘a group’ is a rough and imprecise shorthand for a poorly defined group of people united by a label (‘Republicans’ or ‘the poor’) or by geography (‘New Yorkers’ or ‘The South’).  All cultures — if we still wish to speak of them as bounded at all — are internally heterogenous. A physicist at Harvard has a different stock of knowledge then the bartender who works across the street from the university. Even if cultural knowledge is shared, the psychological emphasis placed on it may vary. A businessman and an actress might both know the plot of Hamlet, but for one of them it is irrelevant to daily affairs, while to another it is central. Neither of them care about how they both intuitively produce grammatical sentence, even though this may be central for the anthropologist studying them.

To understand the relationship of personality to culture, we must pinpoint who specifically we are speaking off, and put the individual in the context of the actual people with whom he has relationships. The key is locating the the concrete social relationships that surround a person. Rather than assume that ‘individuals’ ‘adjust’ to ‘societal norms’ we must study how social life just is the process of people reacting to each other and the relationships they have with each other. This approach to culture and personality anticipates an empirically rigorous and conceptually careful approach to the study of social process, one that differs in its subtelty from some of the excesses that were to mar the more simplistic segments of the culture and personality movement which gained power in the 1930s and 1940s. It is not too much to say, therefore, that Sapir was truly ahead of his time.

Savage Minds Occasional Paper Series #5 Culture, Genuine and Spurious by Edward Sapir, edited and with an introduction by Alex Golub

What kind of a good thing is culture? In asking this question, Sapir describes the role that culture can play in the flourishing lives of individuals, as well as the communities that they are part of. His answer to this question, although inspired by anthropology, also draws on his wider education. As a result, Sapir’s essay presents us with an example of how anthropology can become a form of cultural criticism.

Sapir wrote this essay with modern American culture in mind. On the one hand, he was appalled by the demands industrialization made on workers and depressed by the cheapness and vulgarity of the mass consumerism that was meant to satisfy them. On the other hand, he found American elite’s uptake of European high culture snobbish, artificial, and inauthentic. For Sapir, both ossified ‘high culture’ and the new consumerism were ‘spurious’ forms of culture.

In contrast, Sapir considered culture ‘genuine’ when it drew on the past in order to enrich the lives of people in the present. It was honest, deeply involved people in its production, and created a deep sense of community. Authenticity in culture, from Sapir’s point of view, is more about the mode of cultural production than the contents.

There is much more to say about Sapir as a cultural critic, and I hope to explore his work in future SMOPs. Ultimately, however, I believe that Sapir’s argument is so interesting that it rneeds no introduction.

The version of “Culture, Genuine and Spurious” in this SMOPS has been lightly edited, from about 12,000 words to 8,500. My main goal in presenting this paper has not been to slash it down to a readable size, but to trim some of the more excessive prose and, above all, to help bring attention to this remarkable essay. I hope that this paper, like the others in this series, will help present early anthropological theory in a form that is accessible to everyone. There is today a tremendous amount of material which is open access, but it is difficult to find, inconvenient to read, and many people do not know where to start looking for it. By curating a selection of important open access work, I hope to make open access resources better known and to raise awareness of the actual history of anthropological theory.

Savage Minds Occasional Paper #2: Responses to “The Superorganic”: Texts by Alexander Goldenweiser and Edward Sapir. Edited and with an introduction by Alex Golub

The responses have been edited for brevity, concision, and clarity. In a few cases I have altered verbs and nouns for agreement when editing the text caused them to disagree. These are indicated with brackets. The goal has been to respect the author’s stylistic choices while presenting a slimmed-down version which can be taught in a single session in an undergraduate or graduate theory course.

I hope that this paper, like the others in this series, will help present early anthropological theory in a form that is accessible to everyone. There is today a tremendous amount of material which is open access, but is difficult to find, inconvenient to read, and many people do not know where to start. By curating a selection of important open access work, I hope to make open access resources better known and to raise awareness of the actual history of anthropological theory.

Alexander Goldenweiser earned his Ph.D. from Boas in 1910, with a Ph.D. on totemism. Goldenweiser was the most philosophical of the Boasians, and is best remembered for his theoretical work. His response to Kroeber reflects this theoretical outlook. He engages with Kroeber on two main issues: the nature of civilizational determinism, and the role of the individual in influencing culture.

First, Goldenweiser argues that Kroeber is committed to ‘civilizational determinism’, that idea that the actions of individuals are shaped by their civilization, or culture. It is true, said Goldenweiser, that all civilizations are determined, in the sense that everything in the universe has a cause. But if we decide to focus on the history of a single civilization, then we our analysis will necessarily overlook a variety of factors which we have chosen not to study, and yet which still shape the action of individuals and the development of civilizations. There is nothing wrong with choosing an analytic emphasis — everyone does it — but we should not, Goldenweiser argues, assume that because we are only studying one kind of cause, one kind of cause must be at work in any given situation. Goldenweiser was preoccpied with this dilemma: as anthropologists, we must focus on only part of reality, since reality is too complex for us to understand or study it all. And yet at the same time, the events that we study will always be affected by causes which we have chosen to ignore. How to avoid this paradox became a major part of Goldenweiser’s thought.

This concern with the impossibly rich nature of reality also manifests itself in Goldenweiser’s second issue with Kroeber, regarding the nature of the individual. Individuals are not merely the products of their civilization, they are ‘concrete’ and ‘historical’. Their lives have been shaped by the unique set of factors at play in the historical moment in which they lived. When an individual makes an innovation, they thus inevitably inject some of their particularity into the civilizational stream. It cannot be, then, that culture is immune to influences from other sorts of causal forces.

Goldenweiser ends on an interesting note: perhaps anthropologists believe individuals lack agency because we lack rich accounts of individual human lives in ‘primitive’ societies. As we are never in a position to see the full influence extraordinary people can have on the cultures we study. Goldenweiser was one of the few anthropologists who made a point of publishing obituaries of his key informants in American Anthropologist. Although early anthropologists are often portrayed as being almost hyperbolically racially insensitive, It is worth pointing out that as early as 1917, Goldenweiser thought it important to recognize the full humanity of the people he encountered during his fieldwork.

Edward Sapir is one of the best-known Boasians and the man responsible for spearheading linguistic anthropology as a subdiscipline. Sapir shares Goldenweiser’s insistence on individual agency, and both agree that social facts can have non-social causes. Sapir’s response is particularly interesting because he explicitly elaborates a position that Goldenweiser implicitly drew on. For Kroeber, anthropology is a distinct discipline because it has a unique object: the superorganic. Sapir, on the other hand, believes that anthropology is a distinct discipline because it has a distinct outlook: a concern with particularlity.

Following Boas, as well as other thinkers such as Heinrich Rickert and (perhaps) Ernst Mach, Sapir argues that the superorganic is an abstraction, not an actually existing thing. The world is an infinitely complex place, and the terms anthropologists use to discuss it are simplifications which we use to make sense of it. Thus anthropology cannot have a unique object of study, because the object of study is constructed by the anthropologist when they choose how to approach reality — there is a ‘principle of selection’ involved in filtering reality. Because the object of science is the result of the cognitive accomplishment of the researcher — it is selected for study out of the infinity of things one can study — then civilization cannot be a ‘real thing’ out there in the world which we experience. It is, rather, an abstraction that we create. For this reason the superorganic cannot be a real thing with its own principles of causality.

The different between biology and anthropology, Sapir argues, lies not in the object they study but the viewpoint they bring to the table. In the case of anthropology, that viewpoint is a concern with particularity, and so anthropologists are only interested in general laws of human culture because they help us understand particular cultures. Biologists, on the other hand, are interested in general laws pertaining to life, and are interested in particular species only because of the light they may shed on those general laws. In practice, Sapir emphasizes, all healthy disciplines have both generalizing and particularizing moments and the difference between them is a matter of emphasis.

In the 1960s and 1970s anthropologists would spend a great deal of time discussing the role of ‘models’ in social science. It is interesting to see that in this very early debate, Sapir and Goldenweiser hold an orthodox Boasian line against Kroeber’s realism, a line which seems remarkably prescient of theoretical debates that would occur half a century later.