Comments on: Edward Sapir on French culture

By: decasia: critique of academic culture » Philosophizing in senior year?

decasia: critique of academic culture » Philosophizing in senior year? — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 17:14:42 +0000

[…] who has worked on Dewey and early 20th century culture theory (she suggested the Sapir article I mentioned earlier this spring). Here I want to translate a short interview she did in 2007 with a monthly […]

By: eli

eli — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 10:36:06 +0000

Thanks for the correction, my bad. I fixed it in the post, not to pretend I didn’t screw up but just because it seems to me that the post is, in fact, saying something that’s still interesting in spite of the stupid error. (For future readers, I originally typed ‘Boas’ where I should have typed ‘Sapir’. I think it was one of those off-by-one kinds of cognitive processing errors where the brain magically substitutes a similar word related to the word one meant to write.)

Also, Rex, you say this is among the the most famous – hence important? – pieces in American anthro — are you serious? It’s very fun to read, but the analysis of ‘French culture’ is, to be more frank than I initially was in the post, lazy and pretty classist to boot, and I’m not sure it’s the best theoretical contribution to culture theory I’ve seen either. I mean, ‘spurious cultures’ are to be judged as such on the basis of the insufficiency of their structure of means-ends relations? That requires a better argument than I see in this piece.

OK, but I’ll stop being defensive because I was wrong. I can’t say I’m entirely above that impulse.

By: Rex

Rex — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 17:27:45 +0000

Edward Sapir wrote that article.

Honestly what are they teaching you people these days? This is one of the most famous pieces in the canon of American anthropology. Go give your systems prof hell for not making you read this earlier (and getting the attribution right).

Kids these days grumble grumble…

By: eli

eli — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 17:14:23 +0000

This article, by the way, was recommended to me by a French philosopher — hence the link with my own research topic. Curious to find that American anthropology can become at least a very marginal object of French philosophical attention.