Edward Sapir
Edward Sapir was a prominent linguist and anthropologist, born in 1884 in Louemburg, Pomerania (now Poland), and later immigrated to the United States. He completed his Ph.D. at Columbia University in 1909 after initially studying German but shifted his focus to Native American languages under the mentorship of Franz Boas. Throughout his career, Sapir documented numerous Indigenous languages, including Chinook, Takelma, Yana, and Paiute, emphasizing the importance of these languages in understanding cultural perspectives.
Sapir's influential work was largely conducted during his 15 years at the Canadian National Museum, where he produced significant publications such as "Time Perspective in Aboriginal American Culture" and "Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech." In 1925, he transitioned to the University of Chicago and later to Yale University, integrating anthropological insights with linguistic analysis, which contributed to the "culture-and-personality" approach. This shift mirrored his personal experiences, including the loss of his first wife and his creative pursuits as a poet.
Throughout his career, Sapir held leadership roles in major linguistic and anthropological organizations and was recognized by the National Academy of Sciences. He passed away in 1939, leaving behind a legacy that continues to influence the fields of linguistics and anthropology.
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Edward Sapir
- Born: January 26, 1884
- Birthplace: Louenburg, Pomerania (now Poland)
- Died: February 4, 1939
- Place of death: New Haven, Connecticut
Biography
Linguist and anthropologist Edward Sapir was born in 1884 in Louemburg, Pomerania (now northern Poland), near the Baltic Sea. He immigrated with his family to New York City in 1889, where he lived until he completed his Ph.D. from Columbia University (then Columbia College) in 1909. He also received his B.A. and M.A. from that institution in 1904 and 1905, respectively.
Sapir began his university education as a student of German but changed to the study of Native American languages after meeting and studying with renowned anthropologist and linguist Franz Boas, who would eventually direct Sapir’s dissertation research. Under Boas’s tutelage, Sapir documented the languages of the Chinook, Takelma, Yana, and Paiute tribes, the first four of twenty American Indian languages Sapir would research and document during his career.
In 1908, Sapir accepted a position at the University of Pennsylvania, where he worked for two years before becoming the chief of anthropology at the Canadian National Museum in Ottawa. Sapir would remain in Ottawa for fifteen years, the most productive period of his life and the time when he wrote his two most seminal monographs: Time Perspective in Aboriginal American Culture: A Study in Method (1916) and Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech (1921).
In 1925, Sapir left Ottawa to become a professor at the University of Chicago. His work from his Chicago tenure—work he would continue after relocating to Yale University in 1931—is considered part of the “culture-and-personality” approach to anthropology, an interdisciplinary method drawing on psychology and sociology that marks a departure from Sapir’s training in the strict Boasian linguistic model. Sapir’s transition away from Boasian methodology and toward cultural ethnography occurred during his time in Ottawa, when he was preoccupied with the illness and eventual death of his first wife, Florence, and when he was engaged creatively as a poet. Although Sapir believed that any good writer should be able to write verse, he was never satisfied with his poetry and always felt compelled to reconcile the aesthetic practice of writing verse with the scientific spirit that pervaded his linguistic research. His later theoretical work on ethnography most likely grew out of this cross-disciplinary intellectual conflict.
Sapir was appointed the Sterling Professor of Anthropology and Linguistics at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1931. While at Yale, he held the presidencies of the Linguistic Society of America and the American Anthropological Association and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. He died of a heart attack in New Haven in 1939.