Handbook of American Indian Languages - Classics in American Thought S. (Hardback)

Franz Boas (1858-1942) is considered "the father of American anthropology". As the first professor of the subject at Clark University from 1899 to 1937, he established the "four-field" approach to the study of societies through attention to human evolution, archaeology, culture and language, each of which has become a sub-field in academic anthropology. Boas brought a new rigour to his many investigations in all these areas. He championed cultural relativism and was a fierce opponent of "scientific racism". The influence of Boas's methods and conclusions has spread beyond anthropology and now permeates intellectual life. His stature is hard to eggaxerate. The "Handbook of American Indian Languages" is Boas's main contribution to anthropological linguistics. It grew out of expeditions made by Boas to study the tribes of Baffin Island and British Columbia in the 1880s. Supplemented by the research of his collaborators, the "Handbook" was first published by the Smithsonian Institution as Bulletin 40 of the Bureau of American Ethnology (part 1, 1911; part 2, 1922). The first of these four classic volumes contains a long introduction on general linguistic principles, followed by many chapters devoted to the languages of various American Indian tribes. Subsequent volumes analyze the grammar and vocabulary of individual languages in great detail, always according to Boas's central methodological rule - that the internal structures of languages and societies must be allowed to emerge on their own, without the distorting imposition of European templates upon them.