SOURCE: “The Dainty and the Hungry Man: Literature and Anthropology in the Work of Edward Sapir,” in Observers Observed: Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork, edited by George W. Stocking, Jr., The University of Wisconsin Press, 1983, pp. 208-31.

In the following essay, Handler explores Sapir's theories about culture as they relate to his understanding of poetry, music, and criticism, particularly his notion that art is a key element in the anthropological study of culture.

“We lived, in a sense, lives in which the arts and the sciences fought uneven battles for pre-eminence.” So wrote Margaret Mead of her student days in the early 1920s at Columbia University (1959:xviii). Mead's “we” refers to a community of anthropologists that included Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, and Ruth Benedict. That Boas was privately a pianist and the others more publicly poets is well known; that they developed a science of anthropology centered on the...