SOURCE: “Sapir's Lectures Reconstructed,” in Philosophy of Social Sciences, Vol. 26, No. 3, September, 1996, pp. 387-96.

In the following essay, McMillan reviews the reprinted edition of Sapir's The Psychology of Culture, addressing criticisms of Sapir's work from his peers and later observers.

Culture

In an extensive monographic survey, Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions, Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1952) searched through European and American literature spanning more than 150 years for a concise definition of “culture.” This exercise in splitting hairs produced a lot of words but no results. Edward Sapir's Chicago and Yale lectures on culture (spanning the years 1926 through 1937) suggest the ineffable character of the culture concept. Sapir's cool critique examines early twentieth-century American archaeology and ethnography, European psychology and psychoanalytic theory, British functionalist anthropology of the period 1925 to 1935, and the “culturology” promoted by several American Boasian students—Kroeber, Mead, and Benedict. Sapir's teaching survived (miraculously) during the years...