A Holistic Humanities of Speaking: Franz Boas and the Continuing Centrality of Texts

Abstract

We take up Boas’s commitment to the establishment of a large corpus of texts from the indigenous languages and peoples of the Americas, examining what we take to be his fundamental principles: using texts as the philological record from which to document and explore language, culture, and intellectual life on their own terms; training speakers to engage in documentation through the creation and analysis of texts; and a focus on the emergence of patterns and interrelationships. We then outline what we see as his influence up to now, both directly through the kinds of projects he promoted and indirectly through a broader application of Boasian principles that has animated a series of later movements. Finally, we discuss the prospects for a more comprehensive text- and documentation-centered approach to language and culture that welds together these themes and movements, and which we envision as a holistic humanities of speaking.