‘The Many After(lives) of Benjamin Lee Whorf’ by Hannah McElgunn et al.

Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897-1941) was one of the most intellectually creative and—with a degree in chemical engineering and a career as an inspector for the Hartford Fire Insurance Company—oddly credentialed and occupationally unusual members of the Boasian group of North American anthropologists. I have long considered his essay on “The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language” (1941) as that rarest of scholarly productions: a brilliant analysis realized as a perfect work of art. Yet, as John Leavitt observes in his contribution to the collection under review here, Whorf became “one of the great straw men for the universalist cognitive sciences of the 1970s and 1980s” (409), fodder for what Whorf himself might have called Standard Average European (SAE) psychology, whose practitioners never understood that the Boasians’ suggestions about the relation of language to culture grew from studies of grammatical categories, not words by themselves.

Happily, more recent work has refurbished Whorf’s reputation and left us eager to learn more about him, which, happily again, the present collection of five essays (originally presented at the 2023 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association) provides. The essays range widely, from Whorf’s work with his Hopi consultant, Ernest Naquayouma, to affinities between his famous example of “empty” gasoline drums and present-day pedagogies, to the ongoing resonance of his work in philosophy, science, and science fiction. As Hannah McElgunn puts it in her introduction, taken together, the papers offer “a grounded contextualization of this oft-caricatured figure” (382).

In “What Whorf Read and Who Has Been Reading (or Thinking) Whorf,” Leavitt contrasts Whorf’s “retrojected precursors”—authors like Antoine Fabre d’Olivet and Friedrich Max Müller, whom he adopted as intellectual ancestors—with his “current afterlife” in various authors and schools of thought that claim him as an ancestor (402). Before Whorf began working with Sapir in 1931, “he was up-to-date on developments in physical science” but “a late nineteenth-century man” when it came to such topics as evolution and religion. One problem with evolutionism that troubled Whorf (and Müller) was its insistence on “universal laws of development,” which in turn allowed for social evolutionism, with its presuppositions about inferior human races, languages, and cultures (405).

Whorf’s induction into Boasian linguistics led him to abandon his Victorian attack on evolutionism and to reimagine his and Müller’s understanding of the worthiness of all human languages in terms of anthropological relativism. In his last years, Whorf’s project of “provincializing” Europe and SAE grammatical patterns led to his “linguistic relativity principle,” which insisted that linguists had to recognize “the influence” of their own languages on their scientific results (407-8). As Whorf put it, if we are not cognizant of the ways in which our language structures our experience, we treat “very dissimilar” languages as “a part of nature” and then “do to [them] what we have already done to nature,” that is, we overwrite their grammatical categories in terms of our own (Whorf 1941, 77).

The first of Whorf’s two afterlives charted by Leavitt is to be found in work on “logical languages and general semantics,” most tellingly among people who have constructed and written about artificial languages, often meant to serve as international auxiliary languages (410). These people jumped from Whorf’s analyses of the relation of language and thought to the project of creating a logical language, without incorporating the fundamental Boasian premise that what we assume to be logical is our own mode of thinking. Indeed, many artificial languages were merely stripped down versions of one or more SAE languages—and hence, as Whorf complained, they would be simple and logical only to those who presupposed the logic built into SAE grammatical categories.

The longest section of Leavitt’s paper concerns the afterlife of various versions of Whorfian ideas among science fiction writers since the 1930s, such as Robert Heinlein, Naomi Mitchison, and Ted Chiang.  Leavitt notes that ideas attributed to Whorf by science fiction readers may not accurately reflect intellectual influences; authors’ ideas about language may or may not have come from Whorf. Indeed, many of these authors take an un-Whorfian position, assuming that SAE logic, simplified, constitutes a good basis for universal or rational thought. Still, some writers, like Suzette Haden Elgin (a linguist as well as a science fiction author), imagined the particular relations between a fictional civilization and its language in terms compatible with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

Sean O’Neill’s paper, “Whorf’s Legacy in Anthropological Theory: Science, Mysticism, and the Role of Comparison,” expands Leavitt’s discussion of Whorf’s ancestors and afterlives. Whorf the passionate scientist had “an even deeper passion for mysticism […] going beyond the received wisdom of religious texts into the deeper truths inscribed in the world around us” (436). O’Neill finds that this is an attitude Whorf shared with many of the greatest scientists in the SAE tradition, like Newton and Einstein. But it is also an attitude that requires going beyond that tradition, to take seriously the wisdom encoded in all the world’s traditions and languages.

It took Whorf back to the Indian “linguist and mystic Pānini, the first to write a descriptive grammar on scientific grounds” (437). And it was central to Boasian comparative anthropology, which took seriously the idea that the search for “deeper truths, even universals” (442) could only be pursued by taking seriously all the world’s languages and worldviews, written and oral, new and ancient, without presuming that SAE-based knowledge was superior to all others.^[1]Indeed, Whorf wrote that Pānini’s “highly algebraic, i.e. pattern-symbolic linguistics” was recovered in modern times, after “the Greeks … debased the science. They showed how infinitely inferior they were to the Hindus as scientific thinkers, and the effect of their muddling lasted two thousand years” (Whorf 1940, 83). Comparison was central to the method, for it taught the lesson of linguistic and cultural relativity—it showed scientists the limitations of their own science and the possibility of a grander science that might result from bringing together many ways of knowing the world.

Hannah McElgunn’s essay, “Benjamin Lee Whorf and Ernest Naquayouma’s Working Relationship,” charts the two men’s interactions between 1932 and 1939, beginning when the Hopi speaker Naquayouma, then living in Brooklyn, visited Yale “to participate in a phonology class,” after which the two “began working together almost immediately” (384, 390). McElgunn places this work in the context of Hopi people’s participation in American society at that time, when Hopi (Naquayouma prominent among them) “mediated how information about Hopi life would be interpreted and consumed in a wide variety of domains” (387).

With respect to linguistic collaboration, McElgunn presents considerable evidence that the most enigmatic and suggestive of all Whorf’s ideas—the cryptotype—emerged from his work with Naquayouma. It was the latter’s ability to interpret “fine grammatical details” (396) that allowed Whorf to conceptualize the cryptotype as a grammatical intuition “so nearly at or below the threshold of conscious thinking that it cannot be put into words by the user and eludes translation” (Whorf [1938] 2012, 134, quoted in McElgunn). Moreover, in McElgunn’s story, Naquayouma schooled Whorf about Hopi pragmatics as well as grammar: he “let Whorf know when certain topics were not his business,” thereby helping him see that the norms and values of a speech community were relevant to linguistic theory” (396).

In “Reflections on Teaching Whorf: Gasoline Drums as a Pedagogical Tool,” Morgan Siewert discusses using Whorf in an introductory linguistic anthropology course populated not with linguistics majors but with students checking off a general education requirement, at a state university with many students of “working class, immigrant, and first-generation backgrounds” (478). Siewert explains why she decided to start her lectures on Whorf where he began his famous essay, with his own example of “empty” gasoline drums, instead of with grammatical structures that “reflect how Hopi speakers and SAE speakers conceptualize time” (479)—despite the fact that he was more interested in the latter than the former.

This pedagogical choice resulted from Siewert’s work with “fluent Anishinaabemowin speakers” (481) who are committed to teaching their language to their youth. These folks are conceptually committed to something like a strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, explaining that members of their community whose first language is English are “predisposed […] to interpret the world through an ‘English way of thinking’” (482). Yet these same people often focus their discussions not on grammatical structures but on what they call basic words and “the accumulated experiential knowledge” found in those words, especially words brought to life in storytelling (485-86). It was their example that taught Siewert to redesign her lectures on Whorf, beginning “with lexemes before introducing structure” (486).

Anthony K. Webster’s essay on “Whorf, Navajo Poetry, and Ethnopoetic Dialoging” is both a critique and a celebration of Whorf. Webster critiques Whorf for erasing from his theoretical papers the names and teachings of consultants like Naquayouma although, “in typical Americanist tradition,” he acknowledged him in his Hopi grammar. Webster “wants to know […] how Whorf came to know [what he learned about the Hopi worldview] in his real-time interaction with […] Naquayouma” (455-56). Much of the paper gives extended analyses of how Webster came to know about Navajo poetry by talking to Navajo poets in what Webster, taking a cue from Whorf’s coinage, “eventing” (Whorf 1941, 84), calls “ethnopoetic dialoging” (456).

But Webster celebrates Whorf as well for the larger project in which he and his Americanist colleagues were engaged, the hard work of cultural translation, based on their conviction “that understanding was possible, that we were not hermetically sealed off from each other” (461). Webster’s celebration returns us to Whorf’s most famous paper, where he wrote that “the seemingly endless task of describing [Hopi] morphology did finally end.”^[2]See McElgunn, 395, for a discussion of Whorf’s “exhaustive grammar of Hopi and dictionary of about 4000 stems carefully and minutely described.” But, Whorf continued, that was only the beginning: “I knew […] the morphological formation of plurals, but not how to use plurals.” To learn the language (Whorf’s emphasis), one needed to know how to use it, a study “that consumed nearly two more years” (Whorf 1941, 77).

Perhaps it was during that time that Ernest Naquayouma taught Benjamin Lee Whorf how Hopi people used the Hopi language to live in a Hopi world.

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Works Cited

Whorf, Benjamin Lee. 1940. “Linguistics as an Exact Science.” Technology Review 43: 61-63, 80-83.

Whorf, Benajmin Lee. 1941. “The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language.” In Language, Culture, and Personality: Essays in Memory of Edward Sapir, edited by Leslie Spier, A. Irving Hallowell, and Stanley Newman, 75-93. Sapir Memorial Publication Fund.

Whorf, Benjamin Lee, and George Trager. (1938) 2012. “Appendix: The ‘Yale Report’ on Linguistic Research in the Department of Anthropology of Yale University for the Term September 1937-June 1938.” In Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, 2^nd ed., edited by John Carroll, Stephen Levinson, and Penny Lee, 345-376. The MIT Press.