Walk through walls

In an interview recorded in 1994, Andr´e-Georges Haudricourt described himself as a “passe-muraille,” a person capable of walking through walls (Bertrand2002: 251). The passe- muraille, best known to French readers from the short story of that name by Marcel Aym´e, is both marvelous and disquieting, a transgressive being – in both senses of the word – who refuses to acknowledge the barriers that contain and channel the movements of others. Haudricourt clearly had this complex of senses in mind when he chose the word to characterize his atypical career in French academia: an agronomy graduate who subsequently studied under Marcel Mauss, Haudricourt went on to conduct important research in such diverse fields as ethnoscience, phonological theory and the history of agriculture, often to the discomfiture of his more sessile colleagues.

For much of the past century, to say nothing of the present one, there has been a great deal of talk about the desirability of interdisciplinarity, and of breaking down the walls that impede communication between adjoining academic fields. The discipline of anthropology, as conceived (and exemplified) by Franz Boas, was to be just such a wall-less meeting place, where ethnologists, archaeologists, linguists, and physical anthropologists would collaboratively grapple with the complexities of human diversity (see, e.g. Boas 1899). Boas’s vision took institutional form as the “four-field” or “Boasian” anthropology departments of many North American universities, where course offerings, faculty recruitment, and even the composition of internal committees conform to the principle of an asymmetrical confederation of canton-like subdisciplines, with social-cultural anthropology as the primus inter pares. Admirable as this Boasian plan might have been at the time of its conception, it has been increasingly subject to criticism and attempts at reconfiguration. Johannes Fabian (1993: 53) – himself a notorious passe-muraille – questioned the continued relevance of “that decisively modernist conception of a ‘four-fields approach’” in the contemporary intellectual landscape of reflexive anthropology, cultural studies, postprocessual archaeology, the various recent developments in human genetics, creole studies and sociolinguistics. To this list one might add the troublesome fault line running between “scientific” and “critical” stances within the discipline. It is a telling sign of the times that when the anthropologists at Stanford University split into separate “Anthropological Sciences” and “Cultural and Social Anthropology” departments, the new wall cut across three of the four Boasian fields. Where something akin to the Boasian configuration is maintained, one detects evidence of “the contemporary marginalization of linguistic anthropology” in North American academia (Darnell, this volume). Many leading anthropology departments now recognize only three subdisciplines, with linguistic anthropology either blended into a combined “socio-cultural and linguistic” section (e.g. NYU), or relegated to institutional invisibility (e.g. Columbia, Harvard). Depending on the venue and the time, linguistic anthropologists have a room of their own, bunk with the ethnologists, are split apart by new departmental con- figurations, or fade into the background of institutionally unrecognized specializations like kinship or political economy. Nonetheless, the history of anthropology, and especially of North American anthropology, is to a significant degree marked by its relations with linguistics. As Keesing (1992) noted, the relationship has not always been a tranquil one. It has been a pas-de-deux where the partners approach, then separate, then approach again as the internal dynamics of each discipline shift, and as research focus oscillates between particularism and universalism, culturalism and mentalism. The relationship has at times fostered the sharing of models and exchanging of paradigms, the rejecting or borrowing of concepts, all of which has been beneficial to both disciplines: consider such offspring of crossbreeding as ethnoscience and ethnosemantics, structuralism, and more recently, cognitive anthropology, the dialogic principle and cultural creolization. Even if some of these approaches have not been as productive as had been hoped, and even if some have been the targets of intense criticism (ethnoscience and structuralism, for example), they have informed the anthropological practice of generations of researchers, and therefore, have become part of the history of the field.