Sapir was skillfull at analyzing unwritten languages on the basis of his own fieldwork. He contributed significantly to the mapping of languages and cultures of native America.

Excerpt from Selected Writings of Edward Sapir: In Language, Culture and Personality The papers selected for this volume give only part of the reason for that judgment, for there was an uncommon quality of the man himself which attracted and stimulated - inspired may not be too strong a word - many of those who knew him. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Edward Sapir was one of those men, rare among scientists and scholars, who are spoken of by their colleagues in terms of genius. His writings on frontier problems in cultural anthropology, psychology, and linguistics are outstanding for their provocative insights and remarkable control of factual data. His long essay on language, his principal field of study, is an illuminating exploration of various aspects of the subject. His stress on the fact that language is a cultural or social product helped to make linguistics an integral part of the study of man. The interplay of culture and personality was a field where Sapir was a pioneer and many of his essays have become classics in the social sciences. The nine contributions brought together in this volume well show the distinction and lasting quality of Sapir's work. They include "Culture, Genuine and Spurious," "The Meaning of Religion," "Language," "Cultural Anthropology and Psychiatry," and "The Statue of Linguistics as a Science." This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1949.