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Essay / Essay on The Vigorous Man and the Budding Woman by...
The Vigorous Man and the Budding Woman depicts Sapir (as well as Benoît) as a tortured poet who explored his theories on personality through his poems. I found it interesting how Handler views Sapir as an artist and anthropologist simultaneously, as he humanizes Sapir as a figure. In which poetry writing provides an alternative method for crafting a developing cultural theory that demonstrates its concern with the “dialectic between the traditional discipline” of anthropology and “individual creativity” (134). Upon closer examination, it seemed logical to me that Sapir found poetry as an outlet, as his anthropological work on linguistics emphasized the “aesthetic phenomena” of social behavior (136). Sapir's psychological foundations and methodology are demonstrated in his epistemological critique of culture. In which he notes that culture is not something shared by everyone within cultural "borders", but rather each person has a unique culture because personal history brings unique configurations of influence (147 ). This highly individualistic view of language and, therefore, the experiences that have shaped culture, gives individuals tremendous agency within their culture. Therefore, Sapir fundamentally disagreed with the "superorganic" approach to