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1932–2024
J. David Sapir, a cultural and linguistic anthropologist, West Africanist, and scholar of folklore and ethnographic photography, died August 31, 2024, at the age of 91. He was the son of Jean McClenaghan, a psychiatric social worker, and Edward Sapir. After his father’s death in 1939 when he was 6, the family moved to Greenwich Village, New York City, where he attended public school PS 81. He majored in anthropology at Yale, writing a thesis on African folktales. He went on to Harvard’s Department of Social Relations, completing his PhD in 1964 with a dissertation on the grammar of a West African language, Diola-Fogny (also spelled Jóola, Jola), spoken by Kujamaat Diola people in Southern Sénégal.
His early anthropological career was influenced by Claude Lévi-Strauss. Based on three periods of fieldwork with the Kujamaat Diola, he wrote elegant journal articles analyzing the symbolism of social relationships and rituals that he called “structuralist showpieces.” During this time, he was an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania (1966-1972) with fellowship years at the Laboratoire d’Ethnologie et de Sociologie Comparative at the Université de Paris (Nanterre) and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (in 1972-73 and 1975-76).
David came to the University of Virginia in 1973, where he taught for 34 years and was a pivotal figure in building the newly established Department of Anthropology in the 1970s and 1980s. In his later career, he shifted his focus to visual anthropology, expressing his longstanding passion for ethnographic photography, the history of photography, and the philosophy of aesthetics.
Though the son of a brilliant linguist, David was not particularly interested in linguistics when he began his graduate studies. But when he was seeking a field site for dissertation research, he was serendipitously recruited by the linguist Joseph Greenberg who had funding for a survey of West African languages. It was Greenberg who sent David to Senegal and assigned him the task of writing a grammar. In preparation, he began studying models, including his father’s grammars of the North American languages Paiute and Takelma. Many grammars seemed to him overly “entwined in the particular conventions and formalisms of the moment.” But he appreciated his father’s grammars, which he found “supple enough to respond to the complexity” of the languages themselves, allowing them to transcend “time and fashion.”
Reflecting on his life, David said he was particularly proud that his own Diola grammar met this standard—it “stood the test of the time.” A sign that it has: the grammar was chosen to serve as the primary data source for a linguistics textbook, What Is Morphology? by Mark Aronoff and Kirsten Fudeman. As the authors explain, the book builds on David’s “wonderfully lucid description,” which they find “speaks to us as clearly today as it did when [the grammar] was written almost forty years ago.” David’s other studies in African historical linguistics, folklore, and the social meanings of language variation have likewise stood the test of time. Friederike Lüpke, editor of the Oxford Guide to the Atlantic Languages of West Africa (2024), tells us that David’s work is cited in the book “a whopping 94 times.” When he died, David was at work on a trilingual Diola-French-English dictionary, meant to serve the needs (David said) of “a Diola person who had moved away and maybe spoke Diola only at home but otherwise spoke French.”
He was an early adapter of computing technologies for anthropology and linguistics, learning html to create one of the first departmental webpages and writing a freeware program for printing non-Roman characters, useful in transcribing Indigenous languages, in the mid-1980s before specialty fonts were available.
David championed the work of younger scholars as teacher, mentor, and editor, including as editor of the journal Visual Anthropology Review and a book series, The Anthropology of Form and Meaning. As an editor, he was a fierce critic, urging authors to take the time to get it right.
He was himself a superb black-and-white photographer who enjoyed using antique large-format film cameras. He loved sharing scuttlebutt, scrambling high/low culture distinctions, and collecting vintage model electric trains. He is survived by his wife, Betty Ruth Hursh Sapir; elder brother, Paul E. Sapir; children, Edward Sapir, Julia Sapir, and the ethnomusicologist Liza Flood; and five grandchildren. He is missed by many.
(Ira Bashkow, Lise M. Dobrin, Richard Handler, University of Virginia)
Further Reading
Sapir, J. David. 1981. “Hyenas, Lepers and Blacksmiths in Kujamaat Social Thought.” American Ethnologist 8(3): 526–43.
Sapir, J. David. 1985a. “Introducing Edward Sapir.” Language in Society 14, no. 3: 289–97. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4167661.
Sapir, J. David (“Jimmy Paris Software”), 1985b, “Matrix Program for the Epson FX and JX Dot Matrix Printers,” Newsletter of the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas, vol. 4, no. 3, p. 14.
Sapir, J. David, 2008, Audio recorded interview by Ira Bashkow, April 24, 2008, Charlottesville, Virginia (digital file held by Bashkow).