New Virtual Finding Aids for Two Linguistic Anthropology Collections

Linguistic Anthropology is the study of the effects of communication—in all its diversity and forms—on society and whether differences in language and its usage relate to differences in the way the world is perceived and understood.¹ The two anthropologists discussed in this blogpost whose materials are at the National Anthropological Archive studied different aspects of communication. Garrick Mallery focused on sign language and pictorial representations, while William A. Smalley focused on the written language.

Garrick Mallery (1831-1894)

Pen & ink drawings of Native American sign language prepared for use in the BAE 1st Annual Report (1879-1880), MS 2372 Garrick Mallery Collection on Sign Language and Pictography, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution.

Garrick Mallery pioneered the study of sign language and pictographs. He developed an interest in Native American sign language and pictography while serving in the Union Army during the Civil War and was one of the first ethnologists to join the Bureau of American Ethnology in 1879. Under the BAE’s auspices, he collected and examined sign language vocabulary from Native American groups throughout the U.S. and Canada. He additionally related the Native American sign language he documented to examples from the wider world, both of hearing individuals and the deaf.

Plate of Neapolitan gestures prepared for use in the BAE 1st Annual Report (1879-1880), MS 2372 Garrick Mallery Collection on Sign Language and Pictography, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution.

Mallery completed several publications on the topic of Native American sign language throughout the 1880s, notably Introduction to the Study of Sign language Among the North American Indians (1880), A Collection of Gesture- Signs and Signals of the North American Indians (1880), and "Sign-language among North American Indians Compared with that Among other People and Deaf-mutes," which appeared in the BAE 1st Annual Report (1881). Many of these publications (some annotated by collaborators) are included in MS 2372 Garrick Mallery Collection on Sign Language and Pictography.

Although he is most widely known for his work with sign language, he also performed extensive research into Native American pictography, with a particular interest in Dakota and Lakota winter counts and petroglyphs (examples of winter counts and copies of petroglyphs are included within the collection).

Battiste Good’s Winter Count (page 19), MS 2372 Garrick Mallery Collection on Sign Language and Pictography, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution.

William Smalley (1923-1997)

Like Chris Gjording, whom I discussed in my last blog entry, Smalley coupled anthropology with Christian ministry. The child of missionaries, he was born in Jerusalem in 1923. He developed an interest in anthropology while an undergraduate at Houghton College because he felt that was relevant to missionary work. He attended the Missionary Training Institute (1945-1946), the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) at the University of Oklahoma (1946-1947) for training in linguistics for Bible translation, and Columbia University’s graduate program in anthropology with a concentration in linguistics. Smalley worked on language analysis problems in the southern region of Vietnam when he was sent there by the Christian and Missionary Alliance in 1950. After Vietnam, he was sent to Luang Prabang, Laos, in 1951. While in Laos, Smalley developed the Hmong Romanized Popular Alphabet (RPA) with Reverend G. Linwood Barney and Father Yves Bertrais. He and his wife returned to the United States when civil war broke out in Laos in 1954. His dissertation focused on his work on the Khmu’ language and he received his doctorate from Columbia in 1956. His dissertation was later published, in abbreviated form, in 1961 as Outline of Khmu' Structure.

Sayaboury Script. The William A. Smalley papers, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution.

His work with the Hmong language continued after he became a professor of linguistics at Bethel University in 1978 and found the large Hmong community in the Twin Cities. He studied the adaptation of the Hmong to life in America with the University of Minnesota Southeast Asia Refugee Studies Program, publishing "Adaptive Language Strategies of the Hmong: From Asian Mountains to American Ghettos" (1985) and "Stages of Hmong Cultural Adaptation" (1986). Smalley also continued his study of the Hmong written language, as new scripts had been developed since his participation in the creation of RPA (such as Sayaboury Script, pictured above). He was particularly interested in the Pahwah script, which had been created by Shong Lue Yang in Laos. In addition to studying the script, he studied its creator, and published two books on the subject: Mother of Writing: The Origin and Development of a Hmong Messianic Script (1990) and The Life of Shong Lue Yang: Hmong "Mother of Writing" (1990), both of which he co-authored with Chia Koua Vang and Gnia Yee Yang.

Smalley also studied the languages and dialects of Thailand. He lived in Thailand from 1962 to 1967 and from 1969 to 1972 while working as a translation consultant for the American Bible Society and as a translations coordinator and consultant for the United Bible Societies. He later returned to Thailand as a Fulbright research fellow in 1985 and 1986. He published Linguistic Diversity and National Unity: Language Ecology in Thailand (1994); "Thailand's Hierarchy of Multilingualism" (1988); and "Language and Power: Evolution of Thailand's Multilingualism" (1996) as a result of his work there.

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¹ “Linguistic anthropology,” Encyclopedia Britannica, accessed September 2, 2020, https://www.britannica.com/science/anthropology/Linguistic-anthropology.

Katherine Christensen

Contract Archivist, National Anthropological Archives