Andrew Garrett

Do you know Zoom & other companies are encouraging discrimination against employees for things like "pausing too long" or not sounding sufficiently "charismatic"? Read all about our dystopian present in my new paper, out today in JASA!
(Seriously, read it. It's important)
doi.org/10.1121/10.0...

The Plunderers’ Dilemma | Susan Tallman Museums have been apologizing for the overlap of their ethnology collections with the subjects of colonial occupation, yet many still struggle to articulate a clear mission.

Susan Tallman on plunder and repatriation at the museum

Per OED fwiw, fancy-pants is much older.

www.oed.com/dictionary/f...

www.oed.com/dictionary/p...

... except now on rereading it I find disappointingly retrograde sentiments at the end.

And of course his work on Crow is very important. I also enjoy Lowie's autobiographical "A case of bilingualism" (www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1...).

Andrew Garrett sitting next to headstone of Alfred L. Kroeber, 1876-1960.

Headstones for Alfred L. Kroeber, 1876-1960; Robert H. Lowie, 1883-1957; and Luella Cole Lowie, 1893-1970.

Headstones for Paul Radin, 1883-1959; Doris Woodward Radin, 1901-1991; Robert H. Lowie, 1883-1957; and Luella Cole Lowie, 1893-1970.

Alfred Kroeber (d. 1960), w/ colleagues who predeceased him, Robert Lowie (d. 1957) & Paul Radin (d. 1959), & their wives Luella Lowie (d. 1970) & Doris Radin (d. 1991). Three German-Austrian-Polish-American students of Boas, once colleagues and now neighbors. Sunset View Cemetery, El Cerrito, CA.

"What kind of linguist am I?" Apparently, I can only be a man.

Thank you!

Two cats resting next to each other.

Linguist / anthro types: I've been thinking about writing more personally than the usual academic piece, about "fieldwork" experiences & how they've changed me, my relation to my discipline, etc. I'd love to find models of any kind & places that might publish such writing. Cat photo for attention.

For 50 years, she recorded her Pomo language. Her voice is helping one student reclaim his culture. - Berkeley News For Berkeley graduate student Tyler Lee-Wynant, linguistic materials in the California Language Archive featuring his great-great aunt have opened a portal to his family’s history and led him to teach...

New podcast about @ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social linguistics grad student Tyler Lee-Wynant and the work of the California Language Archive. Give it a listen! (You can turn the volume way down when my voice comes on.)

news.berkeley.edu/2025/11/06/b...

23 boxes and a suitcase full of tapes: How a linguist's lifelong work is shaping Indigenous language today - Berkeley News Collections at UC Berkeley's California Language Archive help keep Indigenous languages alive. This is the story of one of them.

Work in the California Language Archive to support language reclamation:

news.berkeley.edu/2025/11/06/2...

William M. Chace, The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall: Language, Memory, and Indigenous California - PhilPapers This impressive book reveals the ferocity with which a present generation can bring charges against those of a past generation alleged to have committed errors. Alfred Kroeber, one of the most ...

Here's a short, inattentive (but positive), and hastily written review of my book by William M. Chace, in "Common Knowledge"

philpapers.org/rec/CHATUO-25

Text from a judicial opinion: "Similarly, in one of many, often repetitive, and laudatory (toward President Trump) but superfluous allegations, the pleader states, 'The Apprentice' represented the cultural magnitude of President Trump’s singular brilliance, which captured the [Z]eitgeist of our time."

Awesome passive-aggressive brackets! (The original failed to capitalize "Zeitgeist".)

Source: storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

Ursula K. Le Guin, wearing a white button-down shirt, sits amid a pile of cushions, resting her head on her fist. Image by Marion Wood Kolisch | Courtesy Portland Art Museum

This fall brings not just one but two exhibitions about Ursula and her work.

In Portland, A Larger Reality: Ursula K. Le Guin opens October 31st at Oregon Contemporary.

In London, The Word for World: The Maps of Ursula K. Le Guin opens October 10th at the AA Gallery.

She Held Her Baby for an Hour. Then the State Took Her Away.

www.nytimes.com/2025/09/15/w...

Also not said in the letter: "therefore also we chose to turn in the Berkeley faculty, staff, and students who anybody ever complained once about, so the government can deport them or whatever"

"1.Background. Few episodes in the history of American anthropology and linguistics are as disturbing as the treatment of six Inughuit (Polar Inuit) people brought from northern Greenland to New York City in 1897 at the behest of Franz Boas. Living in the world’s northernmost permanently inhabited place, later dubbed Thule by Knud Rasmussen, Inughuit people were objects of fascination for Americans and Europeans. This was partly due to their environment (with its three-and-a-half-month winter night and seven months of solid sea ice) and proximity to the North Pole, but also because of their apparent isolation. Inughuit people occupy “an island in an ocean of ice” (Gilberg 1984:577) and were thought to have been unaware of other people before the arrival of European explorers. In short, they were exemplars of the ethnographic fantasy of “uncontaminated” indigenes."

I'm very proud of this paper, now published in Anthropological Linguistics: "Alfred Kroeber’s Documentation of Inuktun (Polar Inuit)," a study of the earliest substantial documentation of Inuktun (NW Greenland) and what it shows about Inuit dialects and change.

muse.jhu.edu/pub/17/artic...

Opinion | When Universities Become Informants A practice from the McCarthy era makes an ugly return.

"It is important to refuse the notion that this is just how things are right now, invoking a feckless realpolitik that justifies complicity with a brutal and rising authoritarianism."

www.chronicle.com/article/when...

UC Berkeley shares 160 names with Trump administration in ‘McCarthy era’ move Prominent professor Judith Butler among students and faculty investigated for ‘alleged antisemitic incidents’

"[T]he decision to send the information to the Trump administration was made by the University of California’s systemwide general counsel. ... Berkeley’s counsel declined to share with [Judith] Butler the contents of the files."

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Cover of the book The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall: Language, Memory, and Indigenous California. Shows hands in blue latex gloves scratching off letters from a white wall

In finally finished reading The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall by @andrewgarrett.bsky.social cover to cover and wooow, it's so good!
Big recommendation for all linguists, anthropologists, ethnologists, Ursula K. LeGuin fans and everyone else!
So many things 100% relevant to my work to reflect on

Thank you, I'm really flattered!

The most important news from today's reshuffle:

www.bpr.org/2025-09-01/t...

You should! It was great.

Jobs: General Linguistics: Assistant Professor - Language Revitalization - Linguistics, University of California Berkeley Description: Assistant Professor - Language Revitalization - UC Berkeley   Position Description: The Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, has been authorized to make an appointment in Language Revitalization. The position will be filled at the rank of assistant professor (tenure-track). Duties will include teaching (up to three courses per year); undergraduate and graduate advising and supervision of student research; development of a successful and origin

Jobs: General Linguistics: Assistant Professor - Language Revitalization - Linguistics, University of California Berkeley

There will be many casualties from UChicago ending ('pausing') PhD admissions in Humantities, but one which I am keenly aware of: this is close to a death sentence for teaching cuneiform in the United States (esp. Sumerian, Hittite, Elamite, Eblaite, Luwian) and it will affect the whole world.

Actually, Slavery Was Very Bad The president’s latest criticism of museums is a thinly veiled attempt to erase Black history.

a thought i have reading @clintsmithiii.bsky.social’s wonderful piece is that one reason the administration wants to erase any mention of the worst of our past is because it is intent on recapitulating those atrocities www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

My memory of Malcolm Margolin is of his generosity. Once, speaking of Leanne Hinton, he said, "She makes me proud to be a human being."

Assistant Professor - Language Revitalization - Linguistics University of California, Berkeley is hiring. Apply now!

Come be my colleague! UC Berkeley Linguistics has a tenure-track position in language revitalization.

aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05022

They have a strong record of supporting Indigenous applicants (including in linguistics, though the bulk of grants are in science fields). You can see all past grant recipients here: www.amphilsoc.org/grants/lewis...