The concept of “scales of space and time” (Lemke 2000) has been tremendously influential in linguistic anthropology and related fields, and scalar approaches have proved useful for illuminating connections between what used to be called “micro” and “macro” phenomena. This paper disrupts “rhetorics of discontinuity” (Darnell 2001) in present‐day work, arguing that many of the ideas in contemporary work on scales were already implicit in early Americanist anthropology. Through renewed engagement with the debate among the Boasians A.L. Kroeber, Edward Sapir, and Ruth Benedict on questions of individuality, culture, and social action, we can rethink “scale” and bring forth both the useful and problematic aspects of scale as a heuristic. I argue that linguistic anthropologists’ reliance on scalar metaphors should be examined carefully, since the apparent scalability or nonscalability of talk and social action is, itself, a cultural phenomenon that emerges from decisions to scale our analytic vision in particular ways. Revisiting Americanist arguments about the nature of culture reveals some of the limitations of “scale,” as currently conceived, but also suggests that scalar analysis might be fruitfully integrated with linguistic anthropological understandings of agency, vis‐à‐vis voice, and temporality.

中文翻译：

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重新审视美国主义者的论点和语言人类学的量表

“空间和时间的尺度”的概念（Lemke 2000）在语言人类学和相关领域具有巨大的影响，标量方法已被证明有助于阐明过去所谓的“微观”现象与“宏观”现象之间的联系。这篇论文打乱了当今工作中的“不连续性修辞学”（Darnell 2001），认为当代大规模工作中的许多观念已经被美国早期人类学所隐含。通过重新参与Boasians AL Kroeber，Edward Sapir和Ruth Benedict之间关于个性，文化和社会行为问题的辩论，我们可以重新思考“规模”，并提出规模的有用和有问题的方面作为启发式方法。我认为，语言人类学家对标量隐喻的依赖应该仔细研究，由于谈话和社交行为的明显可扩展性或不可扩展性本身就是一种文化现象，这种文化现象是通过决策以特定方式扩展我们的分析视野而产生的。重新审视美国主义者关于文化本质的论点，揭示了目前所设想的“规模”的某些局限性，但同时也表明，标量分析可能与语言人类学对代理，相对于声音和时间性的语言理解相结合。