J. David Sapir

J. David Sapir was an American linguist, anthropologist and photographer.

Life and career

The son of Edward Sapir, he was born in 1932. After completing his PhD at Harvard University, he was assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania and professor of Anthropology at the University of Virginia from 1973 until his retirement. He is known for his research on Jola languages. He has been editor of the journal Visual Anthropology Review
Sapir died on August 30, 2024, at the age of 91.

2011. A Grammar of Diola-Fogny: A Language Spoken in the Basse-Casamance Region of Senegal. Cambridge University Press
1994 - On Fixing Ethnographic Shadows American Ethnologist 21 :867-885.
1981 The Social Use of Metaphor: Essays on the Anthropology of Rhetoric. 1977. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
1981 - Kujaama, Symbolic Separation among the Diola-Fogny. American Anthropologist 72 :1330-48.
1981 - Hyenas, Lepers and Blacksmiths in Kujamaat Social Thought. American Ethnologist 8 :526-43.
1981 - Fecal Animals, an Example of Complementary Totemism. Man 12:1-21.
1965 - The Music of the Diola-Fogny of the Casamance, Sénégal New York: Folkways Records.
1965 - A Grammar of Diola-Fogny, Cambridge: University Press