Reminiscences by Pike on early American anthropological linguistics

In this essay, Pike reviews where, in his view, linguistic anthropology was in the past, where it is now, and where it may lead in the future. He describes how he got into linguistics in the 1930s, and then reminisces about his personal interactions with the godfathers of American structural linguistics: Bloomfield, Sapir, Fries, Bloch, Hockett, Nida, Swadesh, Trager, Voegelin, and others. He describes how his theory of tagmemics evolved, as well as his emic/etic concept; and he tells of the abrupt changes that came in American linguistics with the rise of Chomsky and transformational linguistics.