# H. Russell Bernard

Harvey Russell Bernard (born 1940) is an American anthropologist and social scientist, known for his research on social network analysis, for his use of computers to preserve the cultural history of vanishing languages, and for his work on training young anthropologists.

## Quotes

* Weren't humans domesticated by the requirements of the plants and animals themselves?
** Quoted in "Studying Man, In So Many Words" The Washington Post (December 4, 1980)
* Computers will not preserve cultures. But they can be used to foster cultural pluralism and to provide people everywhere with the power to make their own bilingual educational materials, or to print pamphlets on how to grow better rice, or to record for future generations the customs and lore of those now alive.
** "The Power of Print: The Role of Literacy in Preserving Native Cultures" Human Organization 45(2), pp. 177–178 (1985)
* Languages have always come and gone. Neither the language of Jesus nor that of Caesar are spoken today. But languages seem to be disappearing faster than ever before.
** Quoted in "In a Publishing Coup, Books in 'Unwritten' Languages" by John Noble Wilford, The New York Times (December 31, 1991)
* I see nothing useful or charming about remaining monolingual .. if that results in being shut out of the national economy.
** Quoted in "In a Publishing Coup, Books in 'Unwritten' Languages" by John Noble Wilford, The New York Times (December 31, 1991)
* Teaching people to read primers and Bibles does not produce authors; it produces readers. Printing presses and publishing houses produce authors. This rule is no different today for nonliterate languages than it was in late medieval times in Europe.
** "Preserving Language Diversity" 'Human Organization 51 (1), pp 82–89 (1992)
* It is not necessary to argue that language diversity caused the evolutionary success of humans. We need only recognize that the knowledge generated by all those successfully adapting cultural groups over the millennia is stored in all those thousands of languages now spoken around the world.
** "Language Preservation and Publishing" in Indigenous Literacies in the Americas (Contributions to the Sociology of Language), Nancy Hornberger Ed. , Mouton de Gruyter (1996)
* Research is a craft. I’m not talking analogy here. Research isn’t like a craft. It is a craft. If you know what people have to go through to become skilled carpenters or makers of clothes, you have some idea of what it takes to learn the skills for doing research. It takes practice, practice, and more practice.
** Research Methods in Anthropology: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches. Fourth edition Walnut Creek, CA:Altamira Press, page 1 (2006)
* .. most people think of science as technology and engineering—life-saving drugs, computers, space exploration, and so on... It is less commonly understood that social and behavioral sciences have also produced technologies and engineering that dominate our everyday lives. These include polling, marketing, management, insurance, and public health programs.
** "The science in social science" PNAS 109 (51) pages 20796-20799 (December 3, 2012)

### "How to rescue indigenous languages from extinction? Complete Gutenberg's Revolution" (2021)

"How to rescue indigenous languages from extinction? Complete Gutenberg's Revolution", 23rd Annual Otopames Conference (October 25, 2021)
* The extinction of language is nothing new...What is new today is the rate and extent of extinction of languages.
* There are 63 officially recognized indigenous languages in Mexico, but there are at least 282 indigenous languages spoken in Mexico...We see the different languages in these families referred to as "varieties" or “dialects” in the literature. Nobody would think today of calling Spanish, Romanian, Catalan, French and Portuguese "varieties" of Latin.
* As a university professor I sell what I know.