Charles King, Gods of the Upper Air:
How A Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender
In the Twentieth Century (Doubleday)
A book billed as an inside look at the anthropology department of Columbia University from the 1890s through the 1940s seems unlikely to send readers scurrying for a copy. But readers might be inclined to scurry if they knew that in this timeframe, a small circle of anthropologists associated with Columbia essentially rewrote the books on anthropology and more generally on human nature, giving shape to modern ways in which we think about issues of race, sex and gender, along with what we mean by culture and how we might understand people living in societies very different from our own. These epic transformations in thinking and the anthropologists behind them constitute the subject of Charles King’s engaging Gods of the Upper Air: How A Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender In the Twentieth Century.
King’s work revolves around Franz Boas (1856-1942), who taught in Columbia’s anthropology department off and on from 1887 through the late 1930s, and three of his star students, all female: Margaret Mead (1901-1978), Ruth Benedict (1887-1948), and Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960). The cantankerous Papa Franz, as he was known, was a German immigrant who made a career of warning against jumping from one’s own “culture-bound schemas to pontificating about the Nature of Man” (p.247), as King puts it. More than any other intellectual of his era, Boas attacked the pseudo-science that seemed to support society’s deepest prejudices, jousting frequently with late 19th and early 20th century racial theorists who “confidently pronounced that they had all of humanity figured out” (p.247).
Mead and Benedict are today better known than Boas, often thought of together as 20th century pioneers in anthropology and the social sciences. Mead gained fame for her studies of adolescent girls in far-flung places, and how they formed their attitudes toward sex and gender roles. Benedict almost singlehandedly refined and redefined how we think about the word “culture,” coining the term “cultural relativity.” But the two pioneering anthropologists also enjoyed an intimate personal relationship throughout much of their adult lives, even as Mead regularly ran through and disposed of husbands. King provides probing detail on the Mead-Benedict relationship and the many men in Mead’s complex personal life. Hurston, African American, was a talented novelist, poet and essayist as well as anthropologist. Although she lacked Mead or Benedict’s public profile in her lifetime, she has vaulted since her death into the upper echelon of 20th century African-American intellectuals, especially after being “rediscovered” by the poet and novelist Alice Walker in 1975.
King, a professor of international affairs and government at Georgetown University, ably captures how Papa Franz and his circle of renegade anthropologists used Columbia as a point of departure while traveling to the furthest reaches of the globe to develop their insights on human nature and human cultures. While their insights varied, the four Columbia anthropologists all saw humanity as an indivisible whole. They put into practice the notion that we can best understand other societies with a data driven methodology, where conclusions are always subject to refinement and change. Social categories, such as race and gender, they agreed, should be considered artificial, the products of “human artifice, residing in the mental frameworks and unconscious habits of a given society” (p.10). For all four, the “most enduring prejudices” were the “comfortable ones, those hidden up close; seeing the world as it is requires some distance, a view from the upper air” (p.345).
To the personal stories and professional thinking of Columbia’s renegade anthropologists, King deftly adds rich detail on their cohorts and contemporaries and the times in which they all lived. The resulting work, written in a mellifluous style, is at once riveting yet surprisingly easy to understand – ample reason to scurry for a copy.
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Franz Boas was born in 1856 into an assimilated Jewish family in Prussia, before Germany had become a unified country. At age 28, he set out to study migration patterns of the Inuit, the indigenous people on Baffin Island in the Artic. Boas actually lived among the Inuit people, a novelty for his time. When he put together his conclusions from his time on the island, he began using the German word Herzenbildung, the “training of one’s heart to see the humanity of another” (p.30), a notion that would shape his overall approach to anthropology over the next sixty years.
Boas immigrated to the United States in 1884, primarily to pursue his love interest in his future wife, Austrian American Marie Krackowizer. Anthropology was then a term, King explains, that people were beginning to use for the combination of travel, artifact collection, language learning, and bone hunting. But for Boas, anthropology was a data-driven discipline, a form of social science. More than his peers, Boas emphasized the relationship between the data and the practitioner. “What counted as social scientific data – the specific observations that researchers jotted down in their field notes – was relative to the worldview, skill sets, and preexisting categories of the researchers themselves” (p.71). A good anthropologist had to be committed to the critical refinement of his or her own experience in light of data gathered. That was the “whole point of purposefully throwing yourself into the most foreign and remote of places. You had to gather things up before you refined them down” (p.247).
Boas’s penchant for following the data put him on what King describes as a “collision course with his adopted country’s most time-honored way of understanding itself, a cultural obsession that Europeans and Americans had learned to call race” (p.77). In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the concept of race was central to the field of anthropology, part of an “unshakable natural order” (p.79). Humans had races in the same way that other animals had stocks or pedigrees. A person’s lips, hair texture, nose or head shape, and skin tone all confirmed the multiplicity of human races, arranged in a sort of pyramid, with the white “races” of Northern and Western Europe and Protestant America at its apex.
Boas set forth his most comprehensive rejoinder to early 20th century race theories, purporting to be based on science, in his 1911 book, The Mind of Primitive Man. Physical traits were a “poor guide to distinguishing advanced peoples from more backward ones” (p.100), Boas contended. Not only was there “no bright line dividing one race from another, but the immense variation within racial categories called into question the utility of the concept itself” (p.101). European success in exploiting resources in Africa and American success in settling the North American continent were not due to some inherent superiority on the part of the people typically called “civilized.” Chance and time could be “equally good explanations for disparities in achievement” (p.100), he suggested.
Our ideas about race are themselves products of history, Boas implied, a “rationalization for something a group of people desperately want to believe”(p.106). The pseudo-scientific racial theories that abounded in early 20th century Europe and America helped convince people that they are “higher, better and more advanced than some other group. Race was how Europeans [and Americans] explained to themselves their own sense of privilege and achievement” (p.106). For Boas, the spread of Europeans overseas during the age of exploration and the establishment of empires across the lands they conquered may have “cut short whatever material and cultural development had been in process there” (p.100).
Boas died in 1942, a time when racial theories emanating from his native Germany, then in the throes of Nazi rule, were being applied to exterminate Europe’s Jewish population. On the day he died, he purportedly told a refugee from Nazi-occupied Paris, “We should never stop repeating the idea that racism is a monstrous error and an impudent lie” (p.316). Among Boas’ disciples, Margaret Mead was considered his closest intellectual heir. Through Mead, Boas’ core ideas “lived on and spread to a broader audience than Papa Franz ever could have dreamed” (p.338), King writes.
Mead, who grew up in a highly educated Philadelphia family, graduated in 1923 from Barnard, Columbia’s “sister” school. From there, she became one of the first women to enroll in Papa Franz’ fiefdom, Columbia’s graduate program in anthropology. Under Boas’ guidance, Mead charted a “new way of doing anthropology itself” (p.148). She “wanted to know about peoples’ lives: how they thought about childhood and aging, what it meant to be an adult, what they thought of as sexual pleasure, whom they loved, when they felt the sting of public humiliation or the gnawing sickness of private shame” (p.148). What set Mead apart from her peers was that she determined to do this with the “invisible mass of people whom anthropologists . . . always seemed to miss – women and girls” (p.148).
After completing her dissertation, Boas suggested that Mead conduct first-hand field research, much as he had done as a young man on Baffin Island, and pointed her to American Samoa, a United States territory in the South Pacific. Mead spent much of her time on three villages on the remote island of Ta’u. The point of examining Samoa was to “see the schemes that people halfway around the world, in a very different environment, climate, and culture, had devised for rendering children into adults” (p.163). To understand the lives, fears, passions, and worries of adolescent girls, Mead spent her time talking directly to them, the “true experts of the crisis of adolescence” (p.167).
The result of Mead’s study of adolescent girls in the Ta’u villages was Coming of Age in Samoa. The book’s basic claim was that the Samoans of Ta’u “did not conceive of adolescence in precisely the same way that Americans tended to see it,” (p.167). Samoan girls knew as much about sex as their counterparts in New York, probably more, Mead found. But she observed no real sense of romantic love, inextricably linked in Western societies with monogamy, exclusiveness, jealousy, and undeviating fidelity.
Growing up in New Guinea, Mead’s sequel to Coming of Age in Samoa, appeared in 1930, before she was 30. Given her frank discussions of sex and her “refusal to acknowledge the self-evident superiority of Western Civilization,” Mead was already considered an “outspoken, even scandalous public scientist” (p.185). Seemingly overnight, she had become “one of the country’s foremost experts on the relevance of the most remote parts of the globe for understanding what was happening back home” (p.185). From that point until her death in 1978, Mead was the “face of her discipline, the epitome of an engaged scholar,” even though other academics considered her “somehow outside the mainstream” (p.340). King summarizes Mead’s core idea as a full recognition of women as human beings, “with the power to choose whatever social roles they wanted – mothers and caretakers as well as anthropologists and poets” (p.339).
As a young woman, Mead had enrolled in Columbia’s graduate program in anthropology at the urging of Ruth Benedict, fourteen years Mead’s senior and already a respected anthropologist. Benedict served initially as Mead’s teacher, mentor and intellectual anchor. Thereafter, their relationship evolved into something more intimate and decidedly more complicated. But it was never quite the relationship Benedict hoped for.
Before she arrived at Columbia, Mead had married Luther Cressman, then a theology student and later an Episcopalian minister. By the time Boas suggested she travel to American Samoa, Mead was having an affair with a prominent Canadian anthropologist, Edward Sapir, a former student of Boas, even though she was then finding herself increasingly attracted to Benedict. Another dashing male lover later replaced Sapir, with Benedict serving as what might be unceremoniously described as Mead’s “backup.” At least two other men subsequently swept Mead away. The players may have been different for Mead in the often cruel game of love, King writes, but it was always the same script, with Mead returning to Benedict until the next Mr. Right Now came along. Mead’s enduring but erratic love for Benedict, King suggests, underscores her life-long inability to “settle down to one kind of relationship, whether with one person or with one gender” (p.258).
Benedict was always disappointed when the object of her affection moved from one man to the next (there’s no indication of other women in Mead’s life). But she was herself a formidable anthropologist who rose to be Boas’ chief assistant at Columbia and was primed to become the department chairman upon his retirement, only to have the position given to a man from outside the university. Unlike Mead, who was most interested in how individuals function within the structures that a given society constructs, Benedict was a “big picture” theorist, fashioning some of anthropology’s most sweeping insights about those structures.
In her signature work, Patterns in Culture, published in 1934, which King describes as “arguably the most cited and most taught work of anthropological grand theory ever” (p.267), Benedict argued that real analysis of human societies starts with discarding prior assumptions that one’s own way of seeing the world is universal. Paying attention to broad patterns enables one to grasp what makes a society “both different from all others and intrinsically meaningful to itself – its way of seeing social life, custom, and ritual, of defining the goals and pathways of life itself” (p.265). All societies, each with its own coherence and sense of integration that “allows for individuals inside that society to find the way from childhood to adulthood,” Benedict argued, are “just snippets of a ‘great arc’ of possible ways of behaving” (p.264).
During World War II, while in Washington working at the Office of War Information, Benedict wrote her final book, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. Benedict was tasked with explaining Japan to America’s policy makers, part of an effort to understand the country’s enemy. The standard view within the United States government was that the conflict in the Pacific, unlike that in Europe, was “nothing less than a struggle for racial dominance” (p.320). The Japanese were considered inherently sneaky, treacherous, untrustworthy, and given to a fanatical allegiance to their country, whereas Germany was made up of essentially good people whose government had been hijacked by an evil clique.
Although she had no serious expertise in Japan, and no way to study Japanese culture first hand in wartime, Benedict aimed to counter the prevailing US government view of the Japanese. The point of her title, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, was that a society that had “delicate, refined ideas of beauty and creative expression could also value militarism, honor, and subservience” (p.327). The work was made available to the general public in 1946. In the years that followed, King notes, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword earned a “good claim to being the most widely read piece of anthropology ever written” (p.330).
Benedict wanted to go to Japan with the American occupation after the war, but was turned down as being too old and, likely, being female. After an exhausting trip to Europe in 1948, Benedict, then age 61, died suddenly of a heart attack. Over her long career, King writes, Benedict provided a “clearer definition than anyone before her of how social science could be its own design for living.” She distilled what she had seen, where she had been, and what she was into a “code that was at once analytically sharp and deeply moral” (p.266).
While Zora Neale Hurston did not come close in her lifetime to achieving the high profile of Benedict and Mead, King suggests that this was due at least in part to the same racism that impeded all African-Americans in her time. The “chasm of race,” he writes, “separated Hurston from the other members of the Boas circle, even at a time when Boas’ students were assiduously denying that race was a fundamental division in human societies” (p.293).
Hurston was born in Alabama but grew up in Central Florida. All four of her grandparents had been slaves. Like Mead, she enrolled at Barnard and from there found her way to Columbia’s anthropology department. Simultaneously, Hurston became part of the African-American intellectual and cultural movement known as the Harlem Renaissance, a “sweeping experiment in redefining blackness in a country that had been built on defining it for you,” (p.193), as King puts it. She became close to many of its leading luminaries, particularly the poet Langston Hughes.
Hurston returned to her native Central Florida at a time when Ku Klux Klan terror was widespread. A “fully formed yet unappreciated recipe for living as a human being seemed to be lurking in the dense pinelands and lakeshores of northern and central Florida” (p.201-02), King writes. More than Mead or Benedict, Hurston “found her calling in fieldwork,” (p.201). No member of the Boas circle could claim to have gone as deeply as Hurston into the “lived experience of the people she was trying to understand” (p.292).
The result of Hurston’s work in Florida was Mules and Men, published in 1935. Mules and Men marked an unprecedented effort to send the reader “deep inside southern black towns and work camps – not as an observer but as a kind of participant” (p.212). Boas wrote the book’s preface, describing it as the first attempt to understand the “true inner life of the Negro” (p212). Mules and Men confirmed the “basic humanity of people who were thought to have lost it, either because of some innate inferiority or because of the cultural spoilage produced by generations of enslavement” (p.214).
Mules and Men appeared the same year as another of Mead’s major studies, Sex and Temperament. The critics did not view the two works in equal terms. “Volumes on Samoans or New Guineans were hailed as commentaries on the universal features of human society,” King observes, whereas one about African Americans in the American South was a “quaint bit of storytelling” (p.275). Hurston subsequently spent time in Jamaica and Haiti, producing significant works on voodoo and folklore, while she also churned out essays, short stories and novels. King derived his title from a deleted chapter in Hurston’s 1942 autobiography, Dust Tracks, where she wrote that the “gods of the upper air” had uncovered many new faces for her eyes.
Hurston died unheralded in 1960. But in 1975, poet and novelist Alice Walker wrote an essay for Ms. magazine in which she recorded her efforts to retrace Hurston’s life journey. Hurston, Walker wrote, was “one of the most significant unread authors in America.” (p.336). Walker’s essay marked the start of a Hurston revival that would “elevate her into the pantheon of great American writers, with an almost cult like following” (p.337). Today, King suggests, Hurston’s reputation arguably exceeds that of Langston Hughes and her other contemporaries of the Harlem Renaissance.
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Boas and the Columbia anthropologists in his circle steered human knowledge in a remarkable direction, King concludes, “toward giving up the belief that all history leads inexorably to us” (p.343). They deserve credit for expanding the range of people who should be “treated as full, purposive, and dignified human beings” (p.343). But Boas would be the first to admit that expansion of that range remains a work in progress.
Thomas H. Peebles
La Châtaigneraie, France
December 1, 2020