First impressions review: Gods of the Upper Air, by Charles King
“Papa Franz” Boas and his intellectual “family,” in a time that saw the height of the eugenics movement, invented the more positive way of thinking about human diversity that is more or less mainstream1 today. It’s an inspiring story about the power of science and also a really good illustration of why diversity within science is important. Essentially every member of this group of scholars was marginalized in at least one way, which meant they brought a variety of experiences to the table, none of which lent themselves to thinking “yep, this society I live in is definitely the pinnacle of humanity!” Boas experienced not just anti-semitism, but the prejudice leveled at German immigrants during WWI. Ruth Benedict was partially deaf, prone to depression, and in love with the bisexual and polyamorous Margaret Mead. Zora Neale Hurston faced not only the racism from whites that you’d expect, but criticism from Black intellectuals for treating Black folktales in Florida and voodoo in Haiti like cultural practices as important as the rituals Mead witnessed in the South Pacific. Ella Deloria grew up on the Standing Rock Sioux reservation and brought an insider’s eye to understanding variety and change within Indigenous culture. And their work had huge impacts, even if most of them didn’t live to see them.
1. Not 100% so, obviously! “Cultural relativism” is still a hot-button issue for much the same reason that natural selection is: it challenges many people’s sense of superiority. But this idea has a lot more relevance for the material conditions of people’s lives than whether we are related to monkeys, and so I suspect the controversy is likely to last at least as long!
King emphasizes that, while this is a story about a moral battle, it is primarily a story about science and scientists – and how science changes. Racial hierarchies were not a fringe belief at the time but the mainstream, and proponents of eugenics would have considered themselves “progressive” for their efforts to improve humanity. Boas first started to see things a different way during his fieldwork with the Inuit:
I often ask myself what advantages our “good society” possesses over that of the “savages” and the more I see of their customs, I find we really have no right to look down upon them contemptuously.
He noted, for example, how useless his university education was in this harsh environment, and how many complex skills an Inuit hunter must master to survive it. Following up this work in the US with further fieldwork among indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest, and with an activity popular among early anthropologists – measuring as many skulls as possible! – Boas made two important observations. First, cultural practices showed much more impact of history and the almost random sharing of ideas between cultures than current theories (which favored environment and genetic heritage) accounted for and, second, that physical variation within supposed “racial groups” was HUGE, obscuring supposed differences between them. The latter wasn’t an entirely new observation: In ‘Descent of Man’, published in 1871, Darwin noted that his colleagues seemed unable to agree on how many races there were…which is exactly what one would expect if all humans were descended from the same stock. But this was not a universally accepted proposition even half a century later, and Boas’s observations were largely ignored. However, he began to gather a circle of interested students at Columbia University, many of them women from the associated Barnard College.
One of the earliest of these was Ruth Benedict, who did her first fieldwork among the Zuñi. “Puebloans sometimes wondered why ‘a deaf’…was so desperate to collect old stories she could barely hear.” But Benedict was fascinated by the way wealth passed from mother to daughter, as well as an established tradition of what we would today call “acceptance of trans people,” but which at the time observers struggled to translate into European languages2. She noted in an essay: “One of the most striking facts that emerge from a study of widely varying cultures, is the ease with which our abnormals function in other cultures…Normality, in short, within a very wide range, is culturally defined.” This insight turned out to be personally relevant not just in regard to her deafness, but in her relationship with Margaret Mead, who described Benedict as a “beautiful walled palace…the ineradicable root, the one homosexual thirst there is no getting by.” Dang, Maggie! Mead’s work focused on cultures in the South Pacific such as Samoa and New Guinea, with a particular emphasis on gender roles and sex. She observed that many types of conflict and anxiety (eg. the phenomenon of “teenage rebellion”) were extremely culturally specific, and something that children had to learn from their culture as opposed to a child-like trait that certain “primitives” retained.
2. For example, the term used for Zuñi people with biologically male bodies living as women was “berdaches”, a French term derived from an Arabic word for “boy sex slave” – something obviously entirely different!
While, as women, both Benedict and Mead struggled to get permanent positions in the academic establishment, their books were highly influential and made them almost household names, at least in certain circles! Deloria and Hurston, as women of color, had a harder time. Zora Neale Hurston grew up in northern Florida and had bohemian artistic ambitions; indeed, most people today probably recognize her as the author of novels like ‘Their eyes were watching God.’ But she was also an anthropologist, who diverged from the position of many Black intellectuals at the time (eg. DuBois), who encouraged the setting aside of “backwards” ways, to recognize African American folklore and practices as their own distinct culture. One of the details I found most fascinating is her encounter with a real zombie in Haiti. This woman was not a literal reanimated corpse, but rather someone who was essentially “dead to society”…a phenomenon in many cultures, but not one we often give a specific name! Ella Deloria (AKA Anpétu Wasté Win, Beautiful Day Woman) had a mostly European mother and a Dakota father, who insisted that his daughter learn all three Dakota dialects. It was this linguistic skill that drew Boas’s attention, and he set her to checking the work of 19th century linguists and travelers’ reports of indigenous practices. She found that one major source had either been making things up, or was recording rather fringe beliefs. But, important as her work was, she had no graduate degree, and was often strapped for cash. Years later, when Mead sent her a posthumous collection of Benedict’s writings, Deloria replied “Thank you also for calling me an Anthropologist” – which I found so sad and frustrating! Even sadder, by that point in the 1940s all of them seemed to have lost touch with Hurston. She was still writing short stories, but had sunk into such obscurity that her death certificate misspelled her name. However, an article by Alice Walker would later bring her literary work back to national and worldwide attention3.
3. And, in fact, she’s the only member of the Boas inner circle whose gravestone (installed by Walker) includes “anthropologist”.
By the 1930s, Boas was in his late 70s and retired. But his work was not done. Seeing fascism rising in Europe, he did what he could with his writing and public radio broadcasts to fight it, including pointing out the unpopular truth of how much inspiration the Nazis drew from American (mostly anti-black) racism, and its faulty scientific justifications. But it was too late to stem the tide – his own PhD was revoked and his books burned when the Nazis came to power – and he soon turned his attention to trying to find positions for mostly-Jewish academics fleeing Europe. Mead went to work for an advisory group to FDR that was meant to use social science to combat Nazi misinformation. Benedict wrote a pocket-sized publication in 1943 for the general public debunking “race science”, which earned her some virulent hate mail. Undeterred, later that year she joined Mead in Washington and began an analysis of Japan – an important endeavor, considering the levels of racist misinformation involved in US impressions of the country! One of her most important sources was Robert Hashima, a California-born man who, unlike many fellow inmates of the internment camps, had actually lived in Japan. The result was ‘The Chrysanthemum and the Sword” – a rather theatrical title suggested by her publisher – which aimed to explain the basics of Japanese culture to the American public.
The Boas “family” wasn’t perfect, by any means; They were decidedly messy individuals, often failing to live up to some of their own ideas4. Boas spearheaded the effort to look at cultures on their own terms but, especially early in his career, still struggled with viewing individuals from those cultures as study subjects rather than people – not protesting the addition of the body of one of his informants to a museum collection, for instance – though he seemed to be trying to make up for this later. Edward Sapir might have had an impressive talent for systematizing the masses of data his colleagues collected, but his bitterness at Mead (who was his lover for a while) rejecting his proposal of a monogamous marriage led to a tendency to denigrate her work, and some really ugly outbursts of misogyny and homophobia5. Mead’s personal life was a bit of a soap opera, especially as rules for ethical polyamory had not really been developed within US culture at the time! She also had to backpedal after a largely black audience reacted negatively to her use of the word “pickaninny”, but she took from this more a “know your audience” tip, rather than reflecting on how odd it was that there was a specific word distinguishing black children from white ones. But, as King points out, the further progress that has been made since then (which allows us to more easily see their flaws) doesn’t erase how important that initial work was.
4. The discrepancy between ideal and reality being an extremely common phenomenon in humans! As Mead pointed out, in Samoa “Theoretically the father’s mother is supposed to name the baby, but nine out of ten people will tell you anyone can name it anything.” Or take Alfred Kinsey’s later observations of the constant violation of the strict sexual rules that 1950s Americans supposedly held themselves to…
5. For example: “Love having been squeezed out of sex, it revenges itself by assuming unnatural forms…The cult of the ‘naturalness’ of homosexuality fools no one but those who need a rationalization of their own problems.” Mead responded to this indirect attack in article of her own that said jealousy was most frequently found among old men with small endowments.
In fact, I had a revelation on finishing this book: Were some of the things my parents did that I appreciated the most directly inspired by this scholarly tradition? My parents are social scientists, in many ways the intellectual grandchildren of Boas and company. I’d heard many of these names before from my dad – it was why my response to Claude Levi-Strauss’ claim to have been beside Boas when he breathed his last was a snort and “yeah, of course that dude would claim that!”– though I hadn’t realized so many of them were essentially in the same “lab”. But here’s where it gets personal…I know from talking to my friends that my parents did two particularly unusual things. First, they never expected me to accept "just because" as a reason for a rule, and afforded me a lot of freedom to explore within certain safety-related boundaries. For instance, I’d always thought it was brilliant that they were very welcoming to my high school boyfriend, allowing us just enough privacy that we felt comfortable sitting out in the garden or the family room talking and kissing for hours on end…which meant that if I were ever not comfortable with anything that was happening, my parents would have been within shouting distance! Second, if I ever did anything that seemed weird, or that they didn’t understand (which was often) their impulse was to figure out the reasoning behind it rather than jumping to discipline, essentially treating me like a foreign culture of one. Well, those interactions between me and my parents seem like a datapoint in favor of Mead’s hypothesis that teenage rebellion is produced by overly restrictive rules, rather than something intrinsic to teenagers, since I always felt that the respect I was given deserved respect in return! She’d also have appreciated the questioning and mixing of gender roles they modeled. We were a mixed-culture family (my mom American, my dad Cuban, our family friends from all over) with unusual traditions for Indiana, and the background of cultural relativism provided a certain armor when I had to go out into a world that hasn’t universally accepted that “different” doesn’t necessarily mean “bad”. Finally, there was the open attitude to LGBT people they always showed, which made me 100% confident in coming out to them. In fact, my dad added: “Anyway, you know I’ve always said everyone is probably a little bit bi6”! I can’t credit all of this to their anthropology classes – if nothing else, credit goes to them for being able to apply those ideas on an individual level! – but whether the ideas came directly through the science or through broader cultural osmosis plus individual reflection…they made a difference to me.
6. While I’m pretty sure that’s an overstatement, it’s an understandable one if you’ve read enough ethnographies of cultures where, yes, being bisexual is considered more normal than not! I was privileged to find those books on the shelves of our house before I even knew I needed them.
King writes: “Cultural relativism was a theory of human society, but it was also a user’s manual for life. It was meant to enliven our moral sensibility, not extinguish it… The only thing that changes are the people we believe should be treated as full, purposive, and dignified human beings.” After all, Boas and his students would have identified the concept "some groups are naturally superior to others" to be itself a cultural idea which is not just incorrect but bad, because it has harmful effects on actual people!
“The most enduring prejudices are the comfortable ones, those hidden up close; seeing the world as it is requires some distance, a view from the upper air.”
Overall recommendation: If you like nonfiction books about science or history, or want to understand more about the concept of cultural relativism and where it came from...absolutely pick this one up!
