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Name: Gods of the Upper Air
Rating: 4.1 (46 reviews)
Author: Charles King

Charles King

How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century

4.1 (46 ratings)

26 mins

What is Gods of the Upper Air about?

Gods of the Upper Air (2019) details the story of how Franz Boas, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Zora Neale Hurston and other researchers challenged pseudoscientific theories upholding racism and established the modern discipline of cultural anthropology. Tracing the travels, romances and ideas that bound this group together, these blinks recount what became a seismic shift in notions of race, sex and gender identity.

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Gods of the Upper Air
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What’s in it for me? Uncover the pioneering ideas of modern anthropology.

When it comes to positive changes in society, the political left tends to depict developments as part of a long arc of progress. Take the 2015 US Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage, or the ability of Americans to mark multiple boxes to describe their ethnic and racial identity since the 2000 census. These can be seen as recent chapters in a fight for civil rights that traces back to the Jim Crow era.

However, these changes were also the product of a more fundamental shift in modern times. And this is where Franz Boas comes in.

These blinks explore how, from the 1880s through the 1940s, Franz Boas and his circle of researchers pioneered the discipline of cultural anthropology. Using evidence-driven analysis, they showed that European customs were just one way of living and paved new ways for thinking about gender, sex and race.

In these blinks, you’ll find out

how Margaret Mead’s polyamorous love life influenced her anthropological research;
why American novelist Zora Neale Hurston believed in zombies; and
why Boas’s ideas for tolerance remain relevant today.

In the Jim Crow era, society’s deepest prejudices informed policies grounded in pseudoscientific beliefs.

Are you familiar with the American national anthem? If you think about it, “the land of the free and the home of the brave,” only began to ring true after the dissolution of slavery. Indeed, Americans in the post-Reconstruction era took pride in being a society that afforded equality to all people.

Yet the reality of US governance told a different story.

From the 1880s until the 1960s, the United States introduced a system of racial disenfranchisement through new segregation laws that came to be called Jim Crow laws. Jim Crow laws segregated schools, hospitals and other public buildings. They also mandated that people of different races weren’t allowed to be buried beside one another and created racially segregated cities by determining where you were or weren’t allowed to buy property.

And it wasn’t just African Americans that the state was hostile toward. At the turn of the century, Jews, Italians, Poles, Slovaks and other immigrant communities were increasingly seen as tainting the American population. In order to slow the influx of these immigrant populations, in 1924, U.S. Congress passed the Johnson-Reed Act, which, among other regulations, set quotas on how many people from specific nations could immigrate to the United States.

Just like the attitude of white European colonizers administering local natives in Africa, Jim Crow laws and new immigration regulations reflected the general sentiment that Anglo-Saxons were a biologically superior race. However, for some, this assumption called for even further scientific justifications. In the late nineteenth century, the fervent interest in race gave rise to a new social science called anthropology, envisioned as the study of human beings.

Early anthropologists such as Lewis Henry Morgan claimed that global societies fell into a hierarchy of evolutionary development. Morgan and others argued that society progressed from savagery to barbarism and, finally, to civilization. Among other things, this affirmed that the so-called “civilized” society of the United States was superior to the so-called “savage” tribes of Sioux Native Americans that had recently lost their rights as a sovereign state.

Yet while early anthropologists affirmed the pseudoscientific beliefs of white supremacy, the new field also led to another type of research – one that saw all humans as inherently equal. It all started with a German immigrant named Franz Boas.

After an early experience on Baffin Island, Franz Boas observed that humanity is individuality.

Born on July 9, 1858 to a middle class Jewish German family in the then-Prussian town of Minden, Franz Boas expressed an interest in the nature of the world from an early age. As a child, Boas studied rocks and animal carcasses and dreamed of going on an expedition to far away lands. So it came as no surprise when, after studying physics and geography at various German universities, Boas planned an expedition to the Arctic in hopes of pioneering a new field of German research.

In June 1883, the young scientist set sail on the Germania for Baffin Island, where he planned to study migration patterns of the native Inuit people. However, as he filled up notebooks with observations and stories from the Inuits, Boas began to see the locals not as research subjects but as people.

Boas fought for an understanding of cultures through the collection of data followed by inductive reasoning.

Upon returning to the United States, Boas went on a fieldwork expedition in the Pacific Northwest. Traveling along the coast of Vancouver Island, he observed the stories and myths of people such as the Bella Coola, Tlingit and Salish. But returning to the anthropological institutions on the East Coast, he started to see how his ideas about these people conflicted with those of his contemporaries.

Walking around the Smithsonian National Museum, Boas observed that objects such as animal-hide drums or bone rattles were grouped together as signifiers of “barbaric” tribes or “savage” societies. Rather than educating the public on the unique people who used these objects, the exhibition seemed to demonstrate the cultural theories of the exhibitor – namely, that societies evolved to become more civilized.

Boas disproved racial science by measuring thousands of people in New York City.

When people think about eugenics, or the practice of selecting the perceived better qualities of a population to improve future generations, they usually think of the Holocaust of Jews in Nazi Germany. What few people know is that Hitler’s ideas about eugenics were actually influenced by a text from the United States.

In 1916, the American lawyer, zoologist and writer Madison Grant published The Passing of the Great Race. Grant’s text claimed that races can be categorized by discernible physical differences and that your race determines whether you are more or less intelligent or able to rule. As such, Grant warned, the influx of non-Nordic Europeans was deteriorating Anglo-Saxon America – a problem that could be solved through a strong eugenics program.

Margaret Mead’s anthropological interests were intertwined with her personal life.

As a professor at Columbia, Boas was uninterested in cultivating a male-only field for anthropology. In order for fieldwork to produce fruitful observations, anthropology would also need female researchers with access to female populations. Luckily, Columbia had an all-women’s college right across the street called Barnard where Boas was asked to give lectures. Among his many students was a young woman called Margaret Mead.

Though Mead had no concrete dream to become a social scientist when she arrived at Barnard in 1920, her personal life led her toward a lifelong career in anthropology. An average student, Mead did well enough in Boas’s anthropology class over the 1922–23 academic year. But it was only after beginning a flirtatious relationship with Boas’s assistant, the anthropologist Ruth Fulton Benedict, that she considered the discipline seriously. That’s because Benedict - who would become her lifelong lover - urged her to enroll in Columbia’s social science graduate program.

Mead’s work as an anthropologist transformed her understanding of sex and gender.

Just as people believed that race was rooted in biology, Western society in the early twentieth century viewed gender roles to be assigned by biology. While men were fit to rule in politics, women were largely perceived as nurturing mothers and limited in public life to charitable organizations or missionary work.

Having abandoned a future as a housewife for an attempted career as an anthropologist, Margaret Mead was particularly interested in the possibility that other cultures might have different expectations for women than what she observed in the United States. But on her first field research trip to Samoa, she wasn’t quite sure what to make of the status of Samoan women.

Zora Neale Hurston’s field research saw African diaspora culture as worthy subject matter on its own terms.

You probably know Zora Neale Hurston as the author of Their Eyes Were Watching God, the American classic novel about an African American woman in early twentieth-century Florida. But beyond her work as a writer, Hurston was also a prominent social scientist who made invaluable contributions to Boas’s circle.

Having grown up in Florida, in 1925, Hurston moved to New York City, where she quickly became acquainted with the personalities of the African American intellectual, social and cultural movement known as the Harlem Renaissance. Soon after, she won a prize at a literary contest that earned her a funded spot at Barnard. It was there that she discovered her passion for anthropology and became a favored apprentice by Boas.

Though some denounce their approaches, Boasian ideas remain valuable today.

In a time before the dismantling of Jim Crow and the shifting acceptance of women in society in the 1960s and 1970s, the careers of Boas, Mead, Benedict, Hurston and their many peers were defined by struggle. Among other accusations, these thinkers were labelled as naive, immoral and uncivilized. Some, like Mead, spent much of their time facing constant criticism and repeating themselves over and over again. Others, like Hurston, spent their later years in complete obscurity.

As Western society became more tolerant in the decades that followed, however, another kind of criticism against the group developed. A new generation of scholars, feminists and activists found flaws in Boasian approaches. Having outlived the majority of her contemporaries, including Boas, Benedict and Hurston, Mead in particular lived to see her work become perceived as outdated.

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Best quote from Gods of the Upper Air

Race as a principle of political power energized the study of race as a scientific one.

—Charles King

About the Author

Charles King is a writer and professor of international affairs and government at Georgetown University. His seven books include Midnight at the Pera Palace and the National Jewish Book Award winner Odessa. King’s articles and essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post and Foreign Affairs.

Who should read Gods of the Upper Air?

Students of anthropology, sociology and gender studies
Zora Neale Hurston fans
Americans interested in racial history

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