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

"This is a fascinating historical investigation that is nevertheless firmly addressed to the present. King shows how, in the early 20th century, a collection of ‘dissident anthropologists’, most of them women, confronted the still widely-held view that only one part of the world was civilized, and created a new understanding in which the world’s human cultures came to stand alongside one another. Nowadays, “cultural relativity” is often derided as implying that anything goes in a world without standards, but Margaret Mead and the other women King shows developing this new line of thought were exploring cultures that were still very different and sometimes geographically isolated from one another, and yet were also bound to come into increasing contact with one another. So the relationship between them really did call for new thinking that did not just reproduce imperial assumptions about ‘the primitive’. The story really starts with a 19th century German anthropologist called Franz Boaz, who came to the East Coast of the United States and carried out field work in Baffin Island and British Columbia. Boas was an outsider, if not always an embattled figure. He had left Germany because of Nazism and knew, long before they started burning his books, that his ideas were at odds with the race thinking that emerged in Nazi Germany—and which, as King shows, was indebted to the race theorists of early 20th century America. Boaz may have initiated the search for a different way of thinking about culture, but it was his students in New York who took it further. Most of them are women, though not all, and the most well-known of them is Margaret Mead, who goes to Samoa and works with the people there to produce books like Coming of Age in Samoa . There’s also Ruth Benedict, who becomes Margaret Mead’s great friend, and whose Patterns of Culture also becomes a classic. “If you wanted to understand why anthropology matters you couldn’t get a better book” Then, most interestingly—and I guess this may be where he is at his most original—King adds the Native American activist Ella Deloria, whom Boas hired to work with First Nations people and also Zora Neale Hurston , who is known primarily as a writer within the Harlem Renaissance . She is another of Boas’s students and went to a poor area in Florida and recorded the folklore and life of people there, before moving on to Haiti where she encountered zombies and other magical creations. These people were all doing really detailed ethnographic work to try and find out how indigenous and other peoples were making sense of their experience, how their belief systems operated, how their exchange systems operated, and there is this enormous enrichment of understanding that comes from their work. There’s no question, in King’s mind, that we need to understand this stuff right now . We’ve got problems with the ways in which culture is being talked about all over again, and the way in which ‘civilization’ is being claimed for some and denied to others. King reminds us that all these investigators were outsiders, their project not welcomed by an academic and museum establishment that was reluctant to open up to them. They lived far-flung, travellers’ lives, and their own relationships were often fairly peculiar and complicated and, in some cases, fairly tormenting, one suspects. So that’s what this book is about. If you wanted to understand why anthropology matters you couldn’t get a better book. In some versions, anthropology can seem little more than a kind of gossip, with one tribe telling tales about the odd behaviour of another. But what you have here is a beautifully written book that gives you a sense of why it matters how we think of the human and what it is and what its extraordinary and diverse capabilities may still be. He’s both gifted and careful in that matter. I’m always looking—aren’t we all?—for the person who actually knows stuff but doesn’t bore you to death. And that’s not as easy to find as you would like. Yes, you’ve got a new definition of what culture is, but it’s also a new definition of what humanity is, and this is pitched against the played-out theories of race we may still have in our heads. The very idea of “Race” is an invention, there is no purity of race in the world: we should all know this, but these ideas persist. Long before those assumptions were off the agenda or in any way in retreat, these people were saying, ‘No, if you look at what’s going on here, you will find that these are people with the same capabilities as people anywhere else and, in their context and their situation, this is how they’ve made sense of the world.’ The extinction of indigenous peoples, which we’ll come to in the next book, is a dreadful loss, once you start accept that you’re not just looking at savages. It’s an impoverishment of the species. The key thing is this discovery that culture is not just something that belongs to ‘Western civilization.’ And the terrible heat as well! You can imagine it, on boats, often, and in weird cabins. It seems to have proved a bit contagious, although not necessarily in Paul Gauguin’s exploitative way. They were experimenting with their own humanity, perhaps particularly the women. There is this man, an English anthropologist named Reo Fortune, Margaret Mead’s husband at the time, who is made unhappy by this, because along comes Gregory Bateson, this tall Englishman, and Mead goes off with him, even though they’re all working together. There is a feeling of experimentation, of possibility. How can you still be entirely governed by western Christian values and rules if you cast yourself adrift in other cultures, which is what the ethnologists did?"

"Yes. At the centre of King’s fascinating book is Columbia University’s Franz Boas (1858–1942), the father of cultural anthropology, who challenged his era’s prevailing wisdom that race, gender and sexuality were destiny. He argued against eugenics and contemporary theories of racial distinction between humans. His work culminated with his theory of relativism, which discredited the prevailing conviction that Western civilization was superior to simpler societies. While Boas championed cultural diversity and scientific discovery, he also created an environment that inspired a circle of visionary women researchers who were pathbreaking. The book is kaleidoscopic, and its title comes from Zora Neale Hurston, one of Boas’s students whose fieldwork work led to her classic novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God . Margaret Mead’s fieldwork with adolescent girls led to her seminal work of anthropology, Coming of Age in Samoa . From her work on post-World War II Japan and Pueblo culture, Ruth Benedict shaped approaches to history and death. Ella Cara Deloria focused on Sioux folklore and legends. “Boas championed cultural diversity and scientific discovery, and created an environment that inspired a circle of visionary women researchers” At a time when women were beginning to chafe at the patriarchal social order, Boas encouraged them to find their work and share it with an audience. Together, they broke new ground and acknowledged differences of colour, gender, custom and ability, yet set forth an expansive vision of normalcy and humanity in a multicultural world. The pioneering work of Boas and his students is particularly interesting to consider in an increasingly tribal America. By showing how these female anthropologists came to their new ideas, King enriches the experience so that readers can grasp how radical and forward-thinking they really were. Boas’s researchers came to terms with their own cultural biases and grasped the common humanity linking the people of Polynesia, the American South and Native America. King evokes the qualities that make each one of them brilliant in her own distinctive way, and gets at the alchemy that connects them. King could have done five separate biographies in one volume, but as a narrative, he makes clear how they shaped, challenged and refined one another’s ideas."