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

“To Boas, the inhabitants of Baffin Island had originally been objects of research, a feature of the landscape to be charted and studied. They had never quite been people. But as he actually lived among them, he could feel a change in his own logic, his own outlook on life.”

Boas’s first foray into field research set the precedent for the theoretical and scientific approach he would adopt going forward: A commitment to methodical introspection became a pillar of his philosophy as a scientist, and a blueprint for the research methods in which he trained his future graduate students.

“For Powell, there was a clear roadmap for how these changes came about. […] Human societies naturally move from savagery to barbarism to civilization, each having its particular characteristics […]. Individual people might fail to exhibit all the characteristics of the stage in which they were embedded; they might be ‘degraded,’ ‘decayed,’ or ‘parasitic’ versions of human culture […]. Ethnology, then, was simply the act of civilized man conversing with those who had yet to travel the same pathway he had once trod.”

Powell’s beliefs about human evolution were accepted as the norm in academic circles, governmental agencies, and the personal opinions of the majority of Americans. Powell and his cohort were considered progressives of their time. The theory that people outside of Western civilization were living relics was not shocking or offensive to anyone in mainstream America at the time. It was seen as a rational explanation of the differences Americans perceived between themselves and others.

“The organization of the collections seemed to reflect the collector’s sense of what an object was for, as opposed to the worldview of the artisan who had originally made it.”

Boas had hoped to count Powell and his ilk among his colleagues, but Boas soon found himself in opposition to not only their conclusions about humanity, but also to the way they approached the fields of anthropology and ethnology. In this indictment of their organization of the objects in the Smithsonian, Boas expresses his belief that the researcher’s opinions about a culture are meaningless when they do not consider the culture, history, and intent of the objects’ makers.

“It was a general feature of humans’ understanding of the world, or ‘apperception,’ as Boas had it: the universal tendency to interpret new experiences in light of the experiences with which we are most familiar. What counted as social scientific data – the specific observation that researchers jotted down in their field notes – was relative to the worldview, skill sets, and preexisting categories of the researchers themselves.”

Despite the uniqueness of explorers’ and researchers’ experiences with remote cultures, Boas found that their recollections were largely lacking in insight into the people they described. He attributed this to their inability to suspend their assumptions and perceive new societies as they were, instead of through the lens of Western values.

“[T]he preponderance of the evidence confirms the plural, fluid, and endlessly adaptable nature of both human bodies and the societies they make. It was one of the great shifts of opinion in the history of science, and it derived largely from Boas’s basic method: to reason inductively and follow the data.”

Boas had not entered the field of anthropology already convinced that his peers were incorrect in their assumptions; it was only through his growing body of research that he came to believe that science did not support their conclusions. Boas possessed a unique background in data collection and statistical analysis, which he gained during his doctoral work in physics, and it was this highly exacting approach that he brought to the social sciences.

“Boas was coming to see his profession not just as a science but also as a state of mind, even a prescription for the good life. Properly practiced, it could cultivate a disposition that pointed toward a ‘higher tolerance’ – one that would even leave the pitying smile behind. It was a blueprint for how anthropology might turn itself into the most hopeful of sciences, one whose job was not just to catalog the many different ways of being human but also, in a way, to love them.”

Although Boas was adamant that researchers should not let their emotional reactions to the people they encounter affect their research findings, he realized that the inverse effect was inevitable. As findings began to reveal that there were no inherent differences between human beings regardless of their origins, the only natural conclusion was empathy for those who seemed unlike oneself.

“Our ideas about race are themselves products of history, Boas implied, a rationalization for something a group of people desperately want to believe: that they are higher, better, and more advanced than some other group. Race was how Europeans explained to themselves their own sense of privilege and achievement. Insofar as races existed, at least as Europeans typically understood them, it was through an act of cultural conjuring, not biological destiny.”

Once Boas had concluded that racial categories were not scientifically discernable, he sought to explain how the notion of distinct racial and ethnic groups had been conceived of in the first place. He reasoned that Europeans had fabricated, either intentionally or subconsciously, an explanation that validated their desire for superiority, and that this explanation had become ingrained not only in their historical narrative but also in their identity in relation to other human beings.

“For nearly any deviants or miscreants you could name, it was possible to identify a society where their afflictions produced not just acceptable lives but easy, honorable ones, too. The strangest people might find places where they could be something other than bizarre. […] Deviance of any type, she argued, was no more than a mismatch between an individual’s way of navigating through life and the catalog of behaviors and emotions that her society tended to prefer and value.”

One of the most impactful revelations to come out of Boas circle was the recognition that parameters of acceptable behavior are determined by each society individually and vary widely. Thus, there was no universality to how certain people were received across societies, even if they displayed the exact same traits and tendencies that would marginalize them in other cultures. In particular, those with mental health conditions, intellectual disabilities, or with nonconforming gender identities were often ostracized or committed to psychiatric hospitals in Western society, while they might be accepted or even cherished as special in other societies.

“Any society had to be understood with reference to the past: its legacy of isolation, contact, or migration. Modern societies might be literate and history-conscious, reveling in their own complexity, but that did not imply that premodern ones ere simpler and therefore change-free.”

Scholars like Powell believed that people considered members of “primitive” societies occupied previous iterations of evolutionary periods that Europeans and European Americans had already surpassed, ignoring their social and cultural histories. It was taken for granted that these societies represented evolutionary stagnation, but Boas insisted that, whether written or preserved in an oral tradition, each society possessed a rich history that must be integrated into any interpretation of their customs, beliefs, and practices, if a researcher hoped to depict a given culture accurately.

“What if the real way to understand people wasn’t to gawk at their ceremonies or even share in their most important work […] but to be beside them in their most unguarded moments – sweeping up debris, rebuilding a house, reweaving a damaged mat, comforting a wailing child? […] She called her accidental method the ‘ethnology of activity.’”

When Mead helped the hurricane victims in American Samoa, she realized she was gathering valuable data by working side-by-side with the people she was studying. Until that time, most of the researchers in the Boas circle were living in the communities they studied, asking questions, and observing practices and rituals, but no matter how deep they attempted to delve into the cultures they visited, they remained outsiders unless they engaged meaningfully with them on a personal level.

“You certainly wouldn’t know them by their rebellion, their angst, their peevishness, or their desire to break free of the suffocating strictures supposedly laid down by their parents. There was no youth culture and no widespread delinquency, at least not as a recognized phase of a person’s second birth into adulthood. The reason, she concluded, was the road maps that Americans had devised for getting a child to full personhood. […] ‘The stress is in our civilization,’ Mead wrote, ‘not in the physical changes through which our children pass.”

One of the Boas circle’s primary objectives was to seek to determine which elements of human experience could be considered universal and which were unique to or shaped by the specific elements of individual societies. When Mead went to Samoa to ascertain how girls transitioned into womanhood, she discovered distinct differences from what someone that Western society would consider “adolescent” behavior. She concluded that “adolescence” didn’t exist without the expectation that it would, so it must be a constructed rather than a universal concept.

“It was easy to show that criminals sometimes clustered in families. But it was a great leap to claim that the essential traits of criminality or deviance were the products of families – much less that these traits were transmitted from parent to child […] Criminologists, for example, tended to pay scant attention to rich criminals or well-placed miscreants […] Their theories of innate criminality seemed to be based exclusively on the poor […].”

Boas was tenacious in his denouncement of eugenics, particularly with respect to its role in government policies: Through his studies, he realized that the parameters defining traits considered undesirable were largely formed around convenient interpretations of “otherness.” Beliefs about the genetic origins of criminality revealed the bias inherent in this practice, as white-collar criminals were exempt from judgment while pickpockets, vagrants, and sex workers were branded not only amoral, but incapable of controlling their impulses.

“‘Negroes were supposed to write about the race problem. I was and am thoroughly sick of the subject,’ she later wrote. ‘My interest lies in what makes a man or woman do such-and-so, regardless of his color.’”

Zora Neale Hurston was a celebrated figure in the Harlem Renaissance, but she adamantly disagreed with the widely held opinion among Black intellectuals that African Americans in poor rural areas were to be seen as a source of embarrassment. She dedicated her work to illuminating the compelling features of these societies with the objective of presenting the richness she felt was deserving of recognition and essential to understanding the American experience.

“The whole point of Mules and Men, as with her growing body of published fiction, was not to talk about black people or embalm Negro culture for future study in a classroom. Rather, she imagined it was a grand project to confirm 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 […].”

Members of the Boas circle and the Harlem Renaissance considered everyday African Americans not only unsophisticated but tainted. Hurston’s work was groundbreaking because of the literary way that she evoked the humanity of the people about whom she wrote, devoid of academic analysis and judgment.

“No matter how vehemently a Two Crows might deny that eight and eight are sixteen, his denial would not change reality. But for just about anything you might wish to know about the social world, you were invariably prisoner to whatever Two Crows or people like him had to say.”

Part of the insight into their work that characterized the Boas circle’s thoroughness and commitment to scientific methodology was their acknowledgment of the limitations of their perspective. Two Crows, an Omaha Chief who frequently refuted the claims of other members of his community, proved the importance of speaking with as many people as possible to control for the natural differentiation in opinion and interpretation that was inevitably found in any culture or community.

“After all, what would that make her, except a ghost with a suitcase? Even an experienced fieldworker like Mead could be guilty of what Deloria called ‘armchair anthropology.’ A better method was to give up trying to identify the dying embers of an older civilization and instead get to know the living, right-now culture of the people you were actually surrounded by - women and men who weren’t stuck in history, but, like Deloria herself, were feeling their way through it.”

Many anthropologists, and Mead in particular, dismissed the importance of field work among certain Indigenous American communities, considering their culture diluted or eroded by their interactions with European colonizers. Like Hurston, Deloria was determined to present the members of her community as they were and not as the tragic remnants of a once proud people that Westerners projected them to be.

“Yet in all societies that Mead, Fortune, and Bateson had studied, there were people whose temperaments seemed to run against the standards. As they talked, late at night under kerosene lanterns, Mead and Bateson came to realize that they were the deviants in their own cultures.”

Many of the members of the Boas circle were denounced as deviants, misfits, and even possible threats to national security, and similar beliefs circulated within the group. For example, Mead was accused by many of her peers of manipulating the conclusions of her field studies to discredit the moral expectations of Western society to excuse the way she treated her spouses and lovers.

“As soon as the new opinion is embraced as customary belief, it will be another trusted bulwark of the good life. We shall arrive then at a more realistic social faith, accepting as a grounds of hope and as new bases for tolerance the […] patterns of life which mankind has created for itself from the raw materials of existence.”

This passage, from Benedict’s Patterns of Culture, explains the concept of cultural relativity as an intentional, introspective commitment to understanding how one’s values and even physical reactions are shaped by the features of their own culture. She attests that when one suspends judgment, engages in critical thinking, and rejects the instinct to accept one’s own perspective as inherently correct, one can reach a kind of moral enlightenment based in empathy and respect.

“[G]ender was the product of a specific time and place – the discrete social positions that a given society assigned to men and women, or alternatively the menu of roles, behaviors, attractions, and potentialities that it made available to people, with little reference to biological sex at all. […] At last she had a way of understanding her own mixed-up, misfit fate.”

Mead’s Sex and Temperament delved into how gender roles were expressed and the degree to which they were enforced in various cultures. She discovered that some roles were more rigidly prescribed by gender in some societies while others saw gender as less of a determining factor of one’s social role. She determined that the constraints associated with sex and gender in the United States held less legitimacy when compared to the variances she found globally.

“Religion depended on categories, Hurston was coming to realize: the sacred and the profane, the ethereal and the earth-bound, the miraculous and the commonplace.”

Religious practices comprised a significant portion of the Boas circle’s research, as religious views were found to be a commonality among all societies. Hurston realized that to truly appreciate another culture’s beliefs, she needed to temporarily abandon the notion of rationality and take for granted the idea that what members of a society were claiming about their religion was true.

“Gambling, the stock market, even the concept of private property – the belief that I can expand myself to include an inanimate object, the loss of which would induce deep displeasure and anxiety – all depended on magical belief systems. They are ways of summoning the unlikely and the invisible in order to control the tangible world.”

The belief in magic and superstition Westerners ascribed to “primitive” cultures was a childlike trait they considered ridiculous and lacking in reason. Hurston refuted this notion by identifying beliefs and behaviors in Western society by which people sought to harness influence over aspects of their existence that were outside their control.

“If American leaders easily recognized Germany’s racism for the abhorrent ideology it was, he felt, that was in large part because the people being excluded, expelled, or imprisoned looked a great deal like them. In these moments, it was especially important to see yourself as part of the problem. You needed to understand the ways your own behavior mirrored the awfulness you saw in others.”

Nazi Germany posed an international threat based upon its aspirations of global dominance, but the values upon which the leaders of the Third Reich based their racially based ideology were not only similar to but largely modeled upon American political and social policy. Boas felt it was crucial to illuminate that Americans were guilty of many of the same offenses that they condemned in reference to Nazi Germany.

“Virtually every member of the Boas circle was routinely denounced as naïve, uncivilized, unpatriotic, or amoral. Boas was a crank who denied American greatness. Mead was a trollop who insisted sex wasn’t necessarily private, perplexing, and vaguely wrong. Benedict was a harridan. Deloria and Hurston were, say no more, an Indian and a Negro. But their whole point was to be upsetting. Getting over yourself was bound to be hard.”

Their detractors relentlessly slandered the members of the Boas circle, attacking their personal lives as vehemently as they attacked their research. In part, the pushback they faced was a testament to the efficacy of their attempts at subversion; they were not concerned about gaining popularity, but in widely disseminating their findings in the hope that they would become integrated into Western consciousness.