Gods of the Upper Air summary

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.