Renegade Anthropologists

In the 1900's, Franz Boas revolutionized anthropology by breaking out of racist conventional wisdom. NPR's Michel Martin talks with Charles King about his book about Boas, "Gods of the Upper Air".

MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

We've been talking a lot about race in this country, most recently because of comments by President Trump about certain lawmakers and certain cities and countries that many have criticized as racist. Critics say that because Mr. Trump's comments so often seem to rely on a racial hierarchy placing people like himself at the top and people different from him, especially people of color, at the bottom.

Given the fierce pushback, it might be hard to remember that in the early 1900s, at the dawn of what we've come to call social science, nearly all research was seen through a white supremacist lens until a German American professor started developing and then teaching the then-radical idea that race is a social rather than biological construct and that most ideas about race are really rationalizations for political positions and that all cultures deserve to be regarded with respect. That professor, Franz Boas, pioneered the field of anthropology, and his influence spread through students who also became pioneers such as Margaret Mead and Zora Neale Hurston.

Their collective story is the subject of a new book - "Gods Of The Upper Air: How A Circle Of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, And Gender In The 20th Century." It was written by Charles King, author and professor of international affairs at Georgetown University. He joined me in our Washington, D.C. studios to tell us more about Franz Boas and just how unconventional his ideas were at the time.

CHARLES KING: Well, he was a revolutionary because, of course, at the time he started doing this new kind of social science, which he and his students had to name as cultural anthropology, there was widespread consensus about this idea of cultural, racial, gender hierarchy - that the natural order of the world was one in which you had folks at the top and folks at the bottom, and you stayed in those categories over the entirety of your life, and those categories were inheritable. You were taught this, and you experienced it every day depending on what swimming pool you could go to, what streetcar you could ride in, where you were buried. So from literally cradle to grave, you work inside this hierarchy. And he worked very hard to teach people that that was a product of our own society, not of God or nature.

MARTIN: Well, given the fact that he was, as you said, surrounded by this point of view, how did it happen that he started to see the world differently? What changed him?

KING: Well, in some ways, he and everyone he gathered around him - Zora Neale Hurston, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict and others - were themselves outsiders in some way. He was a German Jewish immigrant to the United States who found himself on the wrong side of the first World War. He said it was the greatest disappointment of his life when he witnessed the nationalism that attended that conflict.

Of course, we forget today, but at the time of the first World War, German Americans were the largest minority group in the United States - immigrant minority group in the United States. And they were treated abysmally by both the American government at the time, by state governments and so forth. The teaching of German was banned in some states. And so this experience, I think, propelled him forward with the idea that every society creates its own kind of hierarchies, and to live intelligently in the world, to live as a social scientist in the world, what do you had to do was to try to recognize those.

MARTIN: But you make the point in your book that a lot of his ideas started to come from his fieldwork, where he was going out and experiencing, you know, what we would call native cultures or traditional cultures firsthand. A lot of people were doing that at that time. Why is it that he was able to go out and realize that basically, what he had been taught was just wrong?

KING: Well, I think at some point, Boas and each of his students had a kind of transformational experience somewhere. For Mead, it was in American Samoa. For Boas, it was on Baffin Island, living with the Inuit in the Arctic. And all of them at some point had an experience in which they realized that while they were educated, they could make their way through their own culture and their society, in the place that they found themselves in that moment, they were stupid. They didn't know how to survive. They didn't know how to be a proper person. They didn't know what kind of food you could eat or what would kill you.

And each of them took from that experience, I think, the understanding that how you make your way in the world is a product of your education, your circumstance, your culture. It's not a thing that is inherent to you. Your place in the world is determined by your surroundings. And they elevated that into an entire theory of society.

MARTIN: One of the points that you make in the book is that there were always competitors to Boas' ideas. In fact, one of his sort of chief antagonists was a person named Grant. What's...

KING: Madison Grant, yeah.

MARTIN: Madison Grant, who actually created some of the institutions which continue to survive today as anti-immigrant think tanks.

KING: That's right. On the one hand, Madison Grant - you know, we owe the survival of the American bison to him. We owe so many of the great conservation institutions to him and conservation areas in the American West to him. But he at the same time believed deeply that what he was seeing in New York - he was from New York, living in New York - was the same thing he had experienced in traveling through the American West - that is, he understood what it was like when noble creatures could suddenly be brought down by invading species or their environment changing, and suddenly, the bison, the elk, the wolf were in danger.

And when he walked across lower Manhattan, of course, he saw all of what to him were invading species as well - people from Southern Europe and Eastern Europe who had come into the U.S. as part of this great wave of migration. And in 1916, he wrote a very famous book called "The Passing Of The Great Race," which people don't talk much about now but was a bestseller at that time - hugely influential. Roosevelt - Teddy Roosevelt and others read it, commented on it. And he became a national celebrity and an authority on race and immigration.

MARTIN: Well, given that Boas' point of view here was not popular at the time - or rather that Grant had much more currency than Boas did, I mean, you make the point in the book, you say that Boas was making a point that required readers to make a difficult conceptual leap. He was asking Americans and Western Europeans to suspend their belief in their own greatness. Grant, for his part, had something simpler and more powerful on his side - the deep self-confidence of Western society founded upon the observable reality of the Anglo-Saxon dominance around the globe. OK.

So how is it that now, you know, I think we've established that there are still some people who believe in racial hierarchy, that white people are better than everybody else. I mean, that's just a fact. But would it be accurate to say that among most educated people, it is understood that race is a social, not a biological concept, that people are much more similar than they are different and, you know, all the other things. How did that happen?

KING: I think the idea that racism is bad, that you should treat people as if there is no such hierarchy in the world, is a widespread idea. We grow up with it as part of the American creed now in a way that we might not have at some point. But I think many Americans still deeply believe in the idea of race, that race is biological and is not socially constructed, that there's some deep genetic difference between people across racial categories. I even find this in classrooms when I'm teaching or lecturing on these things, where students, I think, come into even - come into university still struggling with some of the things that Boas was trying to teach more than a century ago.

And, you know, the reality, of course, of American history is that we have a set of foundational documents that speak about the inherent equality of all people, but of course there's the entire history of racial segregation, of hierarchy. And what this book tries to do, I think, is to talk about that braided history. It's not a set of dark chapters in American life. This is a strand of American history that continues up to the present moment that we need to understand.

MARTIN: Reading the book, I was very much struck by how many of the themes of the book are resurgent, you know - your city is bad, my city is good, arguments about unconscious bias, arguments about erasing your own immigrant history and - or even if you don't erase it, sort of implying that there's some sort of hierarchy here. I was just - I'm just wondering, does that say something to you?

KING: Well, that era can teach us a lot because the things that we're experiencing in this country now aren't particularly new. They're actually part of American history, and understanding the ways in which they're part of American history is absolutely critical, I think. But I think the other thing that comes out of the book is a kind of moral code that ran alongside the social science that these folks were trying to do. You know, they were trying to teach us not to give much credence to any theory that just happened to put people like us at the top of some heap. Be critical of the society you're living in at the same time you're trying to be an expert in living in it. And that's a very hard thing to do.

Boas said, you know, there's no real progress in morality. In every society that he had studied, there were people you could kill and people you shouldn't kill, people you should have romantic relations with, those who you shouldn't have romantic relations with. The thing that changes, he said, is the circle of people to whom we owe ethical behavior, whatever we think it is. Is it your family? Is it your tribe? Is it your village? Or is it humanity? And that's the worldview that he and his students tried to impart, and I think it makes as much sense now and is as urgent now as it was in their day.

MARTIN: Charles King is the author, most recently of "Gods Of The Upper Air: How A Circle Of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, And Gender In The 20th Century." He was kind of to join us in our studios in Washington, D.C. Professor King, thank you so much for joining.

KING: Thank you very much.

How One Anthropologist Reshaped How Social Scientists Think About Race.  National Public Radio , August 3, 2019.

During the 1930s, the New York-based anthropologist Franz Boas grew increasingly worried about events in his native Germany. He was in his 70s, and close to retiring from Columbia University, where he taught his students to reject the junk science underpinning the country’s restrictive immigration laws, colonial expansion and Jim Crow. Born into a Jewish burgher family, Boas was horrified to see how the Nazis took inspiration from Americans’ pathbreaking work in eugenics and state-sanctioned bigotry. He started to put the word “race” in scare quotes, calling it a “dangerous fiction.”

Boas is at the center of Charles King’s “Gods of the Upper Air,” a group portrait of the anthropologist and his circle, who collectively attempted to chip away at entrenched notions of “us” and “them.” “This book is about women and men who found themselves on the front lines of the greatest moral battle of our time,” King writes, “the struggle to prove that — despite differences of skin color, gender, ability or custom — humanity is one undivided thing.”

A century ago, the prospect of a common humanity seemed radical to an American public that had been schooled in the inherent superiority of Western civilization. Boas and his disciples argued for pluralism and tolerance at a time when cross-cultural empathy was deemed not just threatening but almost unfathomable.

King’s elegant and kaleidoscopic book takes its title from Zora Neale Hurston, a student of Boas’s who contrasted the capacious perspective offered by the “gods of the upper air” with the cramped corner guarded by the “gods of the pigeonholes.” Conducting ethnographic research in the Caribbean, Hurston said that she planned to return to the United States with two books: “One for anthro. and one for the way I want to write it.” That second book became her lush novel about life around the Gulf Coast, “Their Eyes Were Watching God.”

Hurston, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead and Ella Cara Deloria are the other central figures in King’s book; like Boas, all of them came to see anthropology “not just as a science but also as a state of mind.” His ideas were particularly appealing to women who chafed at the patriarchal order. Men were constantly spouting specious and self-serving theories of what was natural; here was a man suggesting that those things might not be so natural after all.

Boas became a pivotal figure in the discipline — though at first he was marginal, an itinerant scholar who had a hard time landing a secure position in the United States. For a while he held a curatorship at the relatively young American Museum of Natural History, but the museum was a creature of the establishment, hosting grand conferences on eugenics and showcasing displays on the “ill effects of racial interbreeding.” The then-dominant school of anthropology propped up a narrative tracing “the stages of human culture,” from “savagery” through to “barbarism” and finally to “civilization.” Mainstream scholars insisted that white supremacy was justified by head measurements and heel length.

Overturning this terrible science required more than fervent criticism. King, a professor at Georgetown and the author of several books about Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, describes how Boas tried to use the methods of physical anthropologists against them, deploying calipers and eye-color meters to show that the children of immigrants, born in the United States, had more in common with other American-born children than with the national groups represented by their parents. But Boas’s work in the field only accounted for part of his influence. It was mainly through his teaching at Columbia and his nurturing of a new generation of anthropologists that he changed how many Americans saw the world and, consequently, themselves.

King weaves in the stories of Hurston and Deloria, who used what they learned from Boas to study their own communities. Hurston’s “Mules and Men,” a book about African-American folklore, included an immersive account of her return to the Florida she left during the Great Migration, and her experience as not just an observer of the community but a participant in it. Deloria, who was born on the Yankton Indian Reservation in South Dakota, was a co-writer with Boas of “Dakota Grammar”; she worked on it for a decade, explaining to Boas the delicate process of deciding on the right gifts to coax candid talk from her informants. “To go at it like a white man, for me, an Indian,” she said, “is to throw up an immediate barrier between myself and my people.”

Mead and Benedict found a measure of freedom in their work. The thrice-married Mead, whose “Coming of Age in Samoa” argued that many assumptions about adolescence and sexuality were culturally contingent, had little patience for the monogamy that was expected of her; what a puritan culture wanted to call “deviancy” was, King writes, “a simple mismatch between her own temperament and the society into which she had been born.” Benedict, for her part, had been a depressed housewife before she became an anthropologist (and, for a time, Mead’s lover); she articulated the Boasian approach in her book “Patterns of Culture,” and gave its core idea a memorable name: “cultural relativity.”

King includes some of the more vexed aspects of this history, including Boas’s involvement in a sham funeral for an indigenous Greenlander whose cadaver had been secretly harvested in the name of scientific research. “Boas’s ideas,” King writes, “were often ahead of his practice.” Not to mention that social science is, well, an inexact science. The honest observer was bound to realize “how hard it was to pin down anything at all about someone else’s culture.”

This looks to be the perfect moment for King’s resolutely humane book, even if the United States of the early 20th century isn’t quite the perfect mirror. Boas and his circle confronted a bigotry that was scientifically endorsed at the time, and they dismantled it by showing it wasn’t scientific at all; today’s nativists and racists generally don’t even pretend to a scientific respectability, resorting instead to a warped version of cultural relativism for fuel in their culture war.

But what Boas advised wasn’t so much a program as a disposition — an openness toward others and a scrutiny of oneself. As King writes, “The most enduring prejudices are the comfortable ones, those hidden up close.”

How a Group of Heretical Thinkers Chipped Away at the Idea of ‘Us’ and ‘Them’. By By Jennifer Szalai. The New YorkTimes , July 30, 2019

The core of Allan Bloom’s 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind, a complaint about the nature of higher education, is an argument against cultural relativism. “There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of,” he wrote, “almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative.” Bloom insisted that students at American elite universities had been so indoctrinated by their primary and secondary educations, under the influence of the culture of the 1960s, that they had come to prioritize an indefensible commitment to openness over universal natural rights and the pursuit of the good life. “When there are no shared goals or vision of the public good,” he asked, “is the social contract any longer possible?”

Bloom wrote with an unabashed elitism but the book proved popular: It was the unexpected academic bestseller of the late Reagan years. Universities, he argued, controlled by educated elites, are failing the children, deconstructing cherished social norms, and undermining the basis for a coherent society. The supposed ubiquity of “cultural relativism” that Bloom decried remains a bugbear of our politics. The ever-present Dinesh D’Souza, who seems to have never met a fact that he couldn’t claim supports his view of the world, held cultural relativism responsible for the continuation of racism in a book in 1995, arguing that it made people afraid to make necessary critiques of African American culture. And though the exact phrase “cultural relativism” has faded somewhat from the discourse, an implicit critique remains embedded in right-wing attacks on multiculturalism and immigration. The law Professor Amy Wax, who featured prominently in the July 2019 conference on “national conservatism,” has written that “not all cultures are equal” and stated “I don’t shrink from the word ‘superior.’ Everyone wants to go to countries ruled by white Europeans.”

The idea of “cultural relativism” serves as a cudgel, somewhat akin to “political correctness,” to impugn the values attributed to liberal elites in general and humanities professors in particular. This dangerous idea, it is said, makes them responsible for many social ills (more ills than their humble enrollments would suggest possible.) Charles King, author of the new book Gods of the Upper Air, is undeniably also a professor. His position, in International Affairs and Government, is suspended ambiguously between the humanities and social sciences to such a degree that I cannot be sure whether he too should be considered responsible for the supposed moral rot of cultural relativism that has wormed its way through our undergraduate population like the Very Hungry Caterpillar on a Saturday. But Gods of the Upper Air is a group biography and intellectual history of the anthropologists who created “cultural relativism,” and something of a defense of its core principles. What is especially welcome about this effort in the current environment is that it removes the idea of cultural relativism from its status as a punching bag for its enemies. Instead it shows the context from which cultural relativism emerged—a particular moment in the study of humanity, brought about by an age of European exploration, colonialism, and pseudoscientific racism that has more than a few unfortunate points of contact with our own era.

The pioneers of cultural relativism were working against centuries of racist ideas and prejudices. The racial theorists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries posited that humanity was divided into a set of distinct racial groups, which they took to represent different stages of civilization. These categories served a hierarchy that made European people and their colonists feel powerful and successful compared to the other humans they met as they moved about the globe. Colonialism, slavery, and restrictions on immigration went in search of justifications, and racial theorists provided them.

This racial theorizing was based on absurd logic. Writing in 1775, for example, German anatomist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, decided to divide the people of the world into five races. After “Ethiopians,” “Americans,” “Mongolians” and “Malay,” Blumenbach original’s contribution was to describe the light-skinned residents of Europe as “Caucasian.” The ostensible reason was that Blumenbach had access to a private collection of skulls, and decided that a young girl’s cranium from the country of Georgia in the Caucasus Mountains was particularly attractive. Since this was also close to the location that some scholars posited for the location of the Garden of Eden, Blumenbach reasoned that “Caucasian” people were those designed by God for their superior beauty, and that other races, more distant from the sources of creation, were degenerated forms of humans.

More than a century later, in the United States, the eugenicist Madison Grant wrote The Passing of the Great Race in 1916, arguing that the best way to improve humanity was to encourage the breeding of the most positive human characteristics: energy, innovation, intelligence, and adventurousness. Those were qualities that Grant believed were best exemplified by Northern Europeans—and justification not only for racism but also for restricting the immigration of Southern Europeans whose admission based on “altruistic values” he thought were “sweeping the nation toward a racial abyss.”

It was into these waters that the anthropologists who would pioneer the ideas of cultural relativism stepped. This group, often called the “Boasians” after Franz Boas, challenged many of the ideas widely held about race at the time. Boas, known as Papa Franz to his students, was born in Prussia. He earned a Ph.D. in physics in 1881 without particular distinction, and, bored with that line of inquiry, looked for a new challenge. Having grown up with tales of Arctic adventure, he embarked for Baffin Island in Canada, where he spent months living among the Inuit. He watched them collect food, coexist with their spouses and children, play games, and get sick.

To his surprise, he found that these were not people outside of time, but individuals with personal histories. One of his main informants, a man named Signa, had been born elsewhere and moved to the village of Kekerten as a child. When an outbreak of diphtheria struck, the locals were disappointed that “Herr Doktor” Boas was of no help. He realized the limitations of his own knowledge, and the appropriateness of the education that Inuit children received for the way of life they were living. Most of all, he came to see his research subjects as real, complete people. “I often ask myself what advantages our ‘good society’ possess over that of the ‘savages’ and the more I see of their customs, I find that we really have no right to look down upon them contemptuously,” he wrote. “We should not censure them for their conventions and superstitions, since we ‘highly educated’ people are relatively much worse.”

For Boas, however, there was no smooth path to academic employment. He worked for the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 (which featured both the first Ferris Wheel as well as displays of living “natives” from around the world up and down the Midway), designing an Anthropology Building. Visitors could have their cranial measurements taken on the spot, in keeping with the voguish interest in phrenology. But the findings inside the building didn’t really conform to what the phrenologists thought they would: mulattoes in the United States, it was found, were the same height as white people; the fingerprints of North American Indians were all unique; head shapes within community groups varied widely, and even changed over the course of a lifetime. Boas began to conclude that scientists were making mistakes because of their own cultural prejudices, and adopting theories even though they did not conform to observable data.      

In 1897, Boas at last joined the faculty at Columbia, his salary underwritten by a wealthy uncle. His first popular book, The Mind of Primitive Man of 1911, argued against the view of human history as a great contest between races. Races even in the present were unstable, and therefore could not have existed in the past in any well-defined way. Nor were race and civilizational level linked—how could they be, if the very idea of race was unreliable? Besides, at different times in history different “races” had been more advanced than Europeans. History, in other words, mattered.

Boas, writes King, “was asking Americans and western Europeans to suspend their belief in their own greatness.” His ideas were ignored by many, and deemed threatening by others. The president of Columbia canceled his undergraduate program, to protect students from such radical thinking. But Boas’s introductory lectures still appealed, especially to women. Though they would struggle against the obdurate sexism of academic institutions, many of his most important students, including Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Ella Cara Deloria, and Zora Neale Hurston, would follow Boas’s path, seeking to write broad and important works that would use anthropology as a way of encouraging people to reflect on themselves and society.

A relatively small community, the Boasian anthropologists seem to have prefigured the idea that the personal was political. Gods of the Upper Air features love triangles and even more ambitious polygons, beginning with the affair between Mead and Benedict. Whether the reader finds this compelling will probably be a matter of taste—I was often waiting for the next judiciously economical summary of a published work—but the relationships do drive the story forward nicely, and they did matter to the work that was done. Benedict’s work among the Zuñi in New Mexico, for example, where she observed gender-crossing—with men adopting the dress and social role of women—made her realize that many that were held to be “deviant” by the standards of her society would have been accepted as normal, if unusual, in others. It was not only race, but other social categories such as sex, that the cultural relativists sought to trouble.

Mead, for her part, grew famous for Coming of Age in Samoa, a work that attempted to denaturalize the angst of adolescence. On the island of Manus, Mead spent nine months living and observing a different way of life: one that, she argued, de-emphasized attachments and therefore reduced jealousy. Spending most of her time with women and girls, Mead concluded that Samoan adolescence was less fraught, in part because sexuality in general was less fraught. Affairs could be noted and punished, but they could also be easily forgiven. It wasn’t that the society did well by all of its members, but simply that it was different.

Coming of Age in Samoa, like many works in the Boasian orbit, is in many ways a book about its author and her own society as much as anything, both beginning and ending with reflections on the United States. “Our children are faced with half a dozen standards of morality,” Mead argued, but “the Samoan child faces no such dilemma. Sex is a natural, pleasurable thing; the freedom with which it may be indulged in is limited by just one consideration, social status.” The point was not that Samoan society was superior, simply that it was different. “Courtesy, modesty, good manners, conformity to definite ethical standards are universal, but what constitutes courtesy, modesty, good manners, and ethical standards is not universal,” wrote Boas in the book’s foreword. “Much of what we ascribe to human nature is no more than a reaction to the restraints put upon us by our civilization.”

The Boasians were not free from error. Sometimes their informants contradicted each other, and as anthropologists they were prone to overgeneralization. Mead’s interpretation of the sexual behavior of adolescents in Samoa has been challenged as overly broad. Nor were the Boasians always free from prejudice. Boas himself sometimes suggested there was something deficient about African Americans. His student Zora Neale Hurston disagreed: Her studies of black communities in Florida (the basis for her since-canonized novel Their Eyes Were Watching God) are recognized for granting the full humanity of her subjects and characters. Even so, she found that her work was often interpreted as being about the particularities and pathologies of “Negroes,” while more remote and supposedly “primitive” people like the Samoans could supposedly hold lessons for all of humanity.

Their work sold impressively well, and began to influence popular consciousness. In the materialistic 1920s, some were attracted to the idea that so-called primitive cultures possessed wisdom that modern society lacked. To the dismay of Ella Cara Deloria, a Boas student of Yankton Dakota ancestry, there was a revival of faux-“Indian” practices for white American youth, from the camp customs and crafts of the Boy Scouts and Camp Fire Girls to the appearance of Native American mascots for sports teams in the 1920s. “Only a few decades beyond the conquest of the West, white American parents now found it entirely normal to invest time and energy toward disguising their children as the very people their forebears had worked hard to obliterate,” writes King.

    

In the 1961 preface to a reissue of Coming of Age in Samoa, Mead clarified that she had not been advocating “a return to the primitive.” She did not want to live in Samoa, she added: “I wanted to live in New York and make something of what I had learned in Samoa.” Cultural relativism, a term that had been introduced to the public with Benedict’s Patterns of Culture in 1934, was supposed to be a way of thinking about the world. Different ways of living were different ways of solving the problems of being human, and, as Benedict put it, the anthropologist “is bound to avoid any weighting of one in favor of another.” It was a professional obligation to be able to take the perspectives of others.

King asserts, in the beginning of Gods of the Upper Air, that his book “is not a lesson in tolerance.” It is true that the book has nothing of the didacticism of an after-school special. But its protagonists are its heroes, however flawed, and they repeatedly call for tolerance: acceptance of human difference, based on their studies of ways of living that led them to conclude that within the realm of human possibility, it was not required by nature to be sexist, racist, or homophobic. “Cultural relativism was a theory of human society, but it was also a user’s manual for life,” King concludes. “It was meant to enliven our moral sensibility, not extinguish it.”

For the Boasians, cultural relativism was a way of thinking about and pursuing the good life. By making clear a variety of ways of being human, and not taking for granted the superiority of one over the other, Benedict hoped that the world could then arrive at “a more realistic social faith.” Though they made mistakes in their research, it was the Boasians who believed that a view of the world ought to be built around facts and observations, rather than cultural prejudices. The core idea—one that is probably fair to ascribe to the majority of humanities professors—was to reject ethnocentrism and to recognize the essential humanity of all people. It counsels humility and self-reflection rather than hubris. It is ironic that cultural relativism today has so few defenders and so many opponents, and that no one is in more need of its central insight than those who rail against it.

Pioneers of Cultural Relativism. By Patrik Iber. The New Republic. August 14, 2019.

In 1968, when i was 13, I read Coming of Age in Samoa, by Margaret Mead. Her landmark 1928 study of adolescence had just been reissued as a 95-cent paperback for the counterculture generation. The book offered a vision of how to be a teenage girl. I could be the seductive young woman on the cover in a red sarong with a blossom in her hair—free, fearless, and lighthearted, especially about sex. It also offered a vision of how to be an intellectual woman. Mead, with her signature cape and walking stick, after all, was the most famous anthropologist in the world. And, sure enough, in that glorious period after the pill, I grew up to be free and fearless and sexually adventurous. I also grew up, naturally and effortlessly, to become a scientist and a writer. The visions came true—the possibilities were real.

But is that actually what happened? In light of the #MeToo movement, I ask myself whether I have simply edited the threats and slights and misogyny of hippie culture out of my memories. Did I really escape the sexism of academia? I can easily call up moments that contradict my version of my past, even if at the time I dismissed them (that radical-leftist mentor, for instance, who explained to me that women could never belong to the philosophy-department faculty, because they were too distracting). And if I’m not sure that I understand my own experience and culture, how could Mead understand the unfamiliar experience and culture of the girls she observed in Samoa? The project of anthropology has always been to study people who seem very different from the anthropologists themselves. Is that project even possible? And is it worth doing?

In Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century, Charles King, a professor of international affairs and government at Georgetown, makes the case for anthropology in a thoughtful, deeply intelligent, and immensely readable and entertaining way. The book is a joint biography of the people who created anthropology at the turn of the last century: Franz Boas, the father of the field, and the women who were among his most influential students, especially Ruth Benedict, Zora Neale Hurston, and Margaret Mead.

Boas was a German Jew born in Westphalia in 1858, and he was a generation older than his students (and had fearsome dueling scars from his days at the University of Heidelberg). He was a pathbreaking explorer—at 25, he sailed to Baffin Island, where he recorded the lives of the Inuit—and an exceptional teacher. He was also rather touchy and grumpy, with an obsessive dedication to collecting facts. Benedict, 29 years younger than Boas, was the deepest thinker of the group; her book Patterns of Culture (1934) is still an important text in anthropology. She is also an elusive figure, perhaps because the life of a lesbian university professor in the early 20th century required a certain amount of evasion. Hurston’s story is remarkable and heartbreaking. Being an intellectual woman in the 1920s was difficult enough. Being an intellectual black woman was much harder. Hurston died in 1960 at 69, neglected and penniless, and her work was rediscovered only decades later.

In King’s book, Margaret Mead is the magnetic center of attention, as she was in life, although she never had a tenured faculty position, and she was small and fragile—the stylish walking stick was a necessity. She was only 23 when she went to Samoa, not much more than a teenager herself. Though she had already been married for two years, she spent the long train journey to the West Coast, where the boat voyage began, talking about ideas and making passionate love to Ruth Benedict, her teacher, who was also married. Then Mead spent the long ship journey back talking about ideas and making passionate love to Reo Fortune, who became her second husband. (Airplane travel has clearly been terrible for romance.) On the next trip she met Gregory Bateson, who became her third husband after several steamy months, literally and figuratively, of sharing a hut with her and Fortune in Papua New Guinea. All this time, she wrote long, analytic letters to Benedict, trying to understand it all. For Mead, sex and ideas were inextricable.

The romantic intrigue makes for irresistible reading, but it’s also central to the book’s argument. The anthropologists had a revolutionary new idea, which they called “cultural relativity.” The phrase is a bit misleading, because it implies there is no truth to be found, but Boas and his students didn’t think that. Instead, they argued that all societies face the same basic problems—love and death, work and children, hierarchy and community—but that different societies could find different, and equally valuable, ways of solving them. Anthropologists set out to discover those ways.

The dilemmas of sex and gender and the tensions between autonomy and jealousy, adventure and commitment, identity and attraction, were especially vivid to young women of the 1920s like Mead, Benedict, and Hurston. If the 1960s felt like a cultural watershed, the period pales in comparison with the decade when these women were coming of age. Virginia Woolf said that around December 1910, human character changed, and you can feel the reverberations of that change in these stories.

Looking at how other cultures resolved those dilemmas was a way of expanding the possibilities of their own culture. The culture of Samoa was actually more complicated and contradictory than it seems in Mead’s book. But her core idea was right: In other places, there were better paths through adolescence than the tormented, repressive American one.

As you read about Mead and her lovers, you can’t help remarking on a recurrent tragicomic hopelessness about brilliant young women’s efforts to figure out sex. That’s true whether the protagonist is Mary Shelley in the 1820s, Margaret Mead in the 1920s, or a polyamorist today. You also can’t help remarking that the person at the apex of a love triangle—the position Mead found herself in again and again—is rather likely to conclude that polyamory is natural and jealousy is cultural, while the folks at the other two vertices are more likely to argue the opposite view.

More broadly, the history of feminism has seen a pendulum swing between libertine and puritan impulses. A hundred years earlier, another great feminist anthropologist working closer to home carefully studied how adolescent village girls came of age. But Jane Austen concluded that resisting male pressure and seduction was the route to empowerment, a view that may resonate more nowadays than Mead’s free love under the palm trees.

Still, the back-and-forth doesn’t mean that nothing changes, or that the project of cultural expansion is doomed. (I doubt that my granddaughter will figure out sex entirely either, but she’ll be a lot further along than Shelley or Austen—or Mead.) Neither Mead nor Benedict could fully envision the best example of 20th-century cultural transformation. They pointed out that homosexuality was accepted in other cultures and came under fire for saying it, even from other anthropologists. Edward Sapir was another famous Boas student (and another ex-lover of Mead’s), and he argued that gay sex was not just unnatural but pathological.

Benedict was the most stable and satisfying love of Margaret Mead’s early life, and another anthropologist, Rhoda Métraux, was Mead’s partner for more than 20 years. And yet the fearless, transgressive public intellectual never openly identified herself as bisexual or lesbian. Even in the 1960s, when I was reading Coming of Age, romantic love with a woman was still far outside my personal realm of possibilities—35 years passed before I discovered it.

In 2019, it’s easy to imagine Benedict and Mead settling into a happy academic marriage with a big house and kids and dogs. In 1919, it was impossible. But the anthropologists who showed how sexual patterns and expectations could vary and change helped make that kind of marriage a reality.

The very word culture, and the idea that people in one culture can learn from people in others, is taken for granted now. But King shows how revolutionary those concepts were at a time when scientists classified people as savage, barbarian, or civilized, and three-quarters of American universities offered courses in eugenics. In the 1920s, as King vividly conveys, ideas about biologically based racial, ethnic, and gender superiority were considered scientific, modern, and progressive. (In some quarters they still are.) When the Nazis looked for examples of a science that justified racial discrimination, and a government that wrote racial categories into law, they turned to the United States.

Boas heroically led the charge against the pseudoscience of race, and his students followed, combining their academic work with public action. Hurston made her mark by her very existence as an African American woman graduate student at Columbia. Boas, Benedict, and Mead also dedicated themselves to fighting the forces of populist xenophobia before and during World War II. Even more striking, after the war, Benedict’s famous book The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture (1946) was an explicit attempt to combat anti-Japanese bias.

At the end of the 20th century, anthropology went through an intellectual and moral crisis. The malign influence of postmodernism, which actually did advocate a profound relativism, played a part. Yet the crisis was also an appropriate reaction to a real problem—privileged members of one culture were parachuting in to study the threatened and oppressed members of other cultures. The result was a kind of paralysis. If people from one culture couldn’t say anything about people from another, for both political and philosophical reasons, why do anthropology at all?

Another development, from the opposite direction, also made anthropology problematic. The late 20th century saw the rise of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, which largely rejected the very idea that cultural difference and change were important. Mead’s work was attacked, in a way that now seems transparently sexist and ideologically motivated, and the unfair charge that she fabricated her data still lingers in the public imagination. Her methods, as she herself recognized, were not as careful and rigorous as later anthropologists’—she and the other pioneers were more or less making them up as they went along—but there is no doubt that her observations of Samoa were genuine and accurate.

More recently, anthropology has revived itself by interacting with other disciplines. Inspired by evolutionary biology, behavioral ecologists such as Sarah Hrdy of UC Davis study how basic biological imperatives—child care, for example—play out in different societies. Inspired by cognitive science, cognitive anthropologists such as Rita Astuti of the London School of Economics study how intuitive theories of kinship and death develop in different cultures. Stanford’s T. M. Luhrmann, and other anthropologists of religion, study how different cultural models of the mind configure religious experience. (Women are still exceptionally prominent in the field—an important legacy of those early figures.) Psychologists and economists are also starting to appreciate the need to study cultures beyond what are known as the WEIRD (Western-educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) ones.

Our very conceptions of biology and culture are changing, and the new ideas redeem the vision of the anthropological pioneers. The old distinctions between biology and culture, nature and nurture, just don’t work. Today, it’s clear that culture is our nature, and the ability to change is our most important innate trait. Human beings are uniquely, biologically gifted at imagining new ways that people and the world could be, and transmitting those new possibilities to the next generation. Human imagination and cultural transformation go hand in hand. Some of the most important current work in anthropology, biology, and psychology looks at the mechanisms that allow cultural transmission and change across generations. Children’s brains are biologically adapted both to innovate and to learn from their elders, and teenagers, in particular, are often at the cutting edge of cultural change. Mead’s focus on childhood and adolescence was prescient.

The girls of Samoa showed Mead that there was a different way to grow up, a different way to become a woman. Mead’s book passed on that sense of other possibilities to me. The early anthropologists made us realize just how many ways there are to be human.

 The Students of Sex and Culture. By Alison Gopnik. The Atlantic ,  August 2019.