Introduction
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a small group of pioneering anthropologists led by Franz Boas revolutionized how we think about culture, race, gender, and human diversity. At a time when racist and sexist views were widely accepted as scientific fact, Boas and his students challenged the prevailing wisdom through meticulous fieldwork and data collection. Their groundbreaking research laid the foundations for modern cultural anthropology and profoundly influenced how we understand human differences today.
Charles King's book "Gods of the Upper Air" tells the story of Franz Boas and his circle of researchers, including Margaret Mead and Zora Neale Hurston, who developed the concept of cultural relativism - the idea that cultures should be understood on their own terms rather than judged against Western standards of "civilization." Through their work, they demonstrated that supposed racial and gender differences were largely shaped by culture and environment rather than biology. Though controversial in their time, their ideas helped pave the way for greater tolerance and equality in American society.
The Social and Political Context
To appreciate the radical nature of Boas and his students' work, it's important to understand the social and political context they were operating in. In the decades after the Civil War, the United States introduced a system of racial segregation and disenfranchisement known as Jim Crow laws. These laws mandated the separation of whites and blacks in schools, hospitals, public transportation, and even cemeteries. They also restricted where people of different races could live and buy property, creating racially segregated cities and neighborhoods.
At the same time, there was growing hostility toward immigrants, especially those from Southern and Eastern Europe. Many Americans viewed Jews, Italians, Poles and other immigrant groups as racially and culturally inferior, believing they were tainting the Anglo-Saxon character of the nation. This xenophobia culminated in the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which set strict quotas on immigration from certain countries.
These racist and nativist policies were justified by pseudoscientific theories of racial hierarchy that were widely accepted at the time. Many scientists and scholars believed that humanity could be divided into distinct races, with Anglo-Saxons at the top of the evolutionary ladder and other groups occupying lower rungs. Early anthropologists like Lewis Henry Morgan argued that societies progressed from "savagery" to "barbarism" to "civilization," with Western culture representing the pinnacle of human development.
It was in this context of entrenched racism and ethnocentrism that Franz Boas began to develop a radically different approach to studying human cultures and societies.
Franz Boas: The Father of American Anthropology
Franz Boas was born in 1858 to a middle-class Jewish family in Minden, Germany. From an early age, he was fascinated by the natural world and dreamed of going on scientific expeditions to far-off lands. After studying physics and geography at German universities, Boas got his chance in 1883 when he embarked on an expedition to Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic.
This trip proved to be a transformative experience for the young scientist. As he lived among and studied the local Inuit people, Boas began to see them not just as research subjects, but as fellow human beings with their own rich culture and way of life. He realized how much he depended on their knowledge and skills to survive in the harsh Arctic environment. This led Boas to a profound insight - that one's education and abilities are relative to one's circumstances and environment.
After returning from Baffin Island, Boas made his way to the United States, where he hoped to find work at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. Though initially unsuccessful, Boas was impressed by how American scholars were engaging in the kind of observational fieldwork he had done in the Arctic. He decided to settle permanently in the U.S., where he would go on to revolutionize the field of anthropology.
Boas's approach to anthropology was radically different from that of his contemporaries. Rather than trying to fit diverse cultures into a universal scheme of human progress, Boas argued that each culture should be understood on its own terms. He insisted on rigorous data collection and fieldwork before drawing any theoretical conclusions. This evidence-based, inductive approach stood in stark contrast to the deductive reasoning of many early anthropologists, who often started with theories and then sought evidence to support them.
Through his fieldwork among Native American tribes of the Pacific Northwest, Boas observed that geographically proximate groups often had very different customs and cultural artifacts. This led him to conclude that a society's specific history had a greater impact on its development than environmental factors. Boas argued that cultures were not evolving along a single path from "primitive" to "civilized," but were endlessly adaptable based on their particular circumstances.
This idea, which came to be known as cultural relativism, was revolutionary. It suggested that Western customs and beliefs were not inherently superior or more rational than those of other societies - they were simply the product of specific historical and environmental conditions. For example, Boas pointed out that the Western use of forks was not more "advanced" than eating with hands or chopsticks, as all these methods carried similar risks of injury.
Boas's ideas earned him both admirers and critics in the scientific community. In 1897, he became a professor at Columbia University, where he would train a generation of anthropologists in his methods and philosophy. From this position of influence, Boas launched a sustained critique of racist pseudoscience and worked to promote a more tolerant, egalitarian view of human diversity.
Debunking Racial Science
One of Boas's most important contributions was his systematic debunking of racial science. In the early 20th century, many scientists and policymakers believed that humanity could be divided into distinct races with inherent physical and mental characteristics. These ideas were used to justify racist policies like segregation and immigration restrictions.
In 1908, Boas was commissioned by the U.S. Congress to conduct a large-scale study on the effects of immigration on the American population. Boas and his team meticulously measured the physical characteristics of nearly 18,000 people in New York City, including immigrants and their American-born children. The results were groundbreaking.
Boas found that the American-born children of immigrants had more in common physically with other American-born children than with their parents' ethnic groups. This suggested that environmental factors like diet and living conditions could alter supposedly fixed racial traits within a single generation. Moreover, Boas's data showed so much variation within racial groups that the very concept of distinct biological races was called into question.
These findings directly contradicted the racial theories of the time, which held that racial characteristics were permanent and hereditary. Boas's work demonstrated that human physical traits were far more malleable than previously thought, and that environment played a crucial role in shaping them. This dealt a major blow to scientific racism and laid the groundwork for our modern understanding of human biological variation.
Despite the strength of Boas's evidence, racist ideologies remained influential. In 1916, the American writer Madison Grant published "The Passing of the Great Race," which warned that immigration was diluting America's superior Nordic stock. Grant's book became hugely popular and influenced racist policies in the U.S. and abroad, including Nazi Germany's eugenics programs. Boas spent much of his later career fighting against these dangerous ideas, insisting on the fundamental equality of all human beings regardless of race.
Margaret Mead: Rethinking Gender and Sexuality
As a professor at Columbia, Boas was committed to training female anthropologists, recognizing that they could gain unique insights into the lives of women in other cultures. One of his most famous students was Margaret Mead, who would go on to become one of the most influential anthropologists of the 20th century.
Mead's interest in anthropology was closely tied to her personal life and struggles with American social norms. As a young woman, she chafed against restrictive ideas about gender roles and sexuality. She was involved in a complex romantic relationship with her mentor Ruth Benedict (another of Boas's students) while also being married to a man. Mead wondered if there might be more open and flexible approaches to love and sexuality in other cultures.
For her first major fieldwork project, Mead traveled to Samoa to study adolescence in a non-Western society. She wanted to know if the turbulent teenage years were a universal experience or if they were shaped by cultural factors. Her resulting book, "Coming of Age in Samoa" (1928), became a sensation. Mead portrayed Samoan culture as having a much more relaxed and positive attitude toward sex and adolescence compared to puritanical American society.
While some of Mead's specific claims about Samoan culture have been disputed by later researchers, her work was groundbreaking in suggesting that many aspects of gender and sexuality that Westerners saw as "natural" were in fact culturally constructed. This aligned with Boas's ideas about cultural relativism and challenged the notion that Western gender norms were universal or biologically determined.
Mead continued to explore these themes in her later work. Her 1935 book "Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies" examined gender roles in three different New Guinea cultures. She found that traits considered "masculine" or "feminine" in Western society were often reversed or differently distributed in these cultures. For example, in one society men were expected to be emotional and nurturing while women were assertive and practical.
Based on her research, Mead argued that gender roles and temperaments were largely shaped by culture rather than biology. She suggested that Western society had evolved to draw sharp distinctions between males and females, but that this was not universal or inevitable. Mead believed that societies should focus on nurturing individual talents rather than enforcing rigid gender categories.
These ideas were radical for their time and faced significant criticism. However, they laid important groundwork for later feminist theory and our modern understanding of gender as a social construct. Mead became a public intellectual and media figure, bringing anthropological insights to a wide audience through magazine articles and interviews. She played a crucial role in popularizing the idea that many aspects of human behavior are culturally determined rather than biologically fixed.
Zora Neale Hurston: Celebrating African American Culture
Another key figure in Boas's circle was Zora Neale Hurston, an African American writer and anthropologist who made groundbreaking contributions to the study of Black culture in the Americas. Hurston grew up in Florida and later became part of the Harlem Renaissance, a flowering of African American art and literature in 1920s New York. She studied anthropology under Boas at Barnard College and quickly became one of his star pupils.
Hurston's approach to anthropology was unique and innovative. While most anthropologists of the time (including Boas) saw African American culture as a diluted version of African traditions that had survived slavery, Hurston believed that Black communities in the Americas had developed vibrant and worthy cultures of their own. She focused on studying these cultures on their own terms rather than trying to trace their African origins.
For her fieldwork, Hurston returned to her native Florida to collect folklore, songs, and stories from rural Black communities. This research resulted in her 1935 book "Mules and Men," the first serious ethnographic study of African American folklore. Hurston's work was groundbreaking in treating Black American culture as a subject worthy of serious academic study.
Hurston's anthropological training also informed her fiction writing. Her novel "Their Eyes Were Watching God" (1937) incorporated dialect and folklore from her research, presenting a rich portrayal of Black rural life that challenged stereotypes and celebrated the community's cultural richness.
One of Hurston's most fascinating research experiences came during a trip to Haiti in 1936. There, she encountered a woman in a hospital who was believed to be a "zombie" - someone who had died and been brought back to life through dark magic. Rather than dismissing this as superstition, Hurston sought to understand the cultural beliefs and social functions behind the zombie phenomenon.
She realized that belief in zombies was an important part of Haitian culture, reflecting a worldview that included states between life and death. Hurston drew parallels between the social role of "zombies" in Haiti and the marginalized status of many Black Americans, who were often treated as if they were socially dead. This insightful analysis showed how anthropological understanding could shed light on complex social realities.
Hurston's work was ahead of its time in many ways. She celebrated the vibrancy and value of African American culture at a time when many scholars still saw it as primitive or inferior. She also pioneered techniques of participant observation, fully immersing herself in the communities she studied rather than observing from a distance. Though her work was often overlooked during her lifetime, Hurston is now recognized as a major figure in both anthropology and American literature.
The Legacy and Relevance of Boasian Anthropology
The ideas developed by Boas and his students were revolutionary in their time and faced significant opposition. They were accused of being naive, immoral, and even un-American for challenging deeply held beliefs about racial and cultural superiority. Many of them, like Mead, spent much of their careers defending their work against constant criticism.
As Western society became more tolerant in the latter half of the 20th century, some of the specific claims and methods of Boasian anthropology came to be seen as outdated or flawed. For instance, some of Mead's generalizations about Samoan culture have been challenged by later researchers. Modern anthropologists have developed more nuanced and context-specific approaches to studying cultures.
However, the core principles established by Boas and his circle remain profoundly influential and relevant today. These include:
Cultural Relativism: The idea that cultures should be understood on their own terms rather than judged by Western standards. This principle encourages empathy and challenges ethnocentrism.
The Critique of Biological Determinism: Boas and his students showed that many traits attributed to race or sex are actually shaped by culture and environment. This undermined scientific racism and sexism.
The Importance of Fieldwork: Boas insisted on rigorous data collection and firsthand observation before drawing conclusions. This evidence-based approach remains central to anthropology and other social sciences.
The Fluidity of Identity: By showing how malleable racial and gender categories can be, Boasian anthropology laid groundwork for modern understandings of identity as socially constructed and multifaceted.
Valuing Diversity: Boas and his students celebrated human diversity as a source of richness rather than seeing difference as a problem to be solved.
These ideas have had a profound impact far beyond the field of anthropology. They have influenced fields like sociology, psychology, and gender studies. More broadly, Boasian concepts have shaped modern liberal attitudes toward multiculturalism, tolerance, and equality.
The relevance of these ideas is clear when we look at current events. Racist and xenophobic rhetoric still plays a major role in politics, as seen in debates over immigration and in the rise of white nationalist movements. Gender roles and sexuality remain contentious issues in many societies. In this context, the Boasian emphasis on understanding and respecting cultural differences, while also recognizing our common humanity, remains as important as ever.
Moreover, the Boasian tradition of using rigorous research to challenge prejudice and pseudoscience is crucial in an era of "fake news" and science denialism. Just as Boas used careful measurement to debunk racial pseudoscience, modern anthropologists and other researchers continue to use evidence-based approaches to counter misconceptions about human diversity.
Conclusion
Franz Boas and his circle of anthropologists were intellectual revolutionaries who challenged some of the most deeply held beliefs of their time. By insisting on the fundamental equality and shared humanity of all peoples, they helped lay the groundwork for the civil rights movements and social changes of the later 20th century.
Their work reminds us that many of the categories we take for granted - like race, gender, or the superiority of Western civilization - are not fixed or natural, but are products of specific historical and cultural circumstances. This insight invites us to question our own assumptions and to approach cultural differences with curiosity and empathy rather than judgment.
At the same time, the story of Boas and his students shows the power of rigorous, evidence-based research to challenge prejudice and expand our understanding of what it means to be human. In a world still grappling with issues of diversity, equality, and cultural conflict, the Boasian tradition of anthropology offers valuable tools for building a more tolerant and inclusive society.
The legacy of Boas, Mead, Hurston, and their colleagues challenges us to see the complexity and potential in every human being, regardless of their background. It encourages us to create a society that nurtures individual talents and celebrates cultural diversity rather than enforcing rigid categories or hierarchies. While their specific findings may sometimes be outdated, their core message - that humanity is endlessly diverse yet fundamentally equal - remains as relevant and urgent today as it was a century ago.
As we navigate an increasingly interconnected yet often divided world, the insights of these pioneering anthropologists can help us build bridges of understanding across cultures. They remind us that by studying and appreciating human diversity, we can gain a richer understanding not just of others, but of ourselves and our place in the tapestry of human experience.