49 pages • 1 hour read
Charles KingGods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century
Nonfiction | Biography | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Importance of Cultural Relativity in Anthropological Research
One of the predominant tenets of adopting the Boasian approach to social science was the development of an awareness of the degree to which one’s own cultural framework, derived from their upbringing and their exposure to their own society, affected their opinions. One of Boas’s major, enduring criticisms of the social scientists in his field was their inability to extract themselves from their own framework of values when assessing the cultures they studied. Boas termed this phenomenon “cultural relativity,” and it has endured as a description of how one’s own cultural background creates bias.
Boas acknowledged that researchers would naturally have initial reactions in the field to certain practices, especially those that differed greatly from their own, but he stressed the need for researchers to interrogate those reactions and put aside their own cultural biases to reach more objective conclusions. King discusses how certain social concepts, like a “second cousin,” for example, widely understood in Western society, may not even be understood in another society while the concept of family between a network or community of people who are not related by blood is uncommon in mainstream Western culture but common elsewhere.
Boas insisted that his researchers assign neither their values nor their labels to the subjects of their field work; they must allow the people of these cultures to express themselves. Once researchers returned to Columbia, they might participate in analysis and theorizing based on what they and their colleagues had discovered and draw conclusions that would be integrated into their publications, but in the field, the goal was to engage and describe, not interpret.
Boas and his students wanted to discover which aspects of the human experience that were shared across cultures and which were particular to individual cultures; they evaluated the degree to which experiences were common in different cultures based upon their region, interactions with other societies, value systems and government, and their relationship to the world around them. Boas’s group’s work was groundbreaking in part because it did not contain the kind of paternalist judgments that earlier explorers had made about the people they encountered.
Boas’s emphasis on the importance of collecting data on a culture’s language, in how it was used, and the way that it described the society stemmed from his belief that language documentation was an essential component of data collection. By allowing cultures to describe and define themselves, rather than researching and interpreting their lives using Western terminology, researchers could avoid imposing their own value-laden concepts onto another society for whom those terms were meaningless, and allow them to describe themselves as much as possible.
Scientific Methods Challenge Bias
Having been trained in the scientific method, data collection, and statistical analysis during his time working on his doctorate in physics at Heidelberg, Boas incorporated those concepts when he transitioned into the field of social science. Boas emphasized avoiding value judgments and, in particular, separating one’s own visceral reactions in the moment, emotional and physical, in order to remain impartial and objective as an almost clinical observer.
His methodical approach to social science led him to conclusions that challenged the biases of his time. He discovered early in his career that the process of anthropometry, despite all of its categories for physical measurement-taking, did not reveal any physical similarities along ethnic or racial lines. It was then that Boas concluded that the idea of race as a biologically essential category did not exist. He further concluded that, since biological race could not be proven, all human beings must have basic humanity in common. This revelation obligated social scientists to treat their subjects with respect and compassion and to discover what being human meant in other cultures as a means of better understanding them and ourselves. Most of his researchers reported learning about themselves during their fieldwork because they interacted with their subjects as fellow human beings, rather than remaining detached observers. Boas insisted they not abandon empathy while documenting both differences and commonalities across cultures, as each informed the body of work on the human condition.
Just as Boas helped to discredit anthropometry and eugenics, Mead and Deloria made similar contributions to overturning long-held beliefs by applying rigorous scientific methods in their field work. Mead learned that the concept of adolescence in Western culture was a cultural construct meant to keep women docile, since the young women and girls of American Samoa did not display the same rebellious, moody, and combative period in their teenage years that Mead observed in young American women. When she learned that other cultures were more sexually liberated than her own, it was a comfort to her as someone who rejected monogamy, but also a chance for her to present other ways of being to a Western audience. Deloria’s painstaking research on Indigenous culture debunked the erroneous, and at times fictionalized, conclusions made by Dr. James R. Walker, who was considered an expert on the subject.
Threaded throughout the Boas circle’s body of work was the theme that people of other cultures and societies have wisdom and insight to share in the way that they live and interact with each other. His group treated the subjects of their anthropological studies as humans with dignity rather than as specimens to be cataloged: The acceptance of a universal humanity was for them a scientifically verified reality.
The Limits of the Boas Circle’s Egalitarianism
A challenge of writing historical nonfiction is effectively relating the events of a historical period while keeping the contemporary reader appraised of how these changes evolved over time. This is especially the case in a text like Gods of the Upper Air, in which the values and beliefs of the Boas circle evolved toward a more egalitarian outlook, but which also perpetuated value systems that, in the 21st century, could be considered outdated, or at least not as radical as they seemed in their own time.
When Boas challenged the social constructions of race and white superiority, he did not just refute the scientific soundness of eugenics. He claimed that White Anglo-Saxon and Euro-Americans had conceived of the idea of their own superiority as a justification for why they felt they should be allowed to hold dominion over and pass judgment upon the rest of the world. King never uses the term “white supremacy” in the book, which implies that Boas and his group did not address this theory directly, but they did denounce the belief in the inherent superiority of European civilization and the oppression of others it entailed. While many social scientists took a harsh view of the “degenerates” and “criminals” they hoped to eliminate from society, some, like John Wesley Powell, saw themselves as benevolent observers of people they did not see as their equals. Though paternalism seemed harmless to many researchers, Boas stressed that it still brought unnecessary bias to scientific study.
As egalitarian as the Boas circle tried to be, its members were not immune to cultural bias, racism, and sexism. Mead considered the study of North American Indigenous culture as a waste of time, as she felt there was not much in the way of culture left to study. Most members of the Boas circle, with the exception of Hurston, did not see the value in doing field research on African American cultural groups in rural areas, particularly the American South. Sapir and Fortune, when they felt that they could no longer control Mead, both proceeded to attack not only her morality and her motivations for becoming an academic, but also her mental health and her ability to function. These prejudices were so pervasive at the time that they continued to exert influence on even those who had made it their mission to try to separate themselves from biased thinking.
