Abstract
The “upper air” is the author’s trope for “seeing the world as it is requires some distance, a view from the upper air” (p. 345). The gods of the upper air are Franz Boas and some of his students, most notably Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Zora Neale Thurston, and Ella Deloria. The book is a collective biography of these scholars and the reception of their ideas in their homeland. It is a story of success that was at the same time failure. Having once captured the public imagination these scholars then lost it in the face of determined push back by advocates of racialism and “eugenics,” in combination with a certain self-destructiveness on their own part. King sees his “gods” as shapers of outlooks now taken for granted on race, sex, and gender. His case is not fully convincing. The persistence of reactionary politics and policies in the USA suggests the enlightenment project of Boas & Co. still has some way to go. King perhaps overstates their radicalism. Race was indeed one of their conscious targets. Sex and gender are another matter. It is true that there was some sexual adventurousness among these academic “gods,” especially between Benedict and Mead, but neither one used their position as public intellectuals to engage in advocacy for it, still less did they connect it to their anthropological science. Mead’s title was Coming of Age in Samoa, not Coming Out in Samoa. You will not find in her many years as a Redbook columnist that Margaret Mead advocated homosexuality. Race is a different matter. Their total opposition to race and racial thinking stemmed from Boas’s view that race simply did not exist. Sex, straight and otherwise, existed. Its gendered expression in social mores was to be explained as culture. “Culture” was the contribution of these “gods” to the discourse of the society and it was also their tragic flaw.
The book follows each of its main characters into the field, beginning dramatically with Margaret Mead arriving at American Samoa in the 1920s and flashing back decades to Boas on Baffin Island and on the West Coast of Canada. The goal of their fieldwork was what they called “salvage ethnography”: chronicling cultures that risked obliteration due to assimilation. Roughly in chronological order the book follows Mead on subsequent field trips to elsewhere in Melanesia. Thurston is tracked through the American South, Harlem, and Haiti. Benedict stayed closer to home: a few months spent interviewing Zuni people in Utah and then later painstakingly studying Japanese culture at a distance from her New York study. The main drift of the major works of these scholars is summarized briefly, as far as Benedict’s 1946 The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. The career of the latter is telling. It was a best-seller that undoubtedly exerted considerable influence on the occupation regime of Japan. Yet not long later it was treated as an embarrassment and quietly buried in academic circles and, later still, by the general public. Nor was it salvage ethnography.
King also surveys the equally productive defenders of race and white hegemony. The latter gained the attention of legislators who passed race based immigration laws that were looked to as models by the Nazis. Boas and his students went from being outsiders resisting the nativists and racialists, to established figures, at least in anthropology. Their relative lack of success with the general public and legislators is not explored.
The author is an historian, not an anthropologist. He is patient with his subjects and seems to have ploughed through the many boxes of papers they left behind them. This is the second recent book where an historian takes a close look at Boas & Co. The earlier was British: Peter Mandler’s Return from the Natives (reviewed in these pages at 2017, Vol. 47(4–5) 359–369). Mandler found in the concept of culture the seeds of its own self-destruction. Advocacy of “cultural relativity” all too easily was read as cultural relativism. Cultural relativism is inconsistent. The Boas circle thought that the United States could learn a good deal from other cultures, other ways of organizing social life. Such a program presupposes that there are truths and values to learn, not that there is a relativist free for all. Chauvinist American legislators could denounce cultural relativity as a dishonorable refusal to acknowledge the semi-official doctrine of exceptionalism.
Mandler is somewhat more jaundiced about the “gods” than King. He is very clear that the later ideas about “culture cracking” were so cranky that the work was eventually deplored and shunned by a majority of anthropologists. Culture cracking was developed during the second world war and offered to government as a technique for managing relations with allies and with enemies. It was devised by Mead, her third husband Gregory Bateson, and a collaborator, Geoffrey Gorer. Its paradigm case was Gorer’s claim that the key to “cracking” Russian culture was the practice of swaddling infants.
Mandler is also clearer about the transatlantic rivalry between the Boas circle and the social anthropologists trained in Britain by Bronislaw Malinowski and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown. Neither of these scholars, gurus in their own way, not unlike Boas, took the cultural approach very seriously. They were Durkheimian sociologists, interested in structure not culture. Similarly to Boas & Co. they also had no time for race still less for racialism, nativism, and so on. Both the Boasians and the Brits were invested in scientific, explanatory anthropology. The Boasians explained by referring to patterns of culture. The Brits countered that patterns of culture explained nothing, but were themselves explainable with reference to social organization and social structure. This once-intense debate has been rendered moot. The once unquestioned idea that anthropology was a science has itself come under challenge. Some successors have abandoned that aim. These tensions in the history and historiography of anthropology have contributed to that radical strain of thought so pervasive today that anthropology has to be a kind of political liberation project and to engage in breast beating about its past iniquities. Because much British and French anthropology was conducted under and subsidised by colonial regimes this has to be endlessly pointed out and apologised for. I suppose those arguing in this way know as well as anybody that colonialism in Sudan does not bear on the fact that the Nuer have a patrilineal kinship system and an acephalous polity. These facts were disclosed by E. E. Evans-Pritchard who certainly enjoyed the protections of being cocultural with the colonizers rather than the colonized. His works documenting Nuer social organization and social structure are landmarks in the history of scientific social anthropology. Their truth or falsity is logically independent of the conditions under which Evans-Pritchard worked.
What tilted the balance away from science and enlightenment? Why did the good influence of these “gods” fail to eliminate racial prejudice and discrimination based upon it? I am not sure what King’s argument is. Part of it is that cultural relativity was taken to mean cultural relativism, that is, the abdication of standards and judgment on other cultures as well as one’s own. It is one thing to adopt such a strategy facing outwards. Mead’s subtitle famously, was “A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization,” in other words, America can learn from Samoa. It is another thing to adopt it facing inwards. How does the logic of that go? Can we even bear to think of our own society without some critical standards? Or, the opposite, can we bear to be critical of our own society and compare it adversely to others? Contemporary readers might be aware of the welter of judgments that are currently in the mass media (January 2021): American exceptionalism, Make America Great Again, and the Secretary of State instructing Voice of America staff to project in their work that America is the greatest country in the world, the greatest country the world has ever seen. Certainly such discourse is not consonant with relativism. It should however be consonant with cultural relativity which merely asserts that the world is diverse, cultures differ, and that on the whole this is to be acknowledged and celebrated. Let 100 flowers bloom, etc.
As this book amply documents, the history of anthropology is contested ground. Since anthropology emerged as a distinct arena of intellectual endeavor it has at times embraced ideas and actions that later anthropologists have found to be false. One reaction to that discovery is embarrassment and a refusal to give it its due. There is always argument in the history of science about how to present past errors. Error is often treated as culpable and apologetics seem in order. A more rational attitude is available, as I argued in this journal 30 years ago (volume 19, 1989, 345–375). I left aside at that time an equally troubling historiographic issue: episodes in the history of science that are abhorrent. For example, it is a fact that generations of previous scientists engaged in vivisection. Descriptions of it are sickening. (Yet some of it still goes on.) The sickening feeling has an extra kick to it if we idealize the ancestors involved. Logic offers us a scalpel to separate abhorrence from science: the fact that Descartes engaged in vivisection does not go to the truth of his ideas. By parallel argument anthropology may be defended: the fact that past anthropologists embraced ideas and carried out actions that we nowadays find intolerable, such as endorsing and benefitting from colonialism, does not nullify all their ideas, still less does it invalidate the science of anthropology as such.
Race, sex, and gender are matters much contested in liberal democracies, including the United States. That anthropologists have had much to say on them is well-known. Why then is it that from being the vanguard of progressive thought, anthropology has become a villain, part of the problem? How is it that the heroes and heroines of the subject, especially Franz Boas and his students Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict have sunk to being embarrassments? (Mead was to be on the cover of American Anthropologist, but then was cancelled (see http://www.americananthropologist.org/2020/06/26/statement-about-march-2020-cover/). Her sin was to have posed with some skulls. This was to disrespect the skulls, or their present descendants, because their images were used without permission. Such hyper-sensitivity is offered as an atonement, I suppose. It does not strike me as especially convincing or necessary. The errors of our intellectual ancestors, whether factual or moral, are signs that we learned something. That we learned something shows we are doing science and that the errors and the horrors are part of the history of that science.