Gods of the Upper Air

Gods of the Upper Air Plot Summary

Introduction

In the late 19th century, as European powers carved up Africa and America expanded westward, a quiet revolution was brewing in the halls of academia. While politicians and generals redrew maps along racial lines, a German-Jewish immigrant named Franz Boas and his students were systematically dismantling the very concept of race itself. Their weapons were not guns or manifestos, but meticulous fieldwork, cranial measurements, and cultural observations that would fundamentally transform how humanity understood itself. This intellectual revolution challenged centuries of assumptions about human difference at precisely the moment when such ideas were being used to justify imperialism, segregation, and eventually genocide. The story of the Boasian revolution offers profound insights into how scientific ideas shape society and how determined scholars can challenge entrenched prejudice. Through their groundbreaking research in Samoa, New Guinea, and Haiti, these anthropologists demonstrated that behaviors Americans considered "natural" were actually cultural constructions. Their battle against eugenics and scientific racism provided crucial intellectual ammunition for later civil rights movements. For anyone interested in understanding how science can both reinforce and challenge social hierarchies, how ideas about human difference have evolved, or how a small group of determined scholars can change the course of intellectual history, this remarkable story offers valuable lessons that continue to resonate in our own era of cultural conflict and scientific debate.

Chapter 1: Franz Boas: Challenging Scientific Racism (1858-1911)

In the late 19th century, as European powers carved up Africa and America expanded westward, scientific racism provided convenient justification for imperial ambitions. The prevailing view held that humanity was naturally divided into distinct races, each with inherent physical and mental characteristics that determined their place in civilization's hierarchy. This worldview wasn't merely academic—it shaped immigration policies, justified colonial exploitation, and influenced how societies treated their minorities. Into this intellectual landscape stepped Franz Boas, a German-Jewish immigrant whose journey would ultimately upend these entrenched beliefs. Born in 1858 in Minden, Germany, Boas initially trained in physics and mathematics before an expedition to Baffin Island in 1883-1884 transformed his outlook. Living among the Inuit, Boas experienced a profound realization: the people he encountered weren't primitive savages but complex individuals navigating their environment with sophisticated knowledge. This experience planted the seeds for his revolutionary approach to understanding human societies. After immigrating to America in 1886, Boas conducted extensive fieldwork among indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest. Unlike most researchers of his era who collected artifacts to display in museums organized by evolutionary stages, Boas insisted that objects should be understood within their cultural context. His methodological innovations transformed anthropology from a discipline that classified "primitive" peoples into evolutionary stages into one that sought to understand cultures on their own terms. He insisted that researchers suspend judgment about unfamiliar practices until they understood them within their cultural context. By 1896, Boas had secured a position at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where he began assembling exhibits that organized artifacts according to cultural context rather than evolutionary stage. Two years later, he joined Columbia University, establishing what would become the first major anthropology department in America. There, he trained generations of students in his scientific approach, insisting that cultures must be understood on their own terms rather than judged against Western standards. During this period, Boas conducted his groundbreaking study on immigrant body forms, published in 1911 as "Changes in Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants." This research directly challenged the foundational assumptions of scientific racism. Measuring thousands of immigrants and their American-born children, Boas discovered that supposedly fixed racial characteristics—like head shape—changed within a single generation. This empirical evidence struck at the heart of racial determinism by demonstrating that environment, not heredity, played the decisive role in shaping physical characteristics. By 1911, Boas had established the intellectual framework that would guide anthropology for decades to come. His emphasis on empirical research, cultural context, and the plasticity of human types directly challenged the scientific racism that had dominated Western thought. Though his ideas remained controversial, they provided a powerful alternative to the deterministic theories that had justified imperialism and discrimination. The stage was set for his students to extend these insights into new domains and bring them to wider audiences.

Chapter 2: Fieldwork Revolution: Mead's Samoa and Cultural Determinism

In August 1925, a twenty-three-year-old woman with a broken ankle and chronic neuritis boarded the steamship Sonoma bound for American Samoa. Margaret Mead, a recent Columbia University anthropology graduate, was embarking on fieldwork that would transform both her life and public understanding of culture. Under Franz Boas's guidance, she aimed to investigate whether adolescent turmoil was a biological universal or culturally shaped. This seemingly academic question would lead to revolutionary insights about human development and challenge fundamental Western assumptions. Arriving in Samoa, Mead employed methodological innovations that would redefine anthropological practice. Unlike earlier anthropologists who relied on brief visits and interpreters, Mead lived among Samoans for nine months, learned their language, and participated in daily life. She focused on understanding individuals rather than abstract cultural patterns, interviewing dozens of young women about their personal experiences. Most radically, Mead centered her research on women and girls, groups largely ignored by previous researchers. This approach, which she called "participant observation," would become standard practice in anthropological fieldwork. Mead's research revealed patterns starkly different from American expectations. Samoan adolescents, she found, experienced none of the storm and stress considered normal in Western societies. Young people transitioned smoothly into adulthood, with relatively relaxed attitudes toward sexuality and few conflicts with authority figures. "The stress is in our civilization," Mead concluded, "not in the physical changes through which our children pass." This insight suggested that many behaviors Americans considered biologically determined were actually products of cultural conditioning. The publication of "Coming of Age in Samoa" in 1928 catapulted Mead to fame and brought Boasian anthropology to a wider audience. Written in accessible prose and addressing topics of broad interest, the book sold over 3,000 copies in its first months—extraordinary for an academic work. Mead's conclusion that "adolescence represented no period of crisis or stress, but was instead an orderly developing of a set of slowly maturing interests and activities" challenged fundamental assumptions about human development. More profoundly, it suggested that if something as seemingly biological as adolescent rebellion was culturally variable, then perhaps many other aspects of human behavior previously considered "natural" might also be products of particular cultural environments. Following her success in Samoa, Mead conducted fieldwork among the Manus people of New Guinea in 1928. Living in stilt houses above a lagoon, she documented a society where children learned to navigate boats before they could walk and where religious beliefs centered around ancestral spirits. Their research challenged another supposed universal - that primitive peoples thought like children. Mead found that Manus children were remarkably practical and realistic in their thinking, while adults maintained elaborate supernatural beliefs. Through her accessible books and magazine articles, Mead brought anthropological perspectives on gender and identity to a broad public audience, influencing emerging discussions about women's roles, child development, and sexuality in American society. Her work demonstrated that practices Americans considered natural and universal - from adolescent rebellion to gender roles to religious beliefs - were in fact culturally specific. This perspective would profoundly influence how Americans understood themselves and others during a period of rapid social change.

Chapter 3: Ruth Benedict and the Patterns of Culture (1922-1934)

Ruth Benedict's entry into anthropology came through an unconventional path. Born in 1887, she spent years as a schoolteacher and unhappy housewife before enrolling in Boas's graduate program at age 34. Despite facing discrimination as an older woman with partial deafness, Benedict quickly distinguished herself through her intellectual brilliance and literary gifts. Her fieldwork among Pueblo peoples in the American Southwest in the early 1920s provided the foundation for her revolutionary approach to understanding cultural patterns. Benedict's breakthrough came with her 1934 masterwork, "Patterns of Culture," which transformed Boasian insights into a coherent theoretical framework. Drawing on her fieldwork and that of fellow anthropologists, Benedict compared three societies—the Zuni of New Mexico, the Dobu of Melanesia, and the Kwakiutl of the Northwest Coast—to demonstrate how each culture selected and emphasized different human potentialities. She likened cultures to individuals, each with a distinctive personality or "configuration" that integrated various elements into a meaningful whole. "A culture, like an individual, is a more or less consistent pattern of thought and action," she wrote, introducing the concept that would become known as cultural relativism. The book's central insight was that cultures represent different possible arrangements of human capacities rather than stages on an evolutionary scale. Benedict argued that each society makes certain behaviors and emotional expressions available while discouraging others. "The vast proportion of all individuals who are born into any society always and whatever the idiosyncrasies of its institutions, assume, as we have seen, the behavior dictated by that society." This perspective challenged the notion that Western norms represented the natural or optimal expression of human nature, suggesting instead that they reflected just one possible configuration among many. Benedict's work had profound implications for understanding difference. She demonstrated that behaviors considered abnormal or deviant in one society might be valued and integrated in another. Homosexuality, trance states, or aggressive competitiveness weren't inherently pathological but simply expressions that some cultures incorporated while others rejected. "Normality, in short, within a very wide range, is culturally defined," she wrote, undermining the universalist claims of Western psychiatry and psychology. "Patterns of Culture" became an unexpected bestseller, selling over two million copies and being translated into fourteen languages. Its accessible prose and compelling examples brought cultural relativism to a broad audience at a crucial historical moment. As fascism spread across Europe with its rigid racial hierarchies, Benedict offered an alternative vision of human diversity as a resource rather than a problem. Her work provided intellectual tools for questioning ethnocentrism and appreciating cultural difference at a time when such perspectives were urgently needed. Through Benedict, the Boasian approach evolved from a methodological stance into a coherent philosophical position. Cultural relativism wasn't merely a research technique but a way of understanding human diversity that had profound ethical implications. By demonstrating that Western standards weren't universal truths but cultural constructions, Benedict's work provided a powerful counterpoint to the hierarchical thinking that had dominated Western thought for centuries.

Chapter 4: Confronting Eugenics: The Battle Against Biological Determinism

While Boas and his students were developing their vision of cultural anthropology, a powerful opposing movement was gaining momentum across America. Eugenics—the effort to improve humanity through controlled breeding—had become a mainstream scientific and social movement by the 1910s. The Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor collected thousands of family histories to document the inheritance of traits like criminality, "feeblemindedness," and poverty. Books like Henry Goddard's "The Kallikak Family" (1912) purported to demonstrate how defective genes passed through generations, creating an underclass of "degenerates." These ideas translated directly into policy with devastating consequences for thousands of Americans. Between 1907 and 1927, twenty-four states passed compulsory sterilization laws targeting those deemed genetically unfit. Immigration restrictions, culminating in the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, were explicitly designed to limit entry of supposedly inferior racial stocks from southern and eastern Europe. In 1927, the Supreme Court upheld forced sterilization in Buck v. Bell, with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes infamously declaring, "Three generations of imbeciles are enough." By 1941, over 38,000 Americans had been sterilized without their consent. The Boas circle represented the most significant scientific opposition to this tide of biological determinism. In "Anthropology and Modern Life" (1928), Boas directly challenged eugenics, arguing that "types" were abstractions rather than biological realities. Ruth Benedict, who joined Columbia's anthropology department in 1923, published "Anthropology and the Abnormal" in 1934, demonstrating that behaviors considered pathological in one society might be valued in another. "The concept of the normal is properly a variant of the concept of the good," she wrote, revealing how cultural standards, not universal laws, determined what counted as deviant behavior. The battle against eugenics illustrated how the seemingly abstract debates about culture versus biology had profound real-world implications. Boas and his students weren't merely challenging academic theories but confronting policies that caused immense human suffering. Their work provided crucial scientific counterevidence to claims about racial and genetic determinism at a time when such ideas dominated public discourse. Though eugenics remained influential through the 1930s, the Boasian critique helped undermine its scientific legitimacy and laid groundwork for its eventual decline after World War II. This period also saw the Boas circle expanding their influence beyond academia. Mead's popular writing, Benedict's public lectures, and Boas's own political activism brought their ideas to wider audiences. When Madison Grant's racist tract "The Passing of the Great Race" appeared in 1916, Boas published a scathing review exposing its scientific flaws. During World War I, Boas risked his career by publicly condemning scientists who used their research as cover for espionage, insisting that science should serve humanity rather than nationalist agendas. These actions reflected their conviction that anthropology wasn't merely an academic pursuit but a moral stance against prejudice and determinism.

Chapter 5: Wartime Applications: Anthropology in World War II

As World War II engulfed the globe, the Boas circle found their expertise suddenly in high demand by government agencies seeking to understand both enemies and allies. The anthropologists who had spent decades studying cultural differences now applied their methods to the urgent challenges of wartime, transforming their discipline while shaping American strategy and policy. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 thrust America into a global conflict that demanded new forms of knowledge. Military planners and intelligence agencies needed information about societies where American troops would fight, while policymakers required insights into enemy psychology and social structure. Anthropologists, with their expertise in understanding cultural differences, were uniquely positioned to provide this knowledge. Within months, many members of the Boas circle had joined government agencies or military units, bringing anthropological perspectives to the war effort. Ruth Benedict's wartime work proved particularly consequential. In 1943, she joined the Office of War Information (OWI), where she was assigned to analyze Japanese culture and society. Working with Japanese-American informants, including Robert Hashima who had been released from an internment camp to assist her research, Benedict developed sophisticated analyses of Japanese social patterns, values, and behaviors. Her classified reports challenged prevailing stereotypes of the Japanese as fanatical and incomprehensible, instead explaining their actions within their cultural context. This work culminated in "The Chrysanthemum and the Sword" (1946), which presented Japanese culture as a coherent pattern with internal contradictions - a society valuing both aesthetic refinement and martial discipline. Margaret Mead similarly applied her expertise to wartime challenges. As executive secretary of the National Research Council's Committee on Food Habits, she studied how cultural factors influenced American eating patterns - crucial knowledge for planning wartime rationing programs. She also worked with the Office of Strategic Services (forerunner to the CIA) analyzing enemy societies and advising on psychological warfare. In "And Keep Your Powder Dry" (1942), Mead analyzed American national character, identifying cultural strengths and weaknesses relevant to the war effort. Her work helped government agencies understand how American cultural patterns might affect military training, morale, and international cooperation. The wartime period also saw anthropologists confronting racism within American society. When the government forcibly relocated and interned over 120,000 Japanese Americans in 1942, several Boas-trained anthropologists worked in the camps as "community analysts." While their participation in this system remains controversial, they documented the injustices of internment and advocated for more humane policies. Meanwhile, Benedict and Gene Weltfish produced "The Races of Mankind" (1943), a pamphlet debunking scientific racism that was distributed to millions of Americans despite being banned from military use for its controversial stance on racial equality. By war's end, anthropology had been transformed by these practical applications. The discipline had developed new methods for studying complex modern societies "at a distance" rather than through traditional fieldwork. Anthropologists had demonstrated their relevance to national policy while maintaining their commitment to cultural understanding. As America emerged as a global superpower, the Boasian perspective on cultural differences would inform postwar approaches to international relations, decolonization, and civil rights - though often in ways that simplified or distorted their nuanced theories.

Chapter 6: Legacy: How the Boas Circle Transformed Western Thought

The intellectual revolution initiated by Franz Boas and his students fundamentally transformed Western understanding of human diversity, leaving an enduring legacy that extends far beyond academic anthropology. Their collective work dismantled scientific racism, established cultural relativism as a key intellectual framework, and permanently altered how societies view differences among human groups. By the mid-20th century, the Boas circle had effectively demolished the scientific foundations of racism. Their meticulous research demonstrated that human biological variation did not align with popular racial categories, that environmental factors significantly influenced physical development, and that intelligence and capability varied independently of physical traits. This scientific refutation of racial determinism provided crucial intellectual ammunition for the civil rights movement and contributed to landmark legal decisions like Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which cited anthropological evidence against segregation. The UNESCO Statement on Race (1950), drafted with input from Boas's students, represented international scientific consensus rejecting biological racism. Cultural relativism - the principle that cultures should be understood in their own terms rather than judged by external standards - became a cornerstone of modern social thought. Ruth Benedict's formulation that cultures represent different "patterns" or configurations, each internally coherent though different from others, offered a powerful alternative to hierarchical views of human societies. This perspective influenced fields far beyond anthropology, from psychology and sociology to literature and art. By the 1960s, cultural relativism had become a foundational principle in education, international relations, and development work, though often in simplified forms that sometimes distorted the nuanced analyses of the Boas circle. The methodological innovations of the Boas circle permanently transformed social science research. Their emphasis on extended fieldwork, language learning, and participant observation became standard practice across disciplines studying human societies. Margaret Mead's focus on individuals within cultures and Zora Neale Hurston's insider-outsider perspective as both researcher and community member pioneered approaches that would later develop into feminist anthropology and native ethnography. Their methodological legacy lives on in contemporary qualitative research across the social sciences. Perhaps most significantly, the Boas circle changed how ordinary people understood themselves and others. Through accessible books, magazine articles, museum exhibits, and public lectures, they brought anthropological perspectives to millions of Americans. Margaret Mead became one of the most recognized scientists in America, regularly commenting on contemporary issues from child-rearing to gender roles. This public engagement helped normalize the idea that human behaviors are shaped by culture rather than biology - a perspective that gradually transformed everything from education and psychology to international relations and civil rights. The legacy of the Boas circle remains contested and complex. Critics have questioned aspects of their methodology, the accuracy of specific findings, and the political implications of cultural relativism. Yet their core insight - that human diversity reflects the remarkable adaptability of our species rather than inherent biological differences - has become fundamental to modern understanding of humanity. By challenging the scientific racism that had justified colonialism, slavery, and discrimination, the Boas circle helped create intellectual foundations for a more equitable world, even as many of their goals remain unrealized.

Summary

The Boasian revolution represents one of the most consequential intellectual transformations in modern history - a shift from viewing human differences as fixed biological hierarchies to understanding them as fluid cultural adaptations. This fundamental reorientation emerged from a tension between scientific evidence and entrenched social beliefs. While dominant Western institutions promoted racial hierarchies that justified colonialism and discrimination, Boas and his students meticulously documented how environment shaped physical traits, how cultural context determined behavior, and how supposed racial characteristics varied more within groups than between them. Their work revealed that what seemed "natural" or "universal" was often merely cultural - a profound insight that undermined centuries of hierarchical thinking about human difference. The legacy of this intellectual revolution offers crucial lessons for navigating our own era of cultural conflict and scientific debate. First, it demonstrates how empirical research can challenge even the most deeply entrenched social beliefs when conducted with methodological rigor and moral purpose. Second, it reveals the power of strategic popularization - how complex scientific ideas can transform public consciousness when translated into accessible language and compelling narratives. Third, it illustrates how intellectual frameworks shape social policy, from the eugenics movement's devastating impact on vulnerable populations to how cultural relativism eventually informed civil rights legislation. Perhaps most importantly, the Boasian revolution reminds us that understanding human difference requires both scientific precision and moral courage - a combination that remains essential as societies continue to struggle with questions of diversity, equality, and human potential in an increasingly interconnected world.

About Author

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Charles King

Charles King is a New York Times-bestselling author and a professor at Georgetown University. His books include EVERY VALLEY (2024), on the making of Handel's Messiah, which was a New York Times Notable Book; GODS OF THE UPPER AIR (2019), on the reinvention of race and gender in the early twentieth century, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of the Francis Parkman Prize and the Anisfield-Wolf Award; MIDNIGHT AT THE PERA PALACE (2014), on the birth of modern Istanbul, which was the inspiration for a Netflix series of the same name; and ODESSA (2011), winner of a National Jewish Book Award.

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