Gods of the upper air: book on race, science…

wash post:https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/the-social-scientists-who-transformed-how-we-think-about-race-and-gender/2019/08/16/c3622dbc-a316-11e9-b732-41a79c2551bf_story.html

The social scientists who transformed how we think about race and gender

Less than a century ago, a group of American cultural anthropologists used their research about other societies to combat racism, which was centered on fears that America’s supposed racial purity was being defiled by immigration. These anthropologists, whose stories Charles King tells in “Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century,” would also challenge other prevailing attitudes of the time, including the idea that sex and gender were natural, immutable characteristics that prescribed heterosexual monogamy and legitimated male dominance over women.

The leader of these anthropologists was Franz Boas, known to his students as “Papa Franz.” Scientists of Boas’s era were determined to prove that Euro-American civilization was the apogee of an evolutionary process in which natives the world over, most of whom were in the process of being colonized, represented prior stages of humanity, such as “barbarism” and “savagery.” Boas was among the first to question these assumptions.

(Doubleday)

Born into a Jewish family in 1858 in what is now northern Germany, Boas received his formal training in physics but shifted his interests to the study of people after taking part in an Arctic expedition to Baffin Island, Canada. There he came to realize that the supposedly more “primitive” Inuit people he was encountering possessed a complex culture that allowed them to survive on the icy tundra, their skills as significant within their contexts as his doctoral degree was in his. Boas, who immigrated to the United States and spent years in temporary academic positions before finally securing a job at Columbia University, argued that cultures did not evolve but were, in fact, products of the influences of their environment.

ut it was Boas’s ideas on race that were the most revolutionary. While scientists were using pseudoscientific methods, such as measuring skull size, to argue that race was a biological characteristic indicating who should be at the top of the social order, Boas asserted that race was merely a genetic trait that had no bearing on intelligence or ability. “What people did,” King writes, “rather than who they were, ought to be a starting point for a legitimate science of society and, by extension, the basis for government policy on immigration.” Further, Boas and his followers promoted the idea of cultural relativism, the idea that prejudices and judgments need to be suspended to better understand others.

The lives of Boas and his students make for riveting storytelling, and the author’s imaginative prose enlivens their discoveries, romantic exploits and professional jealousies. Perhaps the most famous member of Boas’s anthropological circle was Margaret Mead, who wrote prolifically from the 1920s until the 1970s, relating anthropology to contemporary issues such as monogamy and teenage rebellion. Observing that adolescents in Samoa did not experience the moodiness and rage common to American teenagers, Mead noted that “the stress is in our civilization, not in the physical changes through which our children pass.” In another study across three islands in Papua New Guinea, Mead cited multiple examples of what was considered appropriate behavior for men and women, leading her to conclude that gender practices varied widely from culture to culture. To Mead, the point of gender liberation wasn’t to remake women in men’s image but rather to unleash “human beings’ potential from the roles…see link