“Gods of the Upper Air” is a fascinating look at a momentous time during the history of anthropology. Written by Charles King and published in 2019, the book is built around the story of Franz Boas, who was a German immigrant and the anthropology mentor to a number of groundbreakers like Margaret Mead. Boas was one of 1.8 million German speakers who settled in the US between 1880-1900. Unlike an earlier group of German immigrants who were mostly Catholic, this wave was primarily Protestant or Jewish.

In the early 1900s, the view that your race was key in determining who and what you could become went unchallenged. Boas and Meade upended that idea and pioneered the concept of cultural relativity. They and their followers had the very new idea that Americans might not have created the greatest country that ever existed. “Today, cultural relativism is usually listed among the enemies of tradition and good behavior, along with such terms as postmodernism and multiculturalism.”

John Wesley Powell said that civilization is a progression forward. Boas thought Powell was wrong. Geographers and ethnologists should give up trying to model themselves after physicists and other students of the natural world. It is impossible to generalize about a thing that depends on context. The point was that people unlike us are not degraded or lesser but instead they are simply at a different stage of human progressions.

Boas and his group did a study in New York City, and it showed that American born children of immigrants had more in common with other American kids than they did with people from their ancestral groups. Children adapted to their new diets and new environments in all kinds of ways, even in the very shape of their heads.

At the same time, eugenics was used as a basis for compulsory vaccinations and forced sterilization. There were many who believed that they could root out deficient people from society. This practice continued until the 1960s. But most IQ tests actually measure cultural knowledge and not problem solving skills. Margaret Sanger, the founder of the American Birth Control League (which became Planned Parenthood) had a stated goal which was to prevent dysgenic breeding and prevent the decline of what she saw as the master class.

Boas, on the other hand, saw all humans as individuals, not types. He believed that we are social beings who cling desperately to the social reality in which we are raised. Every society trains itself to see categories. Boas said the only thing the eugenics movement proved was how easily the mind is led to believe in an absolute value of those ideas in the surrounding culture. Researchers were seeing the world, not in terms of objective reality but in terms of the systems they knew best, including speech systems.

Margaret Mead’s fascinating story is laid out in this book. She had relationships with men and women and felt constrained by monogamy. Ruth Benedict was another Boas anthropologist contemporary and may have been the love of Mead’s life. At the same time, Mead had a deep romantic relationship with Edward Sapir. But while they were intellectually compatible, Sapir treated her ambition as a mental illness and always insisted that she was frail. But often, her health helped her in fieldwork as it made her someone that others wanted to care for and so they opened up more freely.

Mead is most famous for her insights into gender. She spent a great deal of time studying Samoans and was able to understand their sexuality. She realized that the adolescence angst we see in the West may be strictly due to our repressive ways. It is not a biological given.

Another Boas student was Zora Neale Hurston. Hurston realized that what she was studying as culture was how to be human. She wrote that Gods always behave like the people that make them. "Could you ever really know what it is to be a person of faith if you have never felt the tug for yourself? Could you make sense of a community’s mental universe if you didn’t take seriously their perception of the world and beyond?"

Hurston collaborated with the Federal Writers Project on a guidebook to Florida. She also paired up with Alan Lomax and documented the early history of blues music. Hurston said, “The most enduring prejudices are the comfortable ones, those hidden up close.” It should be no surprise that men often criticized the work of Mead and Hurston. Hurston, as a Black woman, faced an additional layer of criticism.

Boas, Mead, and Hurston showed too that European customs and beliefs make up just one way to be; there is nothing either more evolved or inevitable about them. Their ideas were disruptive, and they were hounded by the press, dismissed from jobs, and monitored by the FBI. Yet, the reach of Boas and his circle was immense. They knew the struggle for equality would be prolonged. Just before his death, Boas said, "We should never stop repeating the idea that racism is a monstrous error and an impudent lie."

Before World War II, Boas said, “The disappointment of my life was that Americans had succumbed to nationalism. Must one always kick the other fellow just because one likes one’s own way of life?” As King said, Boas was disappointed because, “Americans turned out to be less exceptional than anyone had supposed.”

These ideas continue to resonate and divide Americans today. One can draw a straight line through to our current culture battles. King ends the book with these words, “Seeing the world as it is requires some distance, a view from the upper air.” That is good advice for every moment in history.

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