Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century

Summary of Gods of the Upper Air

1. 1

   When a Young Woman Challenged the World's Deepest Assumptions

   

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   In August 1925, a frail 23-year-old with thick glasses stepped off a steamship onto American Samoa, carrying a question that would shake the foundations of Western thought: Is teenage rebellion hardwired into human biology, or is it something we invented? Margaret Mead had traveled halfway around the world despite chronic pain and an inability to swim, driven by a hunch that would prove revolutionary. At the time, scientific racism wasn't just an academic theory-it was shaping forced sterilization programs, immigration bans, and even presidential speeches about "race suicide." Against this backdrop, Mead and a circle of renegade anthropologists were about to prove that almost everything we believed about human nature was wrong. Their story reveals how science can either reinforce our prejudices or liberate us from them-a tension that still defines our world today. Franz Boas looked nothing like a typical professor. With wild hair and a thick accent, he seemed perpetually out of place in American academia. But his outsider status was precisely what made him dangerous to the establishment. Born to a German Jewish family in 1858, young Franz prepared for adventure by forcing himself to eat disgusting foods and practice deprivation-training that served him well when he lived among the Inuit in 1883.

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   The Revolutionary Who Learned to See Beyond His Own Culture

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   Living in Arctic conditions dependent on Inuit hospitality, Boas questioned everything. "Where among us is such hospitality?" he wrote to his fiancee. When diphtheria killed community members despite his meager medical supplies, he experienced what he called Herzensbildung - training your heart to truly see others' humanity. Back in America, the 1893 World's Fair displayed indigenous peoples like zoo exhibits while scientists ranked societies from "savage" to "civilized." Boas knew this was nonsense. Each culture represented a unique historical path understood only on its own terms. "All is individuality," he declared, launching a revolution dismantling the scientific foundations of racism itself. By the early 1900s, eugenics infected American life. Three-quarters of universities taught it as fact. Madison Grant's 1916 book warning of a "racial abyss" became required reading, even influencing The Great Gatsby. Hitler later called Grant's work "my Bible." This wasn't fringe thinking - it was mainstream American science.

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   The Data That Demolished Scientific Racism

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   Boas fought back with data. In 1908, he measured nearly 18,000 immigrants and their children across New York City. His findings were explosive: children born in America physically resembled other American-born children more than their own parents' supposed racial group. Head shapes changed. Facial features shifted. The supposedly fixed categories of race were melting away within a single generation. Environment and diet, not blood and destiny, shaped human bodies. Boas published these findings in his 1911 book "The Mind of Primitive Man," arguing that societies differed because of history and circumstance, not inherent ability. Yet America doubled down-the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act established immigration quotas favoring northern Europeans, remaining law for over forty years. While Boas battled institutions, remarkable women gathered around him. Ruth Benedict arrived in 1921 at age 34, adrift as a housewife to a biochemist. Anthropology ignited something in her-she completed her dissertation in just three semesters.

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   The Women Who Discovered Culture Creates Reality

   Living among the Zuni in New Mexico in 1924, Benedict discovered that normality is culturally defined. The Zuni challenged American assumptions - women owned property, ancestry flowed through mothers, gender-crossing was established tradition. What one society calls deviant, another embraces as natural. Margaret Mead, a brilliant Barnard undergraduate, became both Benedict's personal partner and intellectual collaborator. In Samoa, Mead found that adolescent rebellion - supposedly biological inevitability - simply didn't exist where sexual norms were fluid. Her 1928 "Coming of Age in Samoa" demonstrated that teenage turmoil was cultural invention, not biological destiny. Later work in New Guinea revealed three societies with completely different gender roles, distinguishing biological sex from social categories and suggesting liberation meant unleashing human potential from cultural cages. Zora Neale Hurston arrived at Barnard in 1925 with "a voice too big for polite company." At 34, she was older than most students, Black in an overwhelmingly white institution, and utterly fearless.

   Chapter 5

   Voices the Academy Tried to Silence

   Raised in Eatonville, Florida-America's first incorporated Black town-Hurston learned from her mother to "jump at the sun." Under Boas's guidance, she returned to Florida in 1927, driving through Jim Crow territory to collect folktales. Unlike previous folklorists gathering superficial tales, Hurston immersed readers in complete Black southern life. Her 1935 "Mules and Men" revealed this culture wasn't corrupted whiteness or African holdover but "vibrantly, chaotically, brilliantly alive." Ella Deloria brought another crucial perspective. Born on the Yankton Reservation in 1889, this Dakota woman was both observer and object of study. Working with Boas on Dakota language, she exposed fundamental flaws in previous accounts of Sioux ceremonies. "The moment I don't bring beef or food to an informant, I take myself right out of the Dakota side," she explained, showing how cultural protocols shaped accurate research. Deloria documented living, evolving Native cultures rather than treating them as dying relics.

   Chapter 6

   When Science Confronted the Monster It Had Created

   As Nazi ideology spread through Europe in the 1930s, Boas recognized something chilling: American racism had provided the blueprint. Hitler praised American racial policies in Mein Kampf, Nazi researchers studied segregation as a model, and Madison Grant's book sat in Hitler's personal library. At 81, officially retired and frail, Boas launched his greatest battle - writing to German President Hindenburg, publishing essays dismantling Nazi racial theories, and denouncing fascism from every platform. The Nazis burned his books and rescinded his doctorate. Meanwhile, Ruth Benedict, despite years as Boas's protege, was passed over for Columbia's anthropology chair because her gender was deemed "a big liability." After Pearl Harbor, Benedict joined the Office of War Information to analyze Japanese society - a place she'd never visited. Working with Robert Hashima, a Japanese American unjustly interned at Poston camp, she produced "The Chrysanthemum and the Sword" in 1946, analyzing Japanese culture as a coherent system and countering racist American perceptions of the Japanese as "subhuman."

   Chapter 7

   The Revolution That Refuses to Die and What We Still Need to Learn

   Franz Boas collapsed at a Columbia luncheon in December 1942 while discussing how German scientists struggled to find data supporting their racial theories. Ruth Benedict died in 1948, receiving her full professorship-the first woman in Columbia's social sciences-just months before. Zora Neale Hurston died in poverty in 1960, her work forgotten until Alice Walker rediscovered her in 1975. Margaret Mead outlived them all until 1978. Yet their ideas survived and thrived. By 1987, conservative philosopher Allan Bloom complained that "almost every student entering the university believes that truth is relative," specifically blaming "sexual adventurers like Margaret Mead"-unwitting proof of their victory. The Boas circle fundamentally shifted how we understand human difference. Modern genetics confirms their argument: the labels we use for our ancestors reflect history, not genetic code. Intelligence, gender roles, mental normality-these are social creations, not biological facts. Cultural relativism wasn't moral nihilism but moral expansion-recognizing that while all societies have rules, no single culture monopolizes universal moral codes. In our current moment, when genetic testing promises to reveal our "true" ancestry and politicians exploit cultural differences, their insights matter profoundly. Human categories are our creations, not nature's dictates. The comfortable prejudices we hold-the ones "hidden up close"-are often most dangerous. Their enduring message: the differences between us are real, meaningful, and worth preserving, but they're not the basis for hierarchy. They're proof of our shared capacity for infinite creativity in solving the fundamental challenge of being human.

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