49 pages • 1 hour read
Charles KingGods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century
Nonfiction | Biography | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 8-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 8 Summary: “Coming of Age”
Back in New York, at the recommendation of Boas, Mead accepted a position as an assistant curator at the Museum of Natural History, where she managed the exhibits on Africa, Malaysia, and the South Pacific. She would work there for 50 years. Mead published Coming of Age in Samoa in 1917, in which she argued that education is a universal experience, and, in its purest form, is the process by which adults show children how to eventually become adults. She explained that the adolescent developmental period for Samoan youth was a time of exploration and discovery rather than a time for learning to adhere to social norms. Mead was preoccupied with sex as a social characteristic and was fascinated with the lack of rigidity for the accepted ways to approach sex that she discovered in Samoa. She concluded that the turbulence and emotional intensity characteristic of adolescent American children was a product of what Americans had decided adolescence was. It was during this period that she divorced Cressman—her latest husband—and married Reo Fortune.
Eugenics dominated American biological, medical, and social theory during this period. Eugenicists, taking their inspiration from the work of Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel, discoverer of the gene, believed that human beings could improve through selective breeding with the most desirable members of society. Sir Francis Galton, half cousin of Charles Darwin and the originator of the term “eugenics,” from the Greek words for “well bred,” or “well born,” felt that they could unlock the secrets of genetic inheritance to produce desirable characteristics and breed out undesirable ones.
Eugenicists feared that individuals of higher desirability were not being careful enough in choosing their sexual partners with the goal of improvement of the human race, so they promoted selecting marriage partners on the basis of ancestry and passed “anti-miscegenation” laws. They considered any admixture of “otherness,” whether it came from people of color or people not considered to be the “right” kind of white, to taint an otherwise fit bloodline. This belief eventually resulted in forced sterilization laws in 28 of the United States, which targeted people diagnosed with mental illness, intellectual disabilities, social deviance, and myriad other factors, including those considered ethnically undesirable.
Chapter 9 Summary: “Masses and Mountaintops”
In the mid-1920s, a new student joined the Boas circle. As a writer, Zora Neale Hurston moved to New York City to surround herself with fellow artists but found that she disagreed philosophically with many of her African American peers: Many intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance looked with disdain and embarrassment upon African Americans they considered culturally backward and lacking in intellect. Hurston thought there was nothing shameful about being rural, unintellectual, and using vernacular language. She resented the elitism, snobbishness, and lack of solidarity she found among her Harlem Renaissance peers. So, in 1927, Hurston traveled to her home state of Florida to collect oral histories from African American communities: folklore, adages, anecdotes, phrasing, and components of language unique to the people of the region.
Many anthropologists, Boas and his circle included, looked down upon populations of color in the United States. They saw African Americans in particular as “problematic” and “deviant” due to their African origins. Hurston knew better than to dismiss African Americans as diluted or backward in their cultural identity through the influence of white contact, and the objective of her study was to showcase the richness of Black culture she already knew it contained. By the time she published the product of her efforts, Mules and Men in 1935, she had spent more time in the field than any of the other researchers in the Boas circle. Mules and Men looked unflinchingly at the world of labor camps in Florida, and the societies contained therein. She examined the common practice of white supervisors taking mistresses of color, despite using “anti-miscegenation” rhetoric. Along with her growing body of fictional works, Mules and Men was a testament to Black American Southern culture as relevant, contemporary, and compelling.
Chapters 8-9 Analysis
The Boas circle was relentless in its challenges to the eugenics movement. Boas had proven that physical divisions of race were nonexistent, but he had a much more difficult task in trying to prove that heredity did not determine characteristics that white elites considered undesirable, such as low intelligence and criminality. Desirability was based on White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) norms, and traits and behaviors outside these parameters were more likely to become the target of eugenic policies.
Benedict had discovered that members of Indigenous societies whose behavior deviated from the norm were nevertheless able to play a role in their communities. They were not excluded based on features that Western medicine might describe as “psychosis” or intellectual disability. Societies that emphasized community, collaboration, and resource-sharing did not consider these individuals to be a detriment or a drain on the group as a whole. By contrast, in Western society, where individuality and competitiveness reigned, supporting others was seen as a burden. While against the eugenics movement, Boas, Mead, and other members of the circle harbored views about Indigenous and African Americans, that mirrored many of the prejudices of the eugenics movement.
Eugenicists attributed undesirable characteristics to genetics while Boas and his circle thought that the perceived shortcomings of Indigenous and African Americans were the result of the dilution of their ancestral characteristics through forced interaction with white Americans. Boas and his researchers immersed themselves in native cultures in the field but did not extend the same interest to populations of color in the United States. Hurston was the notable exception; her work not only drew back the curtain on rural African American societies, but illuminated the innovativeness and tenacity with which they had carved out their identity amidst odds perpetually stacked against them.
