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

Franz Boas, PhD, was born in 1858 in the town of Minden, which was then part of Westphalia in the Kingdom of Prussia and is now part of Germany. Boas was born into a family of upper-middle-class Jewish intellectuals. As a young man, he was an acceptable student but often distracted. He displayed an early interest in natural history and instead of becoming part of his family’s furniture import business went to university at Heidelberg, a prestigious institution where he engaged in duels with his peers, studied famed German philosophers, and made the decision to pursue a doctorate in physics. By the time he received his PhD, Boas had become bored with his topic, and in order to earn the postdoctoral degree, which would grant him the privilege of being counted as a professor by German standards, he embarked on an anthropological research trip to Baffin Island. Originally hoping to study how the Indigenous population hunted marine life, Boas discovered a passion for the social sciences.

After occupying various academic and research positions in the US, Boas was recruited to teach at Barnard College, the women’s institution of Columbia University, where he met many of the students who would become part of his intellectual circle. Known affectionately as “Papa Franz” by his students, Boas was both educator and mentor to his undergraduate and graduate devotees. He published a number of books in his lifetime, including Race, Language, and Culture (1910), The Mind of Primitive Man (1911), and Anthropology and Modern Life (1928). He was a prolific correspondent, averaging 2,500 letters sent each year later in his career. He retired from Columbia University in 1936 but kept an office in the department afterward. He earned numerous awards and distinctions throughout his career and died suddenly at an event at the Columbia University Faculty Club in December of 1942, having become one of the most influential scientists of his generation.

Ruth Benedict, PhD, was born in New York City in 1887, the daughter of a teacher and a surgeon. Her father died when she was a toddler, and her mother’s difficulty processing her grief left Benedict with a preoccupation with death and a disdain for displays of emotion. Her interest in how cultures around the world handle dying and grieving figured heavily in her later research.

As a toddler, Benedict became partially deaf after a bout with measles, a disability she learned to navigate when she began her field studies as an anthropologist. After graduating from Vassar College, Benedict held several different jobs, eventually meeting and marrying Stanley Rossiter Benedict. After studying at the New School in New York City, she transferred to Columbia University to study anthropology with Boas. She earned her PhD in 1923 with her thesis The Concept of the Guardian Spirit in North America, and this led to her becoming a professor at Barnard College and an assistant professor at Columbia in 1931.

Benedict met Mead in 1922 while she was teaching at Barnard College, and the two developed a close friendship and eventually became lovers. Benedict’s struggle with Mead’s polyamory made their relationship fraught, but despite Mead’s other relationships, they remained close.

During the Second World War, Benedict joined the Office of War Information to analyze Japanese culture. Her bestselling book, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, was the culmination of her research at the OWI, and her book Patterns of Culture (1934) became one of the most popular works of anthropology ever written. Benedict became the most widely read and respected member of the Boas circle and was eventually named full professor at Columbia University in 1948. She passed away two months later.

Margaret Mead, PhD, was born in Pennsylvania in 1901, the daughter of two academics. She began her education at DePaw University but transferred to Barnard College, earning her bachelor’s degree there in 1923 and pursuing graduate work at Columbia University under Boas. After earning her doctorate, Mead traveled to Samoa to study female adolescence among the Ta’u people.

Her first book, Coming of Age in Samoa, was published in 1928. When she returned to New York, she became an assistant curator at the Museum of Natural History, a position she held for over 50 years. Her second book, Growing Up in New Guinea, was published in 1930. Mead eventually published 12 books and contributed to numerous publications throughout her lifetime. Mead outlived most of her cohort in the Boas circle, becoming involved in many anthropological research societies, occupying many positions of leadership and authority through which she was able to influence her students and mentees. Her multiple marriages and relationships with partners of different sexes, many of them part of the Boas circle, inspired her research interest in gender norms across different cultures. She lived until the age of 76.

Zora Neale Hurston was born in Alabama in 1891 and raised in Eatonville, Florida. Her father was a Baptist minister, and her mother, a teacher, died when Hurston was 13. Hurston was the granddaughter of enslaved people, and the legacy of slavery in American culture strongly informed her work.

She began her academic career at Howard University, but eventually transferred to Barnard College where she earned her BA in anthropology and then went on to study with Boas as a graduate student. Hurston recognized the value of focusing on African American cultures of the rural south, which was not a popular subject at the time. She returned to Florida to immerse herself in the culture in which she had grown up and present it to a broader audience through her anthropological training.

Hurston described her approach as a writer as “literary science” (275). Her first work, Mules and Men (1935), explored the conditions throughout Florida’s multitude of work camps, particularly the individual cultures that emerged there. Hurston wrote over 50 books in her lifetime, including the nonfiction book Tell My Horse (1938), about her research into the Voodoo culture of Haiti, and the novels Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934) and Seraph on the Suwanee (1948). In Haiti, Hurston wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), her most famous work and a classic of American literature. Barracoon: The Story of the Last Black Cargo (2018) was published posthumously.

In 1952, Hurston covered the trial of Ruby McCollum, a Black woman accused of murdering a white physician, for the Pittsburgh Courier, the country’s premier Black newspaper. She passed away in 1960, but in 1975, novelist Alice Walker, (famed for her acclaimed novel The Color Purple), wrote an essay for Ms. Magazine about Hurston, bringing a resurgence of attention to Hurston’s work, which is now considered essential to American literature and history.