Case study: 53 (General Read)
Syllabus: Theories
Source: The New Yorker
How Cultural Anthropologists Redefined Humanity
A brave band of scholars set out to save us from racism and sexism. What
happened?
Not that long ago, Margaret Mead was one of the most widely known intellectuals in America. Her first book, “Coming of Age in Samoa,” published in 1928, when she was twenty-six, was a best-seller, and for the next fifty years she was a progressive voice in national debates about everything from
sex and gender to nuclear policy, the environment, and the legalization of marijuana. (She was in favor—and this was in 1969.) She had a monthly column in Redbook that ran for sixteen years and was read by millions. She advised government agencies, testified before Congress, and lectured on all
kinds of subjects to all kinds of audiences. She was Johnny Carson’s guest on the “Tonight Show.” Time called her “Mother to the World.” In 1979, the year after she died, President Jimmy Carter awarded her the Medal of Freedom. Today, Margaret Mead lives on as an “icon”—meaning that people might recognize the name, and are not surprised to see her face on a postage stamp
(as it once was), but they couldn’t tell you what she wrote or said. If pressed, they would probably guess that Mead was an important figure for the women’s movement. They would be confusing Mead’s significance as a role model (huge as that undoubtedly was) with Mead’s views. Mead was not a modern feminist, and Betty Friedan devoted a full chapter of “The Feminine Mystique” to an attack on her work. Mead mattered for other reasons. One of the aims of Charles King’s “Gods of the Upper Air” (Doubleday) is to remind us what those were.
Mead was a cultural anthropologist, and the rise of cultural anthropology is the subject of King’s book. It’s a group biography of Franz Boas, who established cultural anthropology as an academic discipline in the United States, and four of Boas’s many protégés: Ruth Benedict, Zora Neale Hurston, Ella Cara Deloria, and Mead. King argues that these people were “on the front lines of the greatest moral battle of our time: the struggle to prove that—despite differences of skin color, gender, ability, or custom—humanity is one undivided thing.”
Issues around race, gender, sexuality, and “otherness” are still very much  with us, although in slightly altered form. And when people discuss them they no longer solicit the wisdom of anthropologists. What happened?
Boas was born and educated in Prussia. He moved to the United States in 1886, when he was
twenty-eight, and a decade later, after some false starts, became a professor of anthropology at
Columbia. For many years, he was institutionally embattled, at least partly because of his leftwing
politics. Boas trained an entire generation of scholars in what was, until after the Second
World War, a tiny academic field. The historian Lois Banner has calculated that forty-five
Ph.D.s in anthropology were awarded in the United States between 1892 and 1926, and that
nineteen of the recipients studied under Boas. By 1930, she says, most American anthropology
departments were chaired by Boas students.
Boas was a turgid writer. But he was intellectually fearless; he had energy and charisma; and
though he made a fierce impression—his face was scarred from sabre duels he had fought as a
student in Germany—his students were devoted to him. They called him Papa Franz. He retired
from teaching in 1936, but remained active professionally until his death, in 1942.
It’s an academic adage that a scholar’s career consists of footnotes to the dissertation, and, in a
way, this was true for Boas. He was an empiricist: he collected facts, and he was not inclined to
theoretical speculation. But he thought that the basic fact about human beings is that the facts
about them change, because circumstances change. Our lives may be determined, by some
combination of genes, environment, and culture, but they are not predetermined.
Boas’s revolutionary work was a study, undertaken for a congressional committee and published
in 1911, on the bodily form—head size, height, hair colour, age at pubescence—of the children
of recent European immigrants. The impetus was public anxiety that immigrants from southern
and eastern Europe would, through intermarriage, dilute the racial stock (sometimes identified
as “Nordic”). Boas’s finding, which was that the cranial index of children born in America differed
from that of children of the same background born in Europe, rocked the field. It upset
long-believed claims that racial differences, including what we would now call ethnic differences,
are immutable. The evidence proved, Boas said, “the plasticity of human types.” It also
showed that variations within groups are greater than variations between groups.
In 1911, this was not what most white scientists and politicians wanted to hear. Boas’s career
spanned an exceptionally active period of Aryan supremacy. Boas witnessed the legalization of
Jim Crow; the widespread acceptance of social Darwinism and eugenics; imperial expansion,
including the American occupation of the Philippines; drastic restrictions on immigration; the
rise of the second Ku Klux Klan; and the coming to power of Adolf Hitler. (Boas was Jewish.)
Often, science was invoked as a justification for colonization, segregation, discrimination, exclusion,
sterilization, or extermination. Boas devoted his life to showing people that the science
they were relying on was bad science. “He believed the world must be made safe for differences,”
Ruth Benedict wrote when Boas died. Innate biological differences don’t account for the
observed variety of roles and practices among human groups, then something else must be at
work. Boas thought there were several factors, and one was culture.

Using the term required some redefinition. In the nineteenth century, “culture” was generally
regarded as an attainment; it was something societies acquired as they advanced, marking a
stage in the growth of a civilization. Boas is one of the people responsible for the sense we have
in mind when we use the phrase “culture in the anthropological sense”—that is, the sense of
culture as standing for a way of life. One of his major contributions was to show that pre-modern
societies—“primitive” was the accepted term—have cultures in exactly the same way that
modern societies have them, and that the minds of people who live in those societies are no different
from the minds of everyone else.
Boas did his first field work with the Inuit living on Baffin Island, in northern Canada. He
had intended to study hunting patterns and the like, but the more time he spent with the Inuit
the more he realized that their particular way of doing things reflected a particular way of seeing
the world. The Inuit way was not the European way, but it wasn’t inferior. In some respects, he
thought, it might be better. The Inuit seemed, for example, to be more hospitable than Europeans.
Immersion in Inuit life made him see his own culture from the outside. He learned, as he
put it, “the relativity of all education.”
Boas eventually concluded that there is not one human culture but many, and he started referring
to “cultures,” in the plural. He was engaged in ethnography, and he believed that the job of
the ethnographer was to disappear, in effect, into the culture of the people being studied, to understand
from the inside what it means to be male or female, to give or receive a gift, to bury
one’s dead. The ethnographer needed to get the society’s jokes. This meant leaving one’s ethnocentrism
at home. “Get nowhere unless prejudices first forgotten,” Ella Deloria wrote in her
notes on one of Boas’s lectures. “Cultures are many; man is one.”
Ruth Benedict was professionally the closest to Boas. She had a bachelor’s degree from Vassar
and got interested in anthropology when she took courses at the New School. She entered the
graduate program at Columbia in 1921, and, after getting her degree, became what King calls
Boas’s “lieutenant” in the department. Boas struggled to get her a regular faculty position; she
was finally made an assistant professor in 1931.
When Boas retired, Benedict was the most famous member of the Columbia department. Her
book “Patterns of Culture,” a study of three groups—the Zuñi (of the American Southwest),
the Kwakiutl (of British Columbia), and the Dobu (of Papua New Guinea)—was published
in 1934 and became one of the best-selling works of academic anthropology ever written. The
university, it is almost unnecessary to say, decided to go with a man as the new chair. He was
Ralph Linton, a critic of Benedict’s work. They did not get along.
In 1946, Benedict published a second fantastically popular book, “The Chrysanthemum and
the Sword,” a study of the culture of Japan. Linton left Columbia that year and Benedict was
finally promoted to full professor in 1948. Two months later, she had a heart attack and died.
She was sixty-one.
It was Benedict who recruited Margaret Mead to anthropology. Mead’s choice to do her field
work in Samoa, studying adolescence, was encouraged by Boas, who wrote a foreword to the
book that resulted and that launched her career.

Mead did her best to minimize these circumstances, because she wanted to capture behavior and
mores that were remote from American Christian moral and legal conceptions—in particular,
Samoan attitudes toward premarital sex, which is the part of the book that got all the attention.
So she centered her account on what she took to be the distinctively “Samoan” aspects of her
subjects’ lives.
Early-twentieth-century anthropologists were highly self-conscious about this recovery mission.
They worried that the world was losing its cultural diversity. “Western civilization, because of
fortuitous historical circumstances, has spread itself more widely than any other local group that
has so far been known,” Benedict wrote. “This world-wide cultural diffusion has protected us as
man had never been protected before from having to take seriously the civilizations of other
peoples.” The French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who did his field work among indigenous
groups in west-central Brazil in the nineteen-thirties, once suggested that the word
“anthropology” should be changed to “entropology”—the study of the homogenization of
human life across the planet. Cultural anthropology was the West’s way of memorializing its
victims.
Given this aim, the emphasis falls, almost unavoidably, on the exotic, and for the nonprofessional
audience exoticism is a big part of the appeal. The jacket illustration for “Coming of Age
in Samoa” featured a topless girl. The trick was to turn this appeal inside out, so that what appear
at first to be outlandish and sometimes repellent practices come to seem natural and sensible,
and our own practices, whose reasonableness we had taken for granted, start to appear tribal
and arbitrary. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz, writing about Benedict, called this “portraying
the alien as the familiar with the signs changed.”
Soon after Mead’s death, cultural anthropology began losing its voice in public debates. King
thinks that the reason for this was the rise of anti-relativism. He points out that cultural relativism
is the principal target of Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind,” which was
published in 1987 and helped launch the culture wars of the ensuing decade. Bloom attacked
both Mead and Benedict, and the notion that teachers who preach cultural relativism are turning
American students into unpatriotic nihilists has been a recurrent theme in political rhetoric ever
since.
It’s true that Boas and Benedict spoke of “relativity,” and that at the end of “Patterns of Culture”
Benedict refers to “coexisting and equally valid patterns of life which mankind has created for
itself from the raw materials of existence.” But everything else in Benedict’s book contradicts
the assertion that all cultures are “equally valid.” The whole point is to judge which practices,
others’ or our own, seem to produce the kind of society we want. The anthropological mirror
has a moral purpose.
The term “culture” is responsible for some of the confusion. We think that to call something part
of a group’s culture is to excuse it from judgment. We say, That’s just the lens through which
people in that society view the world. It’s not for us to tell them what to think. Our ways are not
better, only different. What it all boils down to (to paraphrase Montaigne) is: We wear pants;
they do not. That would be relativism.

But to say that a belief or a practice is culture-relative is not to place it beyond judgment. The
whole force of Boasian anthropology is the demonstration that racial prejudice is cultural. The
belief that some races are superior and some inferior is learned; it has no basis in biology. It is
therefore subject to criticism.
Boas spent his entire life telling people that intolerance is wrong. King says that cultural anthropology
pushes us to expand our notion of the human. That may be so, but it has nothing to
do with relativism. King’s anthropologists are prescriptivists. They are constantly telling us to
unlearn one way of living in order to learn a way that is better by our own standards.
Mead argued, for instance, that American families are too insular and put too much pressure on
growing children. The example of Samoa, where families are extended and children can move
around among the adult members, suggested that American teenagers could be healthier and
happier if we relaxed our notions of how families ought to function. There was nothing natural
and inevitable about American social structures.
But there were also changes within the field of anthropology itself. Soon after Mead’s death, the
concept of culture began to be targeted. The arrows flew from multiple directions, and some of
the criticisms exposed tensions within the Boasian tradition. Although the concept had been
given an enormous amount of work to do, the meaning of “culture” was never settled on. In
1952, two anthropologists, Alfred Kroeber (who was Boas’s first Ph.D. student) and Clyde
Kluckhohn, published “Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions.” They list a
hundred and sixty-four definitions from the literature.
As an instrument of analysis, the term is impossibly broad. If we mean by “culture” something
like the lens through which a group of people ineluctably see the world, then “culture” becomes
synonymous with “consciousness,” and it seems absurd to generalize about “Navajo consciousness”
or “Western consciousness.” All distinctions are lost. On the other hand, if we do distinguish
a group’s culture from, say, its social structure, then we dilute the term’s explanatory
power. Culture becomes epiphenomenal, a reflection of underlying social relations.
Benedict had done field work with only one of the three groups she wrote about in “Patterns of
Culture,” and she never set foot in Japan. Lévi-Strauss, after his time in Brazil, did hardly any
field work. He got his facts from published books and articles. This kind of ethnography began
to look like crypto-colonialism, the Western scientist telling the “native’s” own story, sometimes
And there was the complaint, directed at Mead and Benedict, but also at Lévi-Strauss and
Geertz, that the cultural approach is ahistorical. The cultural anthropologist freezes a way of life
in order to analyze it as a meaningful pattern. But ways of life are in continual flux.
Boas was a firm believer in this: he was interested in what he called “diffusion,” the spread of
forms and practices across space and time. Deloria, too, thought that the notion of recapturing
Native American life before the arrival of the Europeans was delusional. Native American life
was being lived right now, in an evolving mixture of pre-Columbian customs and twentieth-century
American ways of life.

Only we can tell us how to live. There is nothing that prevents us from deciding that the goal of
life should be to be as unnatural as possible. “Human nature” is just another looking glass.