“You had to use the imperfect language of your own society,” as King glosses her approach, “to try to make sense of another.”įor Boas student Ella Cara Deloria, the work of translation went in many directions. A profound concern for Mead was the problem of translation, especially acute in the field. Her early book Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) made her a public intellectual to be reckoned with, and she remained prolific in writing for a general audience even as she spent long stretches doing fieldwork in the South Pacific. As a serious young girl, she had showed how “rectitude could be its own form of rebellion” now she was determined to show her fellow Americans alternatives to conventional ways of understanding sex, gender, and identity. Determined to follow her passions (and they were many), Mead opened herself to understanding the passions of people who lived in circumstances very different from her own. King begins with the most famous of the Boas students, the fascinating Margaret Mead. Gods of the Upper Air is gracefully written, and it succeeds beautifully both as intellectual history and group biography. What King does so very well is explain the complex ideas of these brilliant and unconventional women, while situating them within the scholarship (and political debates) of their times and exploring their complicated lives with sympathy. This was quite unusual, though King sheds little light on why this turned out to be the case. As he put it early on, “the main object of ethnological collections should be the dissemination of the fact that civilization is not something absolute, but that it is relative, and that our ideas and conceptions are true only so far as our civilization goes.” King underscores that Boas, and later his students, were asking Americans “to suspend their belief in their own greatness.”Īnd what students Boas came to have! Papa Franz, as he was often called, built the anthropology department at Columbia University, where, as he noted, his best graduate students were women. He saw each culture as having its own integrity, its own ways of providing meaning and direction to the people who comprised it. Boas worked alongside these fellow anthropologists at museums of natural history, world’s fairs, and universities, but his views were different. Theories of evolution were used to justify imperial ambitions, and anthropologists served up accounts of primitive cultures left far behind in the march to modernity. Ultimately, this was a vested interest legitimating the superiority of those doing the displacing. In the last decades of the 1800s, Western countries were competing to build their empires in far-flung regions, and there was more than a little interest in the peoples being displaced. It was also a form of Herzensbildung, an education of the heart, King notes: “Changing his place in the world had changed his perspective on it.”Īrctic expeditions belonged to the genre of 19th-century explorations of the exotic, but Boas’s cut against their grain. Interviewing Inuit in the region, being introduced to their languages and their social organizations, opened for him a different way of thinking about how particular cultures develop in specific environments. Other Arctic explorers had looked to test themselves in unusual and extreme conditions Boas was interested in those for whom such conditions were normal: indigenous peoples who found the landscape no more extreme than he had found the University of Kiel, his alma mater. In the late 1800s, Boas set off for the Arctic. What if one tried to grasp how a quite different culture offered a different modality for navigating the world? Could an outsider come to understand that process and those people, and then communicate this understanding to others? Gods of the Upper Air explores how Boas and his extraordinary students sought to do just that. Suddenly he was less interested, Charles King tells the reader, in building mathematical models of how the world changed than in understanding how our own changing conditions altered the way we made sense of it. Paths for acceptance were not unknown to him, but after receiving a doctorate in physics, he grew impatient and forged a different path. Born in the middle of Europe, and in the middle of the 1800s, Franz Boas was the son of assimilated German Jews. THE FATHER OF 20th-century anthropology in America came - fittingly enough - from another time and another place.
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