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 10-11Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 10 Summary: “Indian Country”
Anthropologists believed that the Indigenous peoples of North America had been stripped of their cultural identity through their contact with Euro-American colonizers. American culture at large had adopted a new perspective on them as well: Now that Indigenous communities had been “tamed,” eradicated, or subdued and no longer posed a threat to the Western way of life, they were romanticized, mythologized, and took on almost mythical proportions.
Ella Cara Deloria brought more realistic insights to studies of Indigenous groups. Born in Yankton, South Dakota, Deloria was raised on Standing Rock Reservation. Originally a research assistant at the Teacher’s College at Columbia, Deloria returned to New York to assist Boas with a specific project: evaluating a body of publications claiming to represent Indigenous culture, specifically the work of reservation doctor James R. Walker. Deloria split her time between studying in New York and researching in the field, i.e., on reservations, where she collected data and compared her findings to Walker’s.
She faced immediate pushback when she found that Walker was not only incorrect in many of his depictions of Indigenous people, but he had fabricated much of what he claimed to have observed. Instead of accepting her findings as valid, Boas challenged Deloria’s thoroughness of research. Although he knew that Walker’s work was created at a time when rigorous anthropological research had not yet been developed, he instructed Deloria to continue looking for evidence of its validity instead of admitting that Walker might have been disingenuous or wrong. Like Hurston, Deloria was committed to separating the historic vision and impression of her community from the reality, and part of that commitment was not allowing Walker’s inaccurate account to define her community. Together, she and Boas collaborated on a book called Dakota Grammar, published in 1941, which was an extensive analysis of the language. It offered a window into the culture by exploring the community’s vocabulary and use of language as a reflection of their history, social structure, religious beliefs, and understanding of the world.
Chapter 11 Summary: “Living Theory”
In 1931, Mead and Fortune traveled to New Guinea to study the Arapesh culture along the Sepik River. When Gregory Bateson, a renowned English anthropologist joined them, Mead and Bateson immediately became enamored with one another. Seeing themselves as fellow misfits, Mead and Fortune concocted a strange theory they called “the squares,” which posited that all human beings could be categorized into one of four types based on their temperaments. Fortune felt increasingly ostracized by their closeness and became deeply resentful. He had originally supported the theory, but it became less and less convincing the more he detached from Mead and Bateson’s private world.
When they returned to New York and Mead shared her new theory with Benedict, Benedict was alarmed by the absurdity of the idea, and, mortified on Mead’s behalf. She begged Mead not to publish or even speak about the squares, certain that it would eviscerate Mead’s reputation. Fortune wrote Mead scathing letters denouncing the squares and Mead’s work in general as nothing more than her search for a set of social parameters she could twist into an excuse for her own behaviors and appetites. As she distanced herself emotionally and academically from her time on the Sepik River, Mead realized how right Benedict had been and begged Benedict never to mention the squares to Boas.
Benedict published her book Patterns of Culture in 1934. Her work emphasized one of the core tenets associated with the Boasian theory, the concept of cultural relativity, or the culturally constructed mindset through which one looks at cultures, including one’s own. Benedict insisted that anthropologists and anyone hoping to gain knowledge of other cultures must be deliberately skeptical of the feelings and assumptions that arise when they encounter unfamiliar cultural practices. The book and the idea of cultural relativity remain the most publicly successful work to come out of the Boas circle.
Another important work of this period was Mead’s book Sex and Temperament, published in 1935. It asserted that the social gender roles attributed to men and women were contrived by society rather than natural or biological in origin and varied based on a culture’s norms and belief systems.
Chapters 10-11 Analysis
American culture used Indigenous identity to conform to its own cultural narratives. Indigenous people were exaggerated in public depictions, infantilized, and caricatured in Wild West shows, and in popular novels. Organizations like the Boy Scouts, which emphasized outdoor survival, appropriated aspects of and imagery from Indigenous culture. Indigenous identity was used as a metaphor for human development: The famous psychiatrist G. Stanley Hall theorized that adolescence, especially that of young white American men, replicated a kind of miniature evolution across the ages, from “primitive” to civilized. Mead wrote to Benedict about her visit to an Omaha reservation that “If this is field work in America, no wonder everybody thinks it’s a penance instead of a privilege. It’s just nothing at all. A thing like this isn’t a culture, hardly even the remains of one” (225).
Deloria was working against not only the American misconception and romanticization of her culture, but also perceptions like Mead’s among her own colleagues. Like Hurston, Deloria was determined to assert the value of those sharing her origins, presenting them as they were in the moment, not as stereotypes or the shells of their bygone ancestors. Even though Boas was Deloria’s mentor, he challenged her expertise more harshly than he did anyone else’s in the circle. Deloria was the only member of the Boas circle with whom Boas shared a byline, and without her he could never have published Dakota Grammar, but his first instinct, when she discovered errors in Walker’s publications, was to suggest that she did not know her own culture well enough or that her research, not his, was faulty. Women were well integrated into the Boas circle, but women of color did not always receive the same respect and equal treatment.
Mead’s sexuality placed her on the boundaries of what the Boas group found acceptable. Over the course of her studies and love affairs, Mead came to feel that polygamy was the only relational philosophy suited to her personal needs. The practices she observed in Samoa and Arapesh reinforced this belief. She and Bateson felt legitimized by what they observed in their surroundings while she and Fortune were conducting their research, and this enabled their pursuit of a nontraditional relationship. Mead was criticized by those both inside and outside the circle for the way she seemed to behave carelessly in her relationships. Most of her partners expected monogamy and were hurt by her inevitable migration to another lover.
Mead’s apparent obliviousness to the feelings of her colleagues, both professionally and romantically, should be considered for its potentially detrimental effect on the group’s dynamics. Her apparent thoughtlessness extended to comments she made about her peers, including that one of Benedict’s publications wasn’t very good. Boas held salons in his house in New Jersey, and the discourse there could become quite heated. The members of the circle spent a considerable amount of time together, especially while in the field, and their relationships as researchers, friends, rivals, and lovers, constituted the most significant social contacts in most of their lives. Mead was accused of turning her research findings into an excuse for her indulgences, and while she contributed a significant body of work to the collection of publications produced by the Boas circle, and carried its mission out longer than many of her peers, consideration should be given to the detrimental impact she may have had on the research cohort.
