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 4-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: “Science and Circuses”
Before the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition, Boas was asked by Frederic Ward Putnam, director of the Peabody Museum at Harvard University, to help curate Department M, a building of galleries devoted to ethnology and archaeology. Boas used his contacts to source and acquire objects for their exhibits, overseeing the design and organization of the collection. With millions of visitors expected to be at the fairgrounds, Putnam knew they were in a unique position to define the field of anthropology on a global scale. This opportunity was especially important because Powell’s associates from the Smithsonian had also been offered an exhibition space.
Putnam presented their exhibits so that observers would appreciate the scientific nature of their approach and the legitimacy of their conclusions, especially in anthropometry, which was the practice of measuring human features to chart and catalog their characteristics. Boas and Putnam were disappointed when they were thoroughly upstaged by the Smithsonian exhibits, which featured “exotic” representatives of people from non-Western cultures as curiosities to be gawked at.
Boas was frustrated when he was not offered a position at the new Field Museum in Chicago, as he had spent the time after the fair’s closing transferring and organizing the objects he had acquired for Department M. However, he impressed Putnam, who had recently been appointed as a curator at the Museum of Natural History in New York, and Putnam hired Boas to design the new exhibit halls dedicated to Indigenous Americans from the West and coastal Northwest. Knowing that Boas still wanted an academic position, Boas’s wealthy uncle, Abraham Jacobi, secretly provided Columbia University with the funds to hire his nephew on a part-time basis. The work would be related to Boas’s curating activities at the museum.
Following his appointment, Boas was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, and helped relaunch the American Anthropology magazine, further confirming his lofty academic status. By this time, Boas had become convinced that “apperception,” defined by King as “the universal tendency to interpret new experiences in light of the experiences with which we are most familiar,” was the main obstacle facing academics who hoped to understand other cultures (71).
Chapter 5 Summary: “Headhunters”
The concept of race as a collection of biologically and visually observable categories originated in the late 18th century and was accepted as fact by the time Boas came to Columbia University. Race was thought of as the absolute determiner of one’s abilities, moral inclinations, and capacity for intelligence. Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution was extrapolated into the belief that different races evolved along separate trajectories across millennia, accounting for the differences that Westerners perceived. Following the Civil War, legal definitions of whiteness and racist policies backed by legislation known as Jim Crow reinforced the pseudo-scientific beliefs that relegated Black Americans and other ethnic groups to the underclass.
In the 1890s, racially minded theorists believed that the United States was at risk morally and ethnically from the mass of non-white immigration the country was experiencing. They saw immigrants as carriers of the instincts, weaknesses, and criminality contained in their genetic line. Racial anxieties dominated in urban centers, where immigrant populations were largest. In March of 1908, Boas was commissioned to contribute to a government assessment of recent immigrants. Using anthropometry, Boas examined the physical changes among those new arrivals to the United States and discovered that physical racial types were a myth: His data revealed that there was more variation among members of the same racial or ethnic group than there were between members of two groups thought to be racially separate. He concluded that life conditions, geographical environment, nutrition, illnesses, and a myriad of other factors were far more important to one’s resulting physical features than genetic or ethnic origin.
In his 1911 book, The Mind of Primitive Man, Boas openly challenged the paternalism and infantilization white Europeans and Americans directed toward their fellow human beings of other ethnic groups. Boas asserted that this perspective was based more on what white elites wanted and needed to believe about themselves rather than on scientific reality. He began to stress an approach of introspection and of critical self-evaluation as the most valuable, relevant, and meaningful ways to look at presumed racial differences.
Chapters 4-5 Analysis
The 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, also known as the Chicago World’s Fair, was designed to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the “New World,” and it intended to display the prowess and progress of the United States at the turn of the 20th century. The exhibits of the Midway Plaisance, which contained villages featuring living people from “primitive” cultures, were structured to reinforce American ideals of racial and moral superiority. In contrast, the displays that Boas curated for Department M included charts depicting anthropometric measurements, and Boas even invited fairgoers to participate by having their own measurements taken, allowing them to feel as though they, rather than the people from Africa and Asia, were the anthropological subjects. Not surprisingly, this exhibit was not popular, as its approach clashed with Westerners’ beliefs about themselves.
By 1908, when Boas had the opportunity to evaluate a broader, more ethnically diverse group of people in his studies on immigration, he rejected the idea of race as separate distinct categories. This is one of many instances during which Boas demonstrated his willingness to adjust his views according to new data. In this anthropometric exercise, Boas developed a concept that would eventually debunk the eugenics movement. In discovering that geographic location, quality of life, economic means, and physical health were the only valuable determinants influencing physical differences, he proved that it was environment and not genetic predetermination that most meaningfully predicted how someone might function in society.
Though scientific, Boas’s conclusions were emotionally charged in the claims they were making and the responses they elicited: Boas could prove that there was no such thing as a Swedish skull or a Moroccan thumb because the numerical data he collected had proven as much. His explanation, however, for the origins of the belief in racial differences cut directly into the white supremacist values most Euro-Americans held and stood as an indictment of their arrogance. Boas claimed that the foundation upon which they built their belief in their own supremacy was nothing more than a fantasy constructed to enable their own desires. It was a hallmark of the Boas circle to remain subversive in their publications and lectures, so as to challenge and compel changes in thought, and one of the ways that their detractors attempted to discredit them was to attack their behaviors and character. Boas was depicted as a kind of kook, and his conclusions attributed to his nonsensical ramblings. They could not silence him, but they could attempt to undermine his credibility.
