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 6-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 6 Summary: “American Empire”
In 1907, Congress formed a group called the Dillingham Commission for a study intended to decrease the influx of European immigrants. The report intended to use scientific racism (eugenics) to prove that the immigrants were degrading the quality of American society. Boas and the others who undertook the study disproved this theory, but when the reports of the Dillingham Commission’s findings were published in 1911, the authors of the reports ignored Boas’s conclusions. The authors claimed that those who immigrated after 1880 could not be considered loyal to the United States, as they were a less desirable class of people.
World War I brought sweeping anti-German sentiment. Boas disagreed with the United States’ decision to enter the war and was anxious at seeing the United States move towards nationalism, a dangerous trend he recognized from his home country. Nicholas Butler, president of Columbia University, denounced Boas’s opinions as treasonous and not representative of the position held by the university. Butler phased out the undergraduate program in anthropology, cut Boas’s funding and salary, and attempted to paint Boas’s way of thinking as grounded in German philosophy.
Now stifled at Columbia, Boas accepted a position at Barnard College, the women’s branch of the university. In 1921, one of Boas’s most influential students, Ruth Benedict, began taking his anthropology classes. She eventually began doctoral work at Columbia, earning her PhD with her thesis The Concept of the Guardian Spirit in North America. She was interested in religious practices, and as someone who eschewed gender conformity, was drawn to the fluid concepts of gender in Indigenous communities. One of her most impactful revelations was her realization that people who would be ostracized, victimized, and “institutionalized” in mainstream Western culture for their nonconforming gender identities had accepted roles in these Indigenous societies, and were frequently given a high status or special consideration in light of their differences. Through these observations, Benedict acknowledged that parameters of normality are defined differently in each culture, rather than being absolute.
Chapter 7 Summary: “A Girl as Frail as Margaret”
In 1920, a young undergraduate named Margaret Mead enrolled at Barnard just as Boas was developing a concept that he called “diffusion.” He had noticed significant differences between geographically close societies while simultaneously noting great similarities between societies that were geographically distant from one another. This suggested that evolution by proximity did not play the role in society that many thought it did: If evolution were the force behind the development of societies over time, there should be uniformity among societies in the same geographical region. Instead, interactions between societies seemed to influence whether similar practices appeared in distant places. This drew him to the conclusion that the most essential element in understanding a culture’s practices and value system was its history.
A misconception held that “primitive” societies were stuck at an earlier period of evolution and lacked the sophistication to have any attachment to their historical identity, especially because such societies were oral rather than writing-based. Boas stressed that, like the West, these societies developed and changed over time though not necessarily in accordance with the West’s narrow definition of progress. Boas insisted that his students must see the people they encountered as the culmination of their community’s collective historical experiences rather than static or underdeveloped.
Though married, Mead was in love with Ruth Benedict. Mead began an additional romantic relationship with a researcher named Edward Sapir. Sapir insisted that Mead divorce her husband, marry him, and assume the responsibility of raising his three children. When she did not comply, he tried to paint Mead as emotionally “unstable” and attempted to recruit Benedict to stop Mead from going to Samoa.
Instead, Benedict and Mead embarked on separate research trips across the United States, during which they met and professed their love for one another. Mead eventually traveled to the island of Ta’u and became involved in cleanup and recovery efforts after a hurricane struck. There, she discovered that her most profound insights about the people came from interacting with them in authentic, meaningful moments of their lives, not from asking questions and taking notes as an observer.
Mead’s research was unique in its focus on the experiences of girls and young women. Sexual freedom, something that Mead herself had learned she required, was largely foreign to mainstream Western culture, but in Samoa, different expectations and customs prevailed. On a personal level, she was relieved by the possibility that other ways of being in the world existed. By the time she returned home from her research trip, she was in love again, this time with a researcher named Reo Fortune.
Chapters 6-7 Analysis
Struggling with her own role as a woman was what compelled Mead to investigate female adolescence as a rite of passage in other cultures. Mead felt confined by the expectations placed on her in American society and wondered whether adolescence was seen as a transitional rite of passage everywhere, or whether it was conceptualized and designed that way by western society.
This viewpoint is evident in Sapir’s questioning of Mead’s mental health: He demanded that she fulfill a socially prescribed gender role in their relationship while she and everyone around her were working to prove that these kinds of demands were artificially imposed upon women by Western society. Mental health facilities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the United States regularly housed women and men who were gender-nonconforming or had a relationship with a member of the same sex. Sapir expected Mead to move to Chicago with him and raise his three young children. That he could not imagine that Mead was anything other than “irrational” to refuse his offer speaks to the limitations shared by some members of even this comparatively liberated group of researchers.
Over the course of Mead’s life, it was only her male companions who levied claims of mental illness against her when she decided she did not want to be in a traditional romantic relationship with them. Benedict was frustrated by Mead’s need to maintain multiple romantic entanglements at once, but she never attempted to undermine Mead’s career or discredit her mental health. Many of Mead’s colleagues perceived her to be a detriment to the climate of the department because of the emotional upheaval the fallout from her relationships caused, and this speaks of how pervasive gender and sexuality norms were even among those trying to dismantle them.
