Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century

“This book is about women and men who found themselves 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.”

This description of Gods of the Upper Air conveys concisely to the reader what to expect from the text that follows. King understands the importance of orienting the reader to the historical climate in which the events he covers took place, so that the reader can appreciate the degree to which the views emerging from the Boas circle differed from common perceptions and values.

“To Boas, the inhabitants of Baffin Island had originally been objects of research, a feature of the landscape to be charted and studied. They had never quite been people. But as he actually lived among them, he could feel a change in his own logic, his own outlook on life.”

Boas’s first foray into field research set the precedent for the theoretical and scientific approach he would adopt going forward: A commitment to methodical introspection became a pillar of his philosophy as a scientist, and a blueprint for the research methods in which he trained his future graduate students.

“For Powell, there was a clear roadmap for how these changes came about. […] Human societies naturally move from savagery to barbarism to civilization, each having its particular characteristics […]. Individual people might fail to exhibit all the characteristics of the stage in which they were embedded; they might be ‘degraded,’ ‘decayed,’ or ‘parasitic’ versions of human culture […]. Ethnology, then, was simply the act of civilized man conversing with those who had yet to travel the same pathway he had once trod.”

Powell’s beliefs about human evolution were accepted as the norm in academic circles, governmental agencies, and the personal opinions of the majority of Americans. Powell and his cohort were considered progressives of their time. The theory that people outside of Western civilization were living relics was not shocking or offensive to anyone in mainstream America at the time. It was seen as a rational explanation of the differences Americans perceived between themselves and others.