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

Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century, was written by Dr. Charles King, and published in 2019 by Penguin Random House. King is a professor of International Affairs and Government at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, and the author of 10 books, predominantly on the subject of society, government, and culture in Eastern Europe. Gods of the Upper Air is a New York Times bestseller, the recipient of the 2020 Francis Parkman Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Award, and was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times History Prize, and the British Academy’s Al-Rodhan Prize. This guide refers to the 2020 illustrated paperback edition of the book.

Content Warning: This text delves into a historical period during which racist, sexist, and otherwise prejudiced views were pervasive in Western society. This guide contains discussions of these concepts, as well as occasional references to direct commentary expressing such views for the purpose of illustrating the historical reality. Every effort has been made to omit outdated, offensive language while maintaining the integrity and accuracy of the subject matter.

Plot Summary

The title of the book is a quote from Zora Neale Hurston’s memoir Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), in which she wrote “The gods of the upper air have uncovered their faces to my eyes.” King uses the line to reference the immersive, experiential methods undertaken by the members of the Boas circle, around whom the text is based.

King opens his narrative in one of its pivotal moments. It is 1925, and 23-year-old Margaret Mead is setting off for the Samoan Islands. Her fieldwork there forms the basis for one of the defining texts in the field of anthropology: Coming of Age in Samoa. King notes that as she embarked on her journey, Mead was leaving behind not only a husband but also a boyfriend and a female lover. Her life—highly unconventional for the time—would shape her groundbreaking research on gender and sexuality.

From here, King moves back in time to consider the career of Mead’s teacher and mentor Franz Boas. A German-Jewish immigrant to the US, Boas struggled at first to find a long-term position with an American university. For a time, he worked as a curator at the American Museum of Natural History. There, he witnessed first-hand the prestige of racial science in the American establishment. The Museum held a conference on eugenics, boasting about an exhibition about the negative effects of interracial procreation. The biologists and anthropologists of Boas’s day believed that race was a biological reality that predicted the physical and psychological characteristics of individual human beings. Boas himself reviled such ideas.

On the strength of his fieldwork in northern Canada and the Pacific Northwest, Boas finally earned a professorship at Columbia University in 1897. He immediately began designing and conducting research intended to debunk the ideas of racial science. He and students (including the young Zora Neale Hurston) spent years accosting people on the streets of New York, taking detailed physical measurements. Boas’s findings were conclusive. The American-born children of immigrants had more in common with other Americans than with children born in their parents’ countries. Diet and environment predicted people’s physical characteristics far more strongly than “race.”

As a teacher at Columbia, Boas encouraged a generation of anthropologists to apply his approach to non-American cultures. He argued that though cultures are many and various, humanity is one, and no culture is intrinsically superior to another. His most important students—Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ella Cara Deloria—would go on to make this perspective the founding assumption of modern anthropology.

The second half of King’s book follows these groundbreaking researchers. The most important of all is Mead. Thrice married and divorced, Mead knew herself to be inclined toward a polyamorous lifestyle. She felt grievously constrained by contemporary American assumptions about female sexuality and the virtue of monogamy. This suffering provided her with the insight that cultural assumptions about sex could be at odds with the psychological and biological reality of sex.

Mead set out to explore this insight through fieldwork in Samoa, where, she argued, young women come of age in a comparatively sexually liberal environment, and accordingly display different behaviors and different preferences. In short, Mead applied Boas’s technique for debunking racial science to gender, and in the process undermined longstanding Western assumptions about the essential nature of womanhood and sexuality.

Another student of Boas’s, Ruth Benedict, was for a time Mead’s lover—and, King, argues, the love of Mead’s life. Benedict became the foremost cheerleader for Boas’s ideas. In her book Patterns of Culture (1934), she coined the term “cultural relativity” for the approach taken by Boas and his students, a term that has remained to this day.

The writer Zora Neale Hurston applied the techniques and approaches she learned from Boas’s work to her own culture of the African American Gulf Coast. She returned from her fieldwork with enough material for two books, one anthropological, the other creative. The anthropological book was Mules and Men (1936), a pioneering study of African American folklore, written at a time when few thought such things worthy of serious study. The second book was the classic novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937).

Indigenous scholar Ella Cara Deloria also pioneered the anthropological study of her own people, working with Boas on a study of the Yankton Indian Reservation in South Dakota where she was born. She broke new ground by developing ways to implement the Western academic approaches of anthropology without defaulting to the typical white, Western, male perspective.

All four women faced profound institutional sexism: When Mead fled the marriage proposal of fellow anthropologist Edward Sapir, he suggested that she ought to be committed to a psychiatric hospital. Additionally, Hurston and Deloria faced racism. King argues that their work had profound political, as well as anthropological consequences.

By the 1930s, Boas was close to retirement. As a German Jew, he was horrified to see that the Nazi regime had adopted as its own racial science pioneered by American academics. He started to speak of “race” (he himself always used scare quotes) as a “dangerous fiction.”

In closing, King nods to the present day, reminding readers that although racial science has been chased from the academy by Boas and his students, it is not gone for good.