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

Franz Boas was born in 1858 in Minden, a small town in Germany, to an upper-middle-class Jewish family. He attended the prestigious Heidelberg University, where he studied the most highly regarded German philosophers and was immersed in scientifically rigorous work. By the time he earned his doctorate in physics, Boas had developed significant proficiency in conducting experiments, analyzing data, and approaching problems through the lens of scientific inquiry.

Boas was fascinated by the ongoing research expeditions to remote parts of the world being undertaken by explorer-adventurers in the late 19th century. Deciding to undertake his own project, Boas planned a postdoctoral research expedition to Baffin Island, Greenland, where he planned to study how the Inuit negotiated the climate, terrain, and the migration patterns of the animals they hunted for survival. Instead, he filled notebooks with observations about their histories, relationships, traditions, and cultural practices, including an attempt at creating a dictionary of their language.

When Boas arrived on Baffin Island, he felt helpless amidst the harsh northern environment. This led him to two epiphanies that would shape not only the course of his research but also his understanding of himself: Despite his array of supplies, the assistance of his manservant, and his extensive knowledge of the region, Boas realized that he was ill-prepared to survive in the arctic climate. He also realized that strong community connections were essential to any one person’s survival, and he lacked such ties.

When he returned to New York after concluding his research, Boas was devastated to discover that all the faculty positions related to anthropology were already occupied, and he returned to Germany.

After leaving the university, Boas turned to famed American adventurer John Wesley Powell for employment in New York. Anthropology, at that time, was closer to the 21st-century concept of archaeology, while the study of people, their practices, and behaviors, was considered ethnology. Powell was the director of the United States government’s new Bureau of Ethnology and believed that human beings evolved along a continuum from baser, more “primitive” states mirroring early man to the epitome of achievement and sophistication seen in Western culture. He theorized that humans occupied one of three evolutionary positions in chronological order: savagery, barbarism, and civilization. Powell considered those in the “savage” and “barbarous” categories to be in the process of socially evolving toward his own society’s level of evolutionary attainment. He believed that in studying non-Western cultures, he was essentially observing earlier iterations of social evolution. As King writes, “Ethnology, then, was simply the act of civilized man conversing with those who had yet to travel the same pathway he had once trod” (45).

Boas returned to North America in 1886, traveling to Vancouver to engage in more field work collecting oral histories and folklore from members of the Indigenous population of the Pacific Northwest. Returning to New York, Boas secured a position at Science Magazine. One of his first pieces was an indictment of the way Powell and his colleagues at the Smithsonian were organizing the institute’s growing collections of objects created by so-called “savage” and “barbarous” artisans. In assessing the items as examples of their creators’ presumed lower evolutionary stage rather than as distinct products of complex societies, the curators were mischaracterizing them and drawing incorrect conclusions about their purpose. They were also grouping them incorrectly, without regard to their origin.

Boas believed this collection method was useless as it ignored an item’s location of origin and the intention associated with its creation. Instead, he asserted, items should be displayed according to their geographic origin with as much context on the usage and significance of the item as was possible to determine. Only by appreciating the creations of a society in context could visitors to the museum develop an understanding of and appreciation for the cultures that were on display.