THENEWYORKER, AUGUST 26, 2019 81
The celebrated cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead, photographed in 1930.
N
ot that long ago, Margaret Mead
was one of the most widely known
intellectuals in America. Her first book,
“Coming of Age in Samoa,” published
in 1928, when she was twenty-six, was a
best-seller, and for the next fifty years she
was a progressive voice in national de-
bates about everything from sex and gen-
der to nuclear policy, the environment,
and the legalization of marijuana. (She
was in favor—and this was in 1969.) She
had a monthly column in Redbook that
ran for sixteen years and was read by mil-
lions. She advised government agencies,
testified before Congress, and lectured
on all kinds of subjects to all kinds of au-
diences. She was Johnny Carson’s guest
on the “Tonight Show.” Time called her
“Mother to the World.” In 1979, the year
after she died, President Jimmy Carter
awarded her the Medal of Freedom.
Today, Margaret Mead lives on as an
“icon”—meaning that people might rec-
ognize the name, and are not surprised
to see her face on a postage stamp (as it
once was), but they couldn’t tell you what
she wrote or said. If pressed, they would
probably guess that Mead was an im-
portant figure for the women’s movement.
They would be confusing Mead’s signifi-
cance as a role model (huge as that un-
doubtedly was) with Mead’s views. Mead
was not a modern feminist, and Betty
Friedan devoted a full chapter of “The
Feminine Mystique” to an attack on her
work. Mead mattered for other reasons.
One of the aims of Charles King’s “Gods
of the Upper Air” (Doubleday) is to re-
mind us what those were.
Mead was a cultural anthropologist,
and the rise of cultural anthropology is
the subject of King’s book. It’s a group
biography of Franz Boas, who established
cultural anthropology as an academic
discipline in the United States, and four
of Boas’s many protégés: Ruth Benedict,
Zora Neale Hurston, Ella Cara Deloria,
and Mead. King argues that these peo-
ple were “on the front lines of the great-
est moral battle of our time: the strug-
gle to prove that—despite differences of
skin color, gender, ability, or custom—
humanity is one undivided thing.”
Cultural anthropologists changed
people’s attitudes, King believes, and
they changed people’s behavior. “If it is
now unremarkable for a gay couple to
kiss goodbye on a train platform,” he
writes, “for a college student to read the
Bhagavad Gita in a Great Books class,
for racism to be rejected as both mor-
ally bankrupt and self-evidently stupid,
and for anyone, regardless of their gen-
der expression, to claim workplaces and
boardrooms as fully theirs—if all of these
things are not innovations or aspirations
but the regular, taken-for-granted way
of organizing society, then we have the
ideas championed by the Boas circle to
thank for it.” They moved the explana-
tion for human differences from biol-
ogy to culture, from nature to nurture.
A lot of this story has been told, but
King is an intelligent and judicious writer,
and he has woven a concise narrative that
manages to work in a fair amount of con-
text. His subjects were all unusual charac-
ters, and their lives are colorfully related.
Obviously, legal and political actors had at
least as much to do with the changes in
social attitudes that King writes about as
anthropologists did. But he makes a good
case with the cards he has dealt himself.
On the other hand, issues around race,
gender, sexuality, and “otherness” are still
very much with us, although in slightly
altered form. And when people discuss
them they no longer solicit the wisdom
of anthropologists. What happened?
B
oas was born and educated in Prus-
sia. He moved to the United States
in 1886, when he was twenty-eight, and
a decade later, after some false starts,
became a professor of anthropology at
BOOKS
THE LOOKING GLASS
Are we at the end of the nature-nurture debate?
BY LOUIS MENAND
