84 THENEWYORKER, AUGUST 26, 2019
took an introduction-to-anthropology
class with Boas in her senior year, and
Benedict was her T.A. Benedict per-
suaded Mead to enroll in the graduate
program. They also fell in love.
Benedict was fourteen years older
than Mead, and Mead was married. So
was Benedict. Their intimacy lasted for
the rest of Benedict’s life, and through
two more marriages for Mead. (That
relationship is the subject
of a book, by Lois Banner,
called “Intertwined Lives.”)
Mead’s choice to do her
field work in Samoa, study-
ing adolescence, was en-
couraged by Boas, who
wrote a foreword to the
book that resulted and that
launched her career.
Zora Neale Hurston en-
tered Barnard in 1925, when
she was thirty-four. (No one knew her
age; Hurston always lied about it.) After
graduating, she spent two years in the
doctoral program before dropping out,
but by then Boas had got her started
collecting African-American folklore
in central Florida, where she had grown
up. She published her findings in 1935,
as “Mules and Men,” with a preface by
Boas, but the real importance of the
work she did was that it provided ma-
terial for the astonishing representation
of African-American speech in her sin-
gular novel “Their Eyes Were Watch-
ing God.” That book was published in
1937 and slowly sank from view—Rich-
ard Wright accused Hurston of min-
strelsy—but it was “rediscovered” in the
nineteen-seventies, and is now a staple
text in English-literature courses.
The anthropology these people prac-
ticed had two motives that might seem,
from an orthodox scholarly perspective,
extracurricular—except that knowledge
is always pursued for a reason. One
motive was to record ways of life that
were rapidly disappearing. Even in the
nineteen-twenties, it was almost impos-
sible to find groups of humans un-
touched by Western practices. The is-
land that Mead’s research subjects lived
on was an American possession. It had
an Anglo-American legal system, and
the Samoans were all Christians.
Mead did her best to minimize these
circumstances, because she wanted to
capture behavior and mores that were
remote from American Christian moral
and legal conceptions—in particular,
Samoan attitudes toward premarital
sex, which is the part of the book that
got all the attention. So she centered
her account on what she took to be the
distinctively “Samoan” aspects of her
subjects’ lives.
Early-twentieth-century anthropol-
ogists were highly self-conscious about
this recovery mission. They
worried that the world was
losing its cultural diversity.
“Western civilization, be-
cause of fortuitous histor-
ical circumstances, has
spread itself more widely
than any other local group
that has so far been known,”
Benedict wrote. “This
world-wide cultural diffu-
sion has protected us as
man had never been protected before
from having to take seriously the civi-
lizations of other peoples.” The French
anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss,
who did his field work among indige-
nous groups in west-central Brazil in
the nineteen-thirties, once suggested
that the word “anthropology” should be
changed to “entropology”—the study
of the homogenization of human life
across the planet. Cultural anthropol-
ogy was the West’s way of memorial-
izing its victims.
The other motive—and this is what
accounts for the popularity of Mead’s
and Benedict’s books, and of Hurston’s
novel—was to hold up a mirror. What
is of interest to the anthropologist is
difference, but all difference is differ-
ence from something, and the “some-
thing” in these books is the anthropol-
ogist’s own culture.
This is true even for Hurston. She
was raised in Florida, but she attended
college in the North and was part of
the Harlem Renaissance. She was cos-
mopolitan. She wrote “Their Eyes Were
Watching God” because she wanted to
show Northern readers a way of life that
was barely conceivable to the integra-
tionist mentality (which she did not
share): African-Americans living hap-
pily in the South and having virtually
no contact with whites.
The idea behind all these books is
that we can’t see our way of life from
the inside, just as we can’t see our ownfaces. The culture of the “other” serves
as a looking glass. As Benedict put it in
“Patterns of Culture,” “The understand-
ing we need of our own cultural pro-
cesses can most economically be arrived
at by a détour.” These books about pre-
modern peoples are really books about
life in the modern West.
Given this aim, the emphasis falls,
almost unavoidably, on the exotic, and
for the nonprofessional audience exot-
icism is a big part of the appeal. The
jacket illustration for “Coming of Age
in Samoa” featured a topless girl. The
trick was to turn this appeal inside out,
so that what appear at first to be out-
landish and sometimes repellent prac-
tices come to seem natural and sensi-
ble, and our own practices, whose
reasonableness we had taken for granted,
start to appear tribal and arbitrary. The
anthropologist Clifford Geertz, writ-
ing about Benedict, called this “portray-
ing the alien as the familiar with the
signs changed.”S
oon after Mead’s death, cultural an-
thropology began losing its voice in
public debates. King thinks that the rea-
son for this was the rise of anti-relativ-
ism. He points out that cultural relativ-
ism is the principal target of Allan
Bloom’s “The Closing of the American
Mind,” which was published in 1987 and
helped launch the culture wars of the
ensuing decade. Bloom attacked both
Mead and Benedict, and the notion that
teachers who preach cultural relativism
are turning American students into un-
patriotic nihilists has been a recurrent
theme in political rhetoric ever since.
It’s true that Boas and Benedict spoke
of “relativity,” and that at the end of
“Patterns of Culture” Benedict refers to
“coexisting and equally valid patterns
of life which mankind has created for
itself from the raw materials of exis-
tence.” But everything else in Benedict’s
book contradicts the assertion that all
cultures are “equally valid.” The whole
point is to judge which practices, oth-
ers’ or our own, seem to produce the
kind of society we want. The anthro-
pological mirror has a moral purpose.
The term “culture” is responsible for
some of the confusion. We think that
to call something part of a group’s cul-
ture is to excuse it from judgment. We
say, That’s just the lens through which