In fact, one of his sort of chief antagonists was a person named Grant. MARTIN: One of the points that you make in the book is that there were always competitors to Boas' ideas. And they elevated that into an entire theory of society. Your place in the world is determined by your surroundings. It's not a thing that is inherent to you. They didn't know what kind of food you could eat or what would kill you.Īnd each of them took from that experience, I think, the understanding that how you make your way in the world is a product of your education, your circumstance, your culture.
#FRANZ BOAS HOW TO#
They didn't know how to be a proper person. And all of them at some point had an experience in which they realized that while they were educated, they could make their way through their own culture and their society, in the place that they found themselves in that moment, they were stupid. For Boas, it was on Baffin Island, living with the Inuit in the Arctic. KING: Well, I think at some point, Boas and each of his students had a kind of transformational experience somewhere. Why is it that he was able to go out and realize that basically, what he had been taught was just wrong? A lot of people were doing that at that time. MARTIN: But you make the point in your book that a lot of his ideas started to come from his fieldwork, where he was going out and experiencing, you know, what we would call native cultures or traditional cultures firsthand. And so this experience, I think, propelled him forward with the idea that every society creates its own kind of hierarchies, and to live intelligently in the world, to live as a social scientist in the world, what do you had to do was to try to recognize those. The teaching of German was banned in some states. And they were treated abysmally by both the American government at the time, by state governments and so forth. Of course, we forget today, but at the time of the first World War, German Americans were the largest minority group in the United States - immigrant minority group in the United States. He said it was the greatest disappointment of his life when he witnessed the nationalism that attended that conflict. He was a German Jewish immigrant to the United States who found himself on the wrong side of the first World War. KING: Well, in some ways, he and everyone he gathered around him - Zora Neale Hurston, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict and others - were themselves outsiders in some way. MARTIN: Well, given the fact that he was, as you said, surrounded by this point of view, how did it happen that he started to see the world differently? What changed him? And he worked very hard to teach people that that was a product of our own society, not of God or nature. So from literally cradle to grave, you work inside this hierarchy. You were taught this, and you experienced it every day depending on what swimming pool you could go to, what streetcar you could ride in, where you were buried. studios to tell us more about Franz Boas and just how unconventional his ideas were at the time.ĬHARLES KING: Well, he was a revolutionary because, of course, at the time he started doing this new kind of social science, which he and his students had to name as cultural anthropology, there was widespread consensus about this idea of cultural, racial, gender hierarchy - that the natural order of the world was one in which you had folks at the top and folks at the bottom, and you stayed in those categories over the entirety of your life, and those categories were inheritable. Their collective story is the subject of a new book - "Gods Of The Upper Air: How A Circle Of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, And Gender In The 20th Century." It was written by Charles King, author and professor of international affairs at Georgetown University. That professor, Franz Boas, pioneered the field of anthropology, and his influence spread through students who also became pioneers such as Margaret Mead and Zora Neale Hurston. Given the fierce pushback, it might be hard to remember that in the early 1900s, at the dawn of what we've come to call social science, nearly all research was seen through a white supremacist lens until a German American professor started developing and then teaching the then-radical idea that race is a social rather than biological construct and that most ideas about race are really rationalizations for political positions and that all cultures deserve to be regarded with respect.
Trump's comments so often seem to rely on a racial hierarchy placing people like himself at the top and people different from him, especially people of color, at the bottom.
We've been talking a lot about race in this country, most recently because of comments by President Trump about certain lawmakers and certain cities and countries that many have criticized as racist.
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