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

By the time that Franz Boas arrived in New York City in 1886, the United States was in the midst of what is known as The Gilded Age. This roughly 20-year period saw a tremendous proliferation in the areas of industry, real estate development, economic growth, and westward territorial expansion. These advances convinced Americans, especially those seeking wealth and privilege, of the inherent superiority and prowess of the United States as a world power. Because the American elite consisted mainly of wealthy, white Anglo-Saxon men, the now-debunked concept of eugenics—meaning “well born”—became popularized by those seeking a scientific justification for the superiority of the white race.

Gilded Age Americans believed in manifest destiny, the idea of the United States’ unique moral superiority and divine right to increase its territory across North America. Europeans at this time were expanding their colonialist holdings in Africa and elsewhere, and technological advances in global travel made it possible for Westerners to reach more remote cultures and regions to further this project. These cultural interactions, conducted with an imperialist mindset, led Westerners to infantilize the members of the societies they studied and colonized. They acquired their artifacts and brought them to the United States, Europe, and Great Britain to display in museums or in private collections, with little understanding of the original contexts in which they were created.

Eugenics developed in response to the increased immigration to the US and Great Britain at this time. Many white Anglo-Saxons with a long family history in America disapproved of the influx of poor immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe, whom they considered ethnically and culturally undesirable and a detriment to the moral fabric of the nation. This white ruling class, many of whom gained extreme wealth through slavery, manufacturing, and colonialism, benefitted from an economic structure that kept the impoverished classes reliant upon them for jobs that were punishing, exploitative, dangerous, and underpaid.

Advances in biological science progressed along with industrial and mechanical technologies, and the common understanding that white Americans and their British and European counterparts were the pinnacle of intelligence, civilization, and genetic excellence gained evidentiary traction in the claims of men like British polymath Sir Francis Galton, cousin to Charles Darwin, who studied genetics and coined the term “eugenics.” Through the implementation of eugenics, white elites established laws stemming the flow of immigration and implementing coercive sterilization procedures that targeted “most immigrants, Blacks, Indigenous people, poor whites and people with disabilities” (“Forced Sterilization Policies in the US Targeted Minorities and Those With Disabilities – and Lasted Into the 21st Century.” University of Michigan Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation, 23 Sept. 2020).  

This was the social and scientific climate in which Franz Boas began questioning the theories that dominated Western cultural thought as he developed the budding academic discipline of anthropology.