Dan Snow's History Hit - Rebel Anthropologists Who Challenged Everything

Episode Date: December 1, 2020

Charles King joined me on the podcast to talk about a group of cultural anthropologist who fundamentally transformed conceptions of 'normality' in the early twentieth century. We talked in particular about the work of Margaret Mead.Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hi there everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. What a treat it is to have you listening to this podcast. This episode of History, do you know what? This was fascinating, this episode. I got to talk to the very wonderful historian in Washington DC. We had a lovely chat. His name's Charles King. He's a professor of international affairs at good old Georgetown University. He's written a best-selling book, an award-nominated book, about Franz Boas, an academic in the early 20th century who redefined the idea of normality. and a group of anthropologists really working with him. Nearly all women, interestingly, helped to challenge all of that and lay the foundations for our understanding of the world as it is today. It is so fascinating. So please enjoy this podcast.

If you're wishing to listen to all these other podcasts without, yes, without listening to the ads on the front, that is perfectly possible. You can do that at History Hit TV. It's our new digital history channel. It's like Netflix for history. Use the code POD1, P-O-D-1, you get a month for free in your second month for just one pound, one euro, one dollar. Pretty sweet. So please do go and check that out. Also, we are selling out of our history hoodies on our shop. I had to get

on there today and buy some for my kids because actually we are running so low. There is not even any left for staff. So please head over to the shop and get some there today and buy some for my kids because actually we are running so low. There is not even any left for staff. So please head over to the shop and get some hoodies and all the weird historical stuff you need for that strange, hard to buy for member of your office, family or friendship group. In the meantime, everybody, here is Charles King. Enjoy. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast, Charles. Really happy to be with you. Thanks for inviting me. This is a fascinating story.

At the dawn of the 20th century, let's take the US and Britain. What did people think was normal when it came to race, sex and gender? Well, if you went into what was called a natural history museum, you would have been exposed to certain truths about the world that were historically and scientifically demonstrable. That the world was divided into a set of things called races, and that individuals inherited a race from their parents and then passed down that race to their children. In that kind of human packaging was contained not only physical differences that could be measured in one way or another, head shape, femur length, and so on, skin tone, but that all those packages also contained everything else about you and about the group

to which you were assigned by nature. So your capacity for leadership, your artistic talent, your ability to reach the heights of civilization. And, you know, you would walk through a natural history museum and you would see the progress of humanity from so-called savage peoples through merely barbarous peoples all the way to fully advanced and civilized people who just happened to look like northern Europeans and their colonial descendants in various parts of the world. So this was not a fringe idea, the concept of racial categorization and racial ranking. This was the scientific and popular consensus of the time. The intellectual gymnastics, of course, are quite profound to achieve that. But

one thing, just on a side note, how did they deal with the unhidably barbarous beginnings of certain European, North European white people? So did they allow for any idea about progression? You wouldn't have to deny the fact that at the time in which, you know, Northern Europeans were living what, by the standards of the day, would have been considered barbarous existences, and there were great civilizations rising and falling in West Africa, in the Middle East, in Asia, and elsewhere. You know, people would always, though, begin from the perspective of the present. And so in some ways, it didn't require that many intellectual gymnastics at all. I mean, just open your eyes and look around the world. Britain and its overseas colonies and its political and cultural civilizational

descendants around the world control things. They've created this massive, you know, industrial technological revolution. Every bit of data that your eyes, your ears were getting at the time seemed to confirm the very stories that you would be told in a world history class or a natural history museum. So in fact, it took some intellectual gymnastics and some hard work to believe the opposite of the stuff that your eyes were telling you. Well, tell me about some of the people that started questioning that and doing those gymnastics. Well, the book I wrote, The Reinvention of Humanity, is really about a group of scholars and activists and writers who set out to demonstrate the essential connectedness of human beings, but in a rather innovative way.

Because, of course, if you look at the great sort of religious and philosophical systems around the world, the concept of the essential unity of human beings is the thing that runs through lots of different ethical and religious systems. But this group set out to show scientifically that you can't divide human beings up into lesser and greater, more civilized, less civilized, advanced, and primitive. That those boxes themselves are a product of a particular time and a particular place, particular culture, if you want to put it that way, and not human universals. They consisted at their core of a guy named Franz Boas, who was of German Jewish background, immigrated to the United States in the 1880s, later became a professor of anthropology, a new field that he helped to invent

at Columbia University. And from that perch in his seminar room, created the entire discipline of what is now known as cultural anthropology in the United States by emphasizing the idea that you can't live intelligently in the world by coming to it with your own culturally determined, socially determined set of analytical boxes. The way to live well in the world, scientifically in the world, is to not put yourself automatically at the center of some story of human evolution. And his students went on to become some of the most famous social scientists of the century, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, the novelist Zora Neale Hurston, who's very famous in the United States, one of the key figures of the Harlem Renaissance, but was also a PhD student of Boaz's. And what I tried to do in the book is sort of reintroduce her to a set of readers as a social scientist, not just as a

writer. What was it about that moment, him and his students, that made it possible, that made it acceptable for him to start reimagining this? Well, I think all of them, at some point in their lives, had a very similar kind of revelation. And it often took place in the field when they were going out to do their anthropological fieldwork. For Boas, as a young man on Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic, for Margaret Mead in American Samoa, very famously writing Coming of Age in Samoa in 1928, which became probably the most widely read piece of popular anthropology ever. Ruth Benedict working in the American Southwest, Zora Neale Hurston working in Haiti and Jamaica. And then their individual lives, you know, these were women

at a time when trying to make academic careers at a time when that was very difficult for women, when Ruth Benedict as an associate professor at Columbia University couldn't go to the faculty club because she happened to be a woman. Zora Neale Hurston, the only black student at Barnard College at Columbia at the time, these were all outsiders in one form or another. And they had the same kind of realization that the winds that are buffeting me in life, in my career, when I walk down the street, the assumptions that people make about me and my talents and my abilities, either those are true, that I am backward, I'm broken in some way. Mead and Benedict were in a lifelong loving relationship at a time when

that had to be kept secret between two women. So there's something deviant about me, and I really am as bad as the society around me says. Or there's something about the relationship between me, I'm fine, and the social categories and norms and expectations that I'm surrounded by that are constraining me in some way. And so each of these individuals were particularly well placed to understand the power of social norms, categories, expectations, totems, if you want to use that anthropological term, in the way that their life arcs worked out, because they all experienced it. These were the people who were the science of the day

would have said about a person like Hurston or Mead, constrain your ambitions because you're just not culturally capable or inherently capable of the heights of civilization. And they chafed at that. You say in the book, and it really strikes me that this important phrase that Boas looked at other cultures from a position of respect. And it's very simple, but it seems that everything grows from that seed. If you begin with the idea that you have something to learn from another society or another group of people or something that seems very unfamiliar to you, not to be afraid of it. Mead once said that her writing, her career

was about getting people not to fear difference of whatever sort. You know, the difference is the normal state of human society around the world. And so don't be afraid of it. Try to understand it in some way. It doesn't mean you have to then agree with it in a moral sense, or you don't have to think some cultural practice is a universally good idea, but you ought to understand where it comes from, what function it serves, what are the historical roots of it. And, you know, we now take this to be pretty fundamental to a broad-minded, capacious view of the world. You know, we kind of take this as obvious or given, at least in some quarters.

But at the time, in the teens and 20s and 30s of the last century, this was pushing against the scientific consensus of the day and pushing against virtually everything that particularly white, Northern Europeans, Americans, and others said about themselves. white Northern Europeans, Americans and others said about themselves. You're listening to History Hit. More from Charles King on these remarkable anthropologists after this. Land a Viking longship on island shores. Scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History,

we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive but to conquer whether you're preparing for assassin's creed shadows or fascinated by history and great stories listen to echoes of history a ubisoft podcast brought to you by history hits affluent new englander or brit in 1900 it would have felt pretty lopsided you would have felt like hang on a second God must have tipped the scales here, because the technological cavern, the healthcare outcomes, the dark, you name it, between you and many societies around the world would have appeared like precipitous. If you observe the world, and you see this great

chasm between your own achievements, the achievements of people who you believe look like you, and the achievements of people who don't look like you, it's the easy thing to think is that this is due to your own brilliance. You know, this is due solely to your own personal, inherent, civilizational superiority. The harder thing to do is to say, wait a minute, maybe there is some history here that I need to understand. Maybe there are things that we now call structural impediments that have prevented or that continue to prevent people who look differently or speak differently or organize the world differently from achieving the same kinds of things that I have achieved. Or maybe I'm located, and this was a big point of Boas's, maybe I'm located inside history.

That stopping the clock where I am right now and then doing my entire analysis of the scope of human history and seeing it as leading inexorably to me, maybe I'm just being a bad historian. Again, the science of the day was pushing the opposite direction. And the thing that Boas realized is that the science itself was serving a very contemporary purpose, right? Because what was different about 20th century colonialism and 20th century white supremacy and so on, and Boas recognized this, is that while it's true that every society of which we have knowledge often puts itself at the center of some human story, that's a very normal thing for societies to do, to, you know, see that God has ordained them to be a particular way or to believe

that their own customs and food ways and practices are the natural and obvious ones. It seems to be a human universal. The difference in the 20th century was to structure your politics, to structure your biological and social sciences, to structure your museums, to structure your elementary school classrooms around proving scientifically the inherent inequality of human beings. You know, and so that by the 20s and 30s, of course, the United States in particular had created the world's most perfect system up to that time of racial categorization and segregation. Before the early 1930s, the United States state governments had subjected a larger number of individuals than anywhere else in the world to forced sterilization so that they wouldn't reproduce themselves and reproduce the defects that the governments had said they were likely to reproduce. we know what scientifically and culturally advanced is, and we're going to use the power of modern government to realize that. That's a difference I think that Boas recognized.

Margaret Mead is one of your extraordinary characters in this book. Talk to me a little bit about her trip to Samoa. Mead was a doctoral student of Boas's. She finished her dissertation in the early 1920s. And typically, you would write your dissertation based on what you found in the library, and then you would go off after that and do your own initial field work. And she had done some work on Pacific cultures and felt that she had sort of teched up in that area and then set off for American Samoa, where she actually lived with an American family. She didn't live in a Samoan household. She was sort of physically a very fragile kind of person, even as she was setting off around the world to do these quite remarkable adventures. And so she lived for about nine months in American Samoa with the idea that she would do a project on a group of people that anthropologists up to that stage had largely ignored, that is,

women and young girls, you know. I mean, it's remarkable, we've been talking about race, of course, but the gender components of how people created vast theories of, you know, man with a capital M, it was, I mean, they were always based on men with a small m, right, not on trying to understand these perhaps less accessible dimensions of the human experience that the male anthropologists traveling around the world just didn't have access to. So she was particularly interested in how people navigate the transition from childhood to adulthood. She was a young woman in her early 20s growing up in New York, going to college and graduate school in New York in the 1920s,

right in the roaring 20s, where the talk was about civilizational collapse. You know, this is the first youth revolution in the United States. People are worried, older Americans are worried that society is collapsing as people are dancing with Charleston and drinking bootleg gin and so on. And she wanted to know whether that was a human universal. And what she concluded in Samoa is that really the fundamental angst that Americans seem to be experiencing about a thing called teeners at the time, or teenagers as we would call them today, that this really wasn't a human, this didn't seem to be a human universal, that societies structure the transition from childhood to adulthood in different ways. And again, this is the kind of thing that we think of as pretty obvious now,

but the book was an incredible hit when it came out in 1928, in part because it was marketed very well, and this was an American social scientist saying that Americans themselves might have something to learn about child-rearing and adolescence from alleged primitives in the South Pacific. But it began Mead's career as a kind of intellectual grenade thrower, which she was until she died in the 1970s. Why Meade was both a social scientist, and in some ways a very talented social scientist, as well as an activist. And she was less good at

being an activist. Sort of later in her life, there was nothing that Margaret Meade didn't have an opinion on. She had an opinion on absolutely everything and would go on, you know, radio and television programs in the 60s and 70s at the height of the sexual revolution and let her views be known. But, you know, on the analytical side, I don't think there's an obvious conclusion about how an individual family or an individual parent chooses to raise a child. What she was making really a point about the entire social context, right? So how did society at large deal with the transition from childhood to adulthood? You know, her point was really not that American society is structured one way sexually and Samoan society is structured another way sexually, but that in fact, observable sexual behavior in both

societies seems to be pretty similar. She was an American college student after all, and she knew what went on in the dorms at Barnard. It was just that how the society chose to talk about those issues, what it chose to keep secret, what it chose to be embarrassed about, those were the things that really differed. And then, you know, this set the stage for 40 and 50 years later, the great studies of human sexuality that would come out during the sexual revolution that, of course, revealed that, you know, newsflash, people lie about sex all the time. And, you know, that was, again, one of the early insights that Mead had. History writing should constantly be changing. I mean, our understanding of the past,

as we have access to different kinds of sources, ought to change. The characters we focus on ought to change. These things are never written in stone, or if they are, it's really not history anymore. It's building a monument to something, or it's being hagiographic. It's not history writing. And this was also something that Boas, as a social scientist, really insisted on and taught all of his students. You know, follow the data. Try to create as much data as you can and then follow it wherever it leads. Try to get rid of your own prejudices and realizing that you're never going completely to get rid of them. But do your darndest to work around them by exposing yourself to as many different ways of seeing the world as possible. One lesson I should draw from your book is that science was very, very dodgy

at the turn of the century, right? Is science different now? Or do we still have to be very skeptical about science? And that's got big implications for issues around climate, around pandemic. Like, how should we feel about that? One of the key theories that the Boas group came up with, cultural relativism. People are always worried that this means you can't make any decision about anything. I mean, you know, does this descend into a kind of intellectual moral nihilism in one form or other? And I think one shouldn't be too worried about that, but you have to take the core of what they meant. And I think this is sort of a good lesson for today, that we can make decisions

about the world, but we ought to do so on the basis of evidence, you know. So when you're thinking about history or science, teaching them that a scientific or historically grounded outlook on the world is about the use and judgment about evidence. You know, it's not about a set of stories and it's not about a set of heroes and it's not about one kind of narrative. In fact, you should expect lots and lots of narratives. But how you distinguish them is digging into what counts as evidence for a thing. Because the president tweeted something, not evidence. Because I happened through a Google search to come up with something, not evidence. And I think that's where, if we're thinking about reforming also history education and what does schools do, having students do less of learning of narratives and heroes and less monumental history, if you like, and more dealing with sources, you know, the critical analysis of sources so that you can make good

guesses, conclusions about certain things based on the evidence available to you. But then still understanding that as with any science, that is, of course, contingent as better evidence comes along. The old Karl Popper notion of what science is is a pretty good one. And I think it applies to the sort of evidentiary humanities as well, that science is simply the falsification of hypotheses based on observable data, you know. And if you're making claims about the world, I know something is true because Q told me, and I saw it on the internet, that is not a falsifiable proposition. A conspiracy theory is by definition not a falsifiable proposition. And so there are ways out of this.

But we're living in a moment where the sharpening of thought, care about evidence, understanding what counts as data, all of these are absolutely crucial, crucial things. Study history, vaccinate yourself, inoculate yourself from propaganda and craziness. I think that's something that's super important as history and the humanities comes under pressure over the next few years, I'm sure. Thank you so much. That was just fascinating. I'm going to let you go. I could talk to you all day. What is the name of the book? The book is called The Reinvention of Humanity. Brilliant. Thank you so much. Well, thanks very much. This was really such a fun conversation. Appreciate it. Hi, everybody.

Just a quick message at the end of this podcast. I'm currently sheltering in a small windswept building on a piece of rock in the Bristol Channel called Lundy. I'm here to make a podcast. I'm here enduring weather that frankly is apocalyptic because I want to get some great podcast material for you guys. In return, I've got a little tiny favour to ask. If you could go to wherever you get your podcasts, if you could give it a five-star rating, if you could share it, if you could give it a review, I really appreciate that. Then from the comfort of your own homes, you'll be doing me a massive favour. Then more

people will listen to the podcast. We can do more and more ambitious things, and I can spend more of my time getting pummeled. Thank you.