Looking at Boas later in life, you would have drawn the conclusion that he had a lot of need, as the scars left him "scrimshawed like an old walrus tusk, with Schmisse on his forehead, nose, and cheek, a jagged line running from mouth to ear." Anthropologists have gone to dark and exotic places to note and analyze the schmisses of others. Maybe that occurred to him as chair of the anthropology department at Columbia.
Early in his tenure at Columbia he was called on by the federal government to gather data among residents of Kleindeutschland (known today as the Lower East Side), which was "brimming with Jews, Poles, Italians, and Slovaks," to gather statistics on assimilation. But as King notes,
"The deeper concern was how to distinguish advanced, healthy, and vigorous northern Europeans from the lesser subraces now stumbling over one another on the streets and alleyways of the Lower East Side."
Nibelungen everywhere.
Inspired by the "scientific racism" found in such popular reads as The Passing of the Great Races, which asserted that superior Nordic races had been enervated by overexposure to democracy, the government was looking to avoid a cultural dilution to America's Way of Life. But Boas and his anthropologists had some bad news for the blue bloods. These groups easily assimilated. And may, in fact, have displayed all the virtues of the American Way - especially multiculturalism. Boas's data disputed government assumptions; it revealed fascistic prejudices simmering just beneath the surface of public policy. The reader can imagine how a different set of data might have led to purges. Philip Roth's The Plot Against America comes to mind. No wonder Hitler winked.
For Boas, notes King, "No one should be creating broad theories of human difference until more data had been collected." Franz Boas's most famous anthropologist was Margaret Mead. Intellectually informed by von Herder's Sturm und Drang literary movement (itself a Goethe-Werther nod), Boas had put Mead to work on the Cause by suggesting that she complete her doctoral dissertation by considering the question:
"Was the transition from childhood to adulthood, with young women and men rebelling against their stultifying parents, the product of a purely biological change, the onset of puberty?"
He arranged for her to go to America Samoa to find an answer. When she got there - Pago Pago - she found "the largest naval deployment since Theodore Roosevelt had sent the Great White Fleet around the world as a display of American sea power." Her thoughts were constantly plagued by some ship in the fleet playing "ragtime." She wrote to Boas, "The only sizable villages were 'over-run with missionaries, stores, and various intrusive influences,' " and were much corrupted by the influence of the Americans." Writes King, "This was no way to study primitive tribes [and] she vowed to get as far away from Pago Pago as possible."
She sailed from Pago Pago to T'ua, hundreds of miles away, where she lived with an American couple. Even there, she was unsure of how she would proceed, when a fortuitous hurricane suddenly changed the course of her study. King paraphrases her thinking,
What if the real way to understand people wasn't to gawk at their ceremonies or even to share in their most important work, as Malinowski had done, but to be beside them in their most unguarded moments-sweeping up debris, rebuilding a house, reweaving a damaged mat, comforting a wailing child?
She went to work, fitting in and taking copious notes.
In her Samoan field work, and later working with children on Manus Island, off the coast of Papua New Guinea, she came to some startling data-driven conclusions about the transition from childhood to adult. Unlike in America or Germany, or any other number of Western countries, the children didn't carry their 'magical thinking' over into adulthood, and there was no real 'sturm und drang.'
The Western presumption was that the transition, for boys and girls, was a natural by-product of growing up - "rebellion against authority, philosophical perplexities, the flowering of idealism, conflict and struggle - [were] ascribed to a period of physical development," Mead found. At the end, as at the beginning, she asked herself the Question: "Were these difficulties due to being adolescent or due to being adolescents in America?" She went with the latter. It's all culturally relative.
Out of all this came Coming of Age in Samoa, which became very popular in academia and helped give wings to the growth in the Humanities, which saw its heyday in the late 60s and 70s. Mead's book quickly found itself listed by conservatives in "10 Books That Screwed Up the World," joining favorite hates like, Darwin's The Descent of Man, Marx and Engels's The Communist Manifesto, and Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. It was a badge of honor for Mead.
King also explores and describes in some detail all the sexual tension implicit (and sometimes explicit) in Mead's many love entanglements. She was a kind of proto-feminist. She wouldn't marry the linguist, Edward Sapir, who, feeling somehow 'betrayed', turned on her later and was a harsh critic of her work. She married three other men - Luther Cressman, Reo Fortune, and Gregory Bateson, who she referred to as "a William Blake in safari cottons." And she left Ruth Benedict unrequited and standing at the altar of love. Naturally, this all informed her anthropology somehow.
Another free spirit attracted to Boas's world was the novelist -- and anthropologist -- Zora Neale Hurston, the so-called Queen of the Harlem Renaissance, and tightly connected to Langston Hughes. The author of Their Eyes Were Watching God, the first novel written that made Black vernacular the star of the show and inspired writers like Toni Morrison later. Urged on by Boas, she sought to develop an ethnographic history of residents of Eatonville, the first self-governing all-black municipality in the United States, and of South Florida in general. King explains, "Between 1890 and 1930, Florida had, per capita, more public lynchings than any other state in the country, almost exclusively of African Americans-twice the number in Mississippi and Georgia, three times that in Alabama."
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