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0:03
We're reading Gods of the Upper Air now. We're going back and forth—so we read chapter one of the textbook Through the Lens of Cultural Anthropology, we will now do a couple chapters out of Gods of the Upper Air, then on Thursday we go back into the
0:26
textbook. I've tried to bounce these things off of each other in a way that will sometimes hopefully make sense. Some of the people you read about in one place will show up in the other place.
0:41
Just to preview where we're going: we did something about what is cultural anthropology and we did some things about the idea of culture and where it came from. But we read more about the historical context of that in this book.
1:31
From here we go back into the next chapter, which is called "Studying Contemporary Culture."
1:40
When we get through Boas on Baffin Island and how he's trying to write down all these things, that will help us to understand how anthropologists started doing this thing we call fieldwork and ethnography. Boas was perhaps one of the inventors of it.
1:59
But I want to start back in the historical context, because I think some of you were struck by how things were quite different back then when the anthropologists were coming out with their ideas.
2:18
The whole society wasn't the same. Now sometimes I think the more things change, the more they remain the same. But there are other things that seem just totally mind-blowingly different. So it's good to kind of get a sense of what people were up against when they first came out with these ideas that today might seem common sense. Back in the day, it would have seemed very strange.
3:13
I want to start back in 1577. What happened?
3:40
They grab some people. One of them is too old to run away, the others have a little kid so couldn't run away. And they just took them. They were some Inuit. They brought them back to England. I guess
4:03
that's usually where they bring people, you know, bring people to various places.
4:11
I think they already had those names, and they started using their names. Well, at least they told people who they were instead of just
4:20
a general name. So you said that was progress of a sort.
4:26
So yeah, it's a little different. I mean, we shouldn't be able to do that today. 1577.
4:36
I guess what I want to say about this is, for one thing, this is happening long before there was ever anything called anthropology. Long before people talked about these things. When we're talking about Boas, we're talking about the 1890s—like 300 years after this. So this is a long time ago. But it's important to know that this was the colonial context of the time, which set up the conditions for anthropology. This is what Europeans sometimes did—go
5:16
in and take people away. And just take them.
5:20
So anthropologists sometimes, as we'll read, did some similar things which were bad. But they didn't invent this tradition. It was already there. People were doing bad stuff before then.
6:00
I guess I would also say we shouldn't necessarily close our eyes to the fact that people still get moved around against their will in our society. We usually try not to keep them in zoos. We usually don't see them when they get moved around. We keep them in prison or at immigration centers and stuff like that. And so they're shielded from view. But this stuff still does happen. So we shouldn't
6:24
congratulate ourselves too much. But yes, things perhaps were a little bit different back then. And then I also want to talk about the census. Now I'm fast-forwarding up to the time
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around when anthropology is coming out. Just to get a sense of what was happening at this time.
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In the United States, the census has been very linked to the question of race from the beginning. And in fact it's still the question that we all have to answer on the census.
7:46
We don't actually have to give our social class, but we do have to check off a box for race. Now, what's perhaps different is in the 1890s, as Charles King says here on page five, not only did they divide people into types, but there were census takers who went around and checked off the box for you by looking at you or asking you. But they checked the box off. So it was usually
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white men who would go around and take the census. Later on, nowadays, it's self-reporting. We still have to check a box. In the year 2000, I think King writes, was the first year that you could check more than one box or write your own thing in. But up until then, you had to choose one box.
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So what King does is tell us that the early anthropologists, the people who ended up gathered around Boas, were—well, let me read what he says on page four: "This book is about women and men who found themselves on the front lines of the greatest moral battle of our time."
9:48
The greatest moral battle of our time. Which is a pretty heady thing to be in on. So what was that battle? What were people trying to argue for or against?
11:05
Basically, trying to pit them one against each other. Who's smarter? Who's overall better? And then after doing that, they determined that there is no one superior race than another.
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The idea was that there were some individuals and groups who were naturally—this is on page seven—naturally smarter, abler, more upstanding, and fitter to rule. The people who should be in charge. And that science would tell you that. And that other people should
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be ruled over, or maybe even disappear. They shouldn't count for so much. That was the idea that everybody thought—that's what was going on. And so what is this greatest moral battle of our time? "The struggle to prove that, despite differences of skin color, gender, ability, or custom, humanity is one undivided thing." And you don't want to count people out too soon, because the people who might look different from you or do things a little different from
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you might have some really great ideas about how to move us all in a better direction. I think this is one of the things I like about Charles King—that as an outsider, he is better able sometimes to see the scope of what this whole thing was about. This is a slide from the last class: I argued that cultural anthropology may be in a better position when it was fighting people from the outsider position. When it was
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fighting against ethnocentrism, racism, gender stereotypes, all of these things. And that as anthropology becomes more established and joins the academy and becomes one of those upstanding people in society, it kind of loses some of that edge that it had before.
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When I first read Charles King's book, it made me mad. Because I'm like, I knew that. I teach that kind of stuff. And here's a person—I think his degree is in political science or international relations—here's a person who isn't even an anthropologist telling me what's important about this. But I think that's sort of critical—that he has an outsider perspective on how this mattered to society. And not just to the people within anthropology or
13:53
the ones who are trying to learn things in a classroom. How does it matter out there? So that's why I enjoy pairing this book. We kind of get a sense of what the stakes are, what the bigger picture is of this enterprise outside of what we're learning in college or what we're supposed to memorize.
14:27
What King says here is that the argument eventually becomes about this idea of culture. What's the deal with culture here?
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Just interesting that culture is in languages, symbols, values, norms. It tells us how to raise a child, how to pick a leader, how to find good things to eat, how to marry well.
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It ends up defining all kinds of things that we consider good, upstanding, all these things.
15:20
In some ways, this is probably for many of us like, yeah, right, of course. But at the time, it did not. At the time, this was a crazy idea. People thought that those things were rooted in nature, biology, God, whatever you might take into account.
15:42
If you remember what we talked about in culture on page five of González's textbook—the idea, this laundry list idea, that culture includes all these things—the crucial thing that Boas and his circle did is to take that laundry list. Okay, if culture is all this stuff that we learn, we're then going to use it to attack the idea that people are determined by their race or their racial abilities.
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How should we think about race? What did they try to convince people to think about race? Race is a social reality and not a biological
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one. Something that exists because we make it up and because we socially impose it.
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It's not a clear-cut biological division in the way that it's been portrayed. And that
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would go against this idea that Lewis Henry Morgan, also an American anthropologist, had been
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codifying—that everybody passed through these stages from the savage to the
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barbarism to the civilized. That we're all on this one line.
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On page nine, after the passage about culture: "The implications of the idea that we make our own agreed-upon truth were profound." So that we ourselves create our own culture. "It undermined the claim that social development is linear, running from allegedly primitive societies to so-called civilized ones."
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So culture, according to King here, is undermining the claim that social development is linear, going from primitive to civilized. "It called into question some of the building blocks of political and social order, from the belief in the obviousness of race to the conviction that gender and sex are simply the same thing."
18:48
We got a little bit of a taste of Margaret Mead talking about those adolescents. What did you get out of that? That they didn't have any—in our society, maybe we still have this, that teenagers are naturally rebellious and they're supposed to break the norms of their parents, especially around the ideas of
19:38
sex. So we'd have this idea that everybody goes through these stages of life.
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Margaret Mead comes in and she goes to another society. It's not that they didn't have norms, but that people didn't feel like they had to rebel against those norms in order to establish themselves. That in some ways, at least when it came to sexuality, they were much more easygoing. There was little to rebel against. You didn't have to become a rebel when you were a teenager because why? You just agreed with people.
20:23
So again, this undermined the idea that the stages of life were underwritten by some sort of predetermined biology, by divine will, that they were the same all over the world.
20:53
A little bit more in this chapter. King says that old ways of doing things have passed away. Ours will too, someday. "Our great-grandchildren will wonder how we ever could have believed and behaved as we do. They will marvel at our ignorance and fault our moral judgment. That is why culture only makes sense in the plural." So it makes sense that there's all these kinds of different cultures.
21:43
And in some ways, we're getting introduced here to the idea that it's also always changing. It's not the same even for us. And in fact, in our own society, our great-grandchildren will think that we were ignorant.
22:15
What does that make you think about the world? What's it going to be like for great-grandchildren?
23:18
I guess I'm thinking more in terms of ideas about morality and who belongs in the world.
24:21
Give me something that seems totally natural in your generation that you look back to your grandparents or great-grandparents and you're like, how could you?
24:34
Same-sex marriage. I would say that with same-sex marriage, that's been an innovation of almost your generation. It's just considered to be completely fine.
25:14
The reason I'm bringing this up is because I want to be clear that if you go over to the next page, we have to realize this about our own society as well as others. This was sort of an insight from Boas and his circle—that history moves in loops and circles, not in straight lines and toward no particular end.
25:39
The things that our great-grandchildren might think were dumb about me may not be the things that I wanted them to think were dumb about me. That is to say, let's just think about what's been happening on the Supreme Court recently.
25:59
So you think back, and actually it's in this book, some of the things the Supreme Court decided—like that same-sex marriage is okay, or that we have a right to contraception, or that interracial marriage is okay. Well, recently a decent number of those things have been called into question. Certain rights that people assumed they had for the last 50 years—bodily
26:27
autonomy and being able to decide what to do about their own reproductive freedoms—taken out. I would just say that history does not move in a straight line. It can circle back and go
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the other way, not the way that you thought it was going to go.
26:57
Let's go into the second chapter here. What do we learn about Franz Boas?
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There was some famous book. I never learned about the childhood of young Franz and got some particulars there. I guess I would say it was interesting that some of these people that are revered to be all great, they just got their start because they read some crazy book and wanted to go somewhere. Be rebellious and go off to somewhere else. So here's Boas. He's now got his degree. This is a picture of him in the younger state,
28:03
aboard the Germania, which is the ship that's taking him up to Baffin Island, way up there.
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He started his life out interested in physics and wavelengths and light and all these things. And interested in something which several of you focused on, around page 19, about how do we perceive reality? What is the difference between the reality out there and our perception of it? Is it the same from person to person? But why? What gives us that shape? And in some ways, Boas thought—I think he believed—that if he went way up here
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into this super harsh environment, that in some ways things would become clearer there. That in such a harsh environment, the people and the customs would all be the same. He began his life as something of an environmental determinist. And there it is, way up there. What a huge place. Way up in the north. Far away. Very cold. I guess I was also struck by—they get there and it takes another six weeks to actually get
29:26
to the island. I don't know about you, but I get a little bit nervous if it takes me like 20 minutes to get somewhere extra. But six weeks sitting on a ship off the coast of this island before you actually dock there would be unbearable. But there he is up there, and a bunch of things happen. He does a bunch of things with the Inuit.
29:50
But he eventually comes to realize, or to come to, a very different conclusion perhaps than what he started with. He uses this German word—and the Germans are always famous for having these multi-syllabic words that have very specific meanings—I'm not even going to try to pronounce that in German. But in this case: Herzensbildung. The training of one's heart to see the humanity of another. And so in some ways, Boas goes off thinking that the people are going to be all the same
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and wondering what they're going to be like and not knowing much at all. And begins by having to
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depend upon them for his survival and depend upon them for understanding this world. To begin to comprehend their lives in a different way. Developing an appreciation for their skills. There's a very famous passage there on pages 28 to 29 when he's still just writing in letters, this time to Marie, about why do we look down on other people who are often better than we are at being hospitable and understanding the social situation? That his
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own training as a university doctor, professor, was no good. It didn't work up there.
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And that being smart was in part conditioned by the environment you were in.
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So then he's up there, does his thing, and then he comes—he actually comes to the United States for the first time and heads down to this place, the Smithsonian. What had started to be this place.
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It was named after Smithson—he gave some money, and then Congress fought and fought about how to spend the money. They finally came up with these goofy-looking buildings and put some stuff in there.
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This kind of reminds me of the story of Hartwick College, by the way, which is—you had John Christopher Hartwick who acquired some land.
33:02
He took some land. He acquired some land. And then he dies. And I was told by Professor David Anthony that he left his money to Jesus Christ. And so they didn't know what to do with this. So they fought and they fought and the lawyers brought in and they finally—well, I guess we'll establish a seminary. I mean, I guess that's what Jesus would want.
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But we have this institution being created. I was looking around for pictures of the Smithsonian and I chanced upon this article as well, which is—they can't prove that it was the labor of enslaved persons that actually brought in the first stones to build the Smithsonian in Washington, DC. But it's probably people who were enslaved from the quarries who brought in some of those first stones to do this.
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And I put this out there just because we have this juxtaposition in this country already from the beginning—of these high ideals of knowledge, science, progress, we're going to build this great building—dependent
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upon the structuring of the society, which was very unequally structured by race.
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At the end, the question came up: Why is Boas considered the father of American anthropology? Because if you look at the very end here, you have Boas going back to Germany.
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He's like, nobody's hiring him. The Smithsonian turns him down. He's just got some field notes. He doesn't speak English very well. He can't get married—marriage postponed. He's setting off in 1885 on the return journey across the Atlantic, going back to Germany. And he says his only consolation was that his English had improved enough for him to be able to name how he felt. It was a state of mind that he had learned from Marie to call "the blues."
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He's got the blues. So you have to wonder where he picked that term up. Where was he hanging around to get that term from? But he's got the blues and he goes back to Germany. And it struck me here—this is a potential essay topic for you. Let's say that Boas never came back from Germany. Let's say he just stayed over there because he couldn't get a job here. And let's say that this guy Lewis Henry Morgan—who we've learned about a little bit, he was the
36:05
author of a book called Ancient Society, or Researches in the Lines of Progress from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization—dominates US anthropology instead of Boas.
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What would be different? What would be different in the way we taught anthropology if it didn't come from the Boasian circle? If Boas had just stayed away and we got all of our stuff from Lewis Henry Morgan, who has been important in academic circles? This book was widely read and a lot of people agreed with him—the line of progress from savagery through barbarism to civilization. What would your classes be like? Would US society be any different?
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We will eventually find out that Boas comes back and becomes the father of American anthropology and trains all these people and develops and becomes very famous and fights against these ideas of Lewis Henry Morgan. But this is the context of the time. This is what we talked about as the greatest moral battle: Is humanity one thing? Are we all in some ways equally part of this human thing? Or can we rank people and
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decide who's better and who's worse and who should be part of the human story?
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