Photo by Victoria Strukovskaya on Unsplash
My new favourite genre of non-fiction books is the history-of-ideas type. Books that trace the development of an idea through the lives of the people who shaped it. Gods of the upper air by Charles King is that kind of book. The story begins with German-born Franz Boas who moved to America, started a new form of anthropology called cultural anthropology, and came to be known as the “father of American anthropology”. The book traces the life and work of Franz Boas and his many illustrious students who carried on his way of thinking, covering several decades from the late 1800s to the 1940s. Through tracing the life of this group of people, the book presents a rich history of anthropology in the United States and how it changed people’s understanding of “culture”.
The novelty of Boas and his group’s approach was in understanding culture the way it appears to the people who are part of that culture. Until then, anthropologists understood culture based on how it appeared to them - as outsiders. The underlying assumption was mostly that Western culture was the norm. It was the superior way of being and all other cultures which were “primitive” had to be uplifted to reach the heights of Western civilisation. Boas’ circle tried to shift this perspective. They did this by closely studying cultures that were radically different from their own. They lived among these other people, ate like them, slept like them, participated in their rituals and customs, and tried as best as they could to understand these different cultures from an insider’s perspective.
My fascination with anthropology betrays my frustration with classical cognitive science. It feels as though, anthropologists are out there studying humans with all their complexity while we, cognitive scientists, have reduced humans to information-processing machines. In a typical cognitive science experiment, we collect data from - depending on time, money and other resources - about 30 to 40 participants. In most studies, these participants are mostly white, mostly young, highly educated university-going students, mostly from wealthy Western countries. And based on these studies, we say stuff like “humans find it very hard to not process the meaning of a word even when processing the meaning of the word is not necessary for a task”. Needless to say, the sample I mentioned is hardly representative of the large majority of people who live in this world. Thankfully, this is acknowledged now and people realise how weird it is to generalise based on a WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic) sample. But, things have not gotten drastically better even with this acknowledgment. What has changed is that there is (a little bit) more acceptance of studies conducted on non-WEIRD samples. The field still doesn’t care a whole lot about individual or cultural differences.
Each of those 30 or 40 people that we collect data from in an experiment is a dot on a plot or a bunch of rows in a .csv file. There are times when I am analysing the data that I have collected, staring at rows of numbers in R studio, I wonder what does this all really mean? I know nothing about the person whose data I am looking at, apart from possibly their age, gender and other basic information. As someone who is endlessly curious about people, this seems disorienting. I want to know everything about every person I meet. Where did they grow up? What do their parents do? Did they hate school? When was the first time they watched a movie in a theatre? At what age did they start dating? How many heartbreaks have they had? Do they have breakfast every day? Everything. I also find it fascinating that you can know someone for years and yet be completely baffled by something they do as if all those years of intimacy and understanding were for nothing. And so, reducing an entire person with all these complexities to rows of data and attempting to understand something about their mind merely through numbers sometimes feels ridiculous, even though this is THE gold standard of empirical research in my field and is widely accepted.
So, I find myself stranded in a no man’s land between science and humanities. I want to call myself a scientist but sometimes I am not sure I’ll be considered one since I don’t believe objective, externally verifiable observations which are the hallmark of “science”, are enough to understand matters of the mind (I think they are necessary, but not enough). I am also weary of being viewed as a humanist who talks about ill-defined, objectively unquantifiable concepts like culture and context that can not be backed up by the kind of data “scientists” take seriously. Thankfully, I am not alone in this. The man who is credited with forming the first formal laboratory for psychology, Wilhelm Wundt himself had stated back in the 1900s that studying the human mind requires combining approaches from both Naturwissenschaften (natural sciences) and Geisteswissenschaften (human/cultural sciences). How psychology then turned into an either/or contest between these two traditions is a long story that I have only understood in parts.
The other most interesting character in the book is Boas’ student Margaret Mead whose fame far surpassed that of her mentor. Mead came to prominence through her book Coming of Age in Samoa based on her fieldwork in Samoa, a small island somewhere in the South Pacific Ocean. The most talked-about finding from the book is the sexuality of Samoan teenage girls. Mead observed that Samoan teenagers were less agitated and irritable than American teenagers. She attributed this difference to the relaxed norms around sexuality in Samoa. Pre-marital sex was not frowned upon (as it was in 1920’s America) and social norms were fluid. Her claims shot her to fame and she quickly became the most public-facing anthropologist in America.
Mead’s personal life in the years around the publishing of the book (and later) was no less thrilling. It was as though she was experimenting with her own life, using her life experiences to understand her fieldwork and vice versa. When she set sail for the Samoan islands, she left behind a husband and a lover (the famous linguist and a fellow student of Boas, Edward Sapir) while being passionately in love with another Boas protégée, Ruth Benedict. On her journey back from Samoa, she met her future second husband Reo Fortune, also an anthropologist, on the ship. She divorced the first husband on her return and married Reo Fortune. On a field trip a few years later, she fell in love with another fellow anthropologist Gregory Bateson whom she subsequently married after divorcing Fortune. It was an intricate web of romantic entanglements and the last time I struggled this hard to keep track of who was sleeping with whom was while reading One Hundred Years of Solitude.
If you find all this fascinating, then you should read Lily King’s Euphoria which is a fictionalised version of the fascinating love triangle between Bateson, Fortune and Mead set in the backdrop of their anthropological work on a remote island near Australia. The book mentions a poem by Amy Lowell that can help make sense of the frenzy of Mead’s romantic life. People can be like wine or bread to us. Wine is exciting, adventurous, sometimes dangerous and unstable. It can briefly make you feel on top of the world but also throw you down the cliffs. Bread is essential, it sustains and nourishes you. It is stable and sometimes, boring. Most romantic problems in the world surround the fact that people can’t find their wine OR they do, but it doesn’t turn into bread OR it turns into bread but they want some wine again. Mead probably only wanted wine. But monogamous marriage can turn even the most exuberant wine into bread and maybe that was the problem for her.
There have been several controversies regarding the methods of anthropology, in general, and Margaret Mead, in particular. One of the most obvious criticisms is that one would have to travel thousands of miles, live in makeshift huts, spend months learning a new language and get bitten by mosquitoes to prove or disprove the conclusions of another anthropologist. Also, when one person is an expert on a culture, do the findings tell us more about the culture or the person studying them and how they see the world? This happened in the case of Margaret Mead’s findings on Samoan culture. One man specifically made it his mission to disprove her claims and I am not sure if the verdict is out yet. I don’t know enough anthropology to have an opinion on this. The key takeaway for me though, from the work of Boas’ circle and this book is that each of us should try to be a little bit of an anthropologist in our everyday lives. We all meet people whose ways we don’t understand. Why do they not share food? Why do they obey the traffic signal, even on a completely deserted street? Why are all the shops closed on Sundays here? Why do most of them dress as if, at any moment, they can be asked to go hiking? Strange beliefs and customs of others can make sense if we suspend judgment. This is difficult because it requires us to momentarily forget our version of common sense and somehow learn what seems obvious to the other person. There’s a scene in the movie Before Sunrise where Ethan Hawke’s character says “we all see the world through our own tiny keyhole”. We believe that what we see through that tiny keyhole is what the world really is like. But the shape of each keyhole is different and what each person sees is different. Expand your keyhole. Be an anthropologist.
If you want more:
An Aeon article on Margaret Mead, her life and the controversies.
An interview with the author. An excellent podcast in general.