MICHAEL CHIBNIK
University of Iowa
Ethnography at its edges:
Boas, race and immigration: Then and now
Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthro-
pologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twen-
tieth Century. Charles King. New York: Doubleday, 2019.
448 pp.
The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law That
Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other Eu-
ropean Immigrants Out of America. Daniel Okrent. New
York: Scribner, 2019. 496 pp.
T
hree of the best-known public intellectuals in the
United States during the first part of the 20th
century were anthropologists associated with
Columbia University. Franz Boas appeared on
the cover of Time magazine, and books by Mar-
garet Mead and Ruth Benedict rose to the top of best-seller
lists. The Boasians rejected the conventional wisdom at the
time about race and gender and claimed that looking at
other cultures could aid in understanding aspects of life
in the United States. Such ideas, of course, are no longer
novel. Nevertheless, two books published in 2019 about is-
sues raised by the Boasians have received extensive cov-
erage in widely read publications such as the New Yorker,
the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe,
and the Wall Street Journal. These books have gained atten-
tion because of their lively writing and their relevance to
contemporary cultural and political controversies. Charles
King’s Gods of the Upper Air examines the works and lives
of Boas, Mead, Benedict, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ella De-
loria. Daniel Okrent’s The Guarded Gate shows how Boas’s
research resulted in his rejection of the pervasive racial
stereotypes used to justify legislation in the 1920s that cur-
tailed immigration to the United States from southern and
eastern Europe.
In his introduction to the first “Ethnography at Its
Edges” pieces in this journal, book review editor Eric Gable
wrote:
This series will feature essays that address via popular
books how ethnography is deployed outside anthropol-
ogy … the premise … is that we can learn (and indeed,
AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 47, No. 3, pp. 303–308, ISSN 0094-0496, online ISSN 1548-1425. © 2020 by the American Anthropological Association.
All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/amet.12915
should learn) much from reading ethnographic work
outside our discipline … either to claim that we do it
better or to figure out why we do not have the discur-
sive traction in the public sphere we would like. (2014,
176)
While the books by King and Okrent are not ethnographic,
they otherwise exemplify the kinds of publications Gable
mentions. Neither author is an anthropologist. King is
a professor of international affairs and government at
Georgetown University. Okrent, the former public editor
for the New York Times, has written several well-received
books on such varied topics as baseball (Okrent 1985) and
the rise and fall of prohibition in the United States (Okrent
2010). The subject matter of Gods of the Upper Air and The
Guarded Gate, moreover, is common knowledge among an-
thropologists. The Boasians’ opposition to theories of uni-
versal evolution, advocacy of cultural relativity, and rethink-
ing of conventional views are covered in undergraduate
courses and in books by our colleagues (e.g., Baker 2010;
Gregory and Sanjek 1994). The pseudoscientific justifica-
tions for racial classifications in the 19th and early 20th
centuries and the political maneuvers that led to restrictive
immigration laws have been carefully examined by anthro-
pologists and scholars in other fields (e.g., Gould 1996;
Higham 1955; Stocking 1968). The academics who have ex-
amined these issues may wonder why the popular books
by King and Okrent are more influential in some ways than
their own studies.
Although King and Okrent discuss numerous topics
of interest to anthropologists, their treatment of race,
ethnicity, and immigration is especially relevant to cur-
rent controversies. The books differ considerably in their
focus. King’s book is almost entirely about Boas’s circle.
Much of Gods of the Upper Air is biographical, written in
a lively—sometimes gossipy—style designed to catch the
attention of nonacademic readers. King sets the tone on the
first page, saying about a trip that Mead took: “She had left
behind a husband in New York and a boyfriend in Chicago,
and had spent the transcontinental train ride in the arms of
American Ethnologist  Volume 47 Number 3 August 2020
a woman.” His primary goal, nonetheless, is intellectual. He
argues throughout the book that the work of the Boasians
led to lasting changes in the ways that many scholars and
members of the educated public thought about a variety of
important issues.
As almost every reader of this journal knows, the great
majority of anthropologists and other scholars in the 19th
century thought that human groups could be ranked on a
superiority-inferiority continuum according to their posi-
tion on a scale ranging from savagery and barbarism to civ-
ilization. Not surprisingly, Caucasians from the north and
west of Europe and their descendants were at the top of this
scale, ranked ahead of southern and eastern Europeans—
often regarded as being members of separate races such as
Mediterraneans and Hebrews—and non-European groups
called by such terms as Negroid and Mongoloid. Boas
made multiple arguments against such racial classification
schemes. He showed that lines could not be easily drawn
among races, however defined. Furthermore, many fea-
tures of such groups were plastic, changing rapidly in new
circumstances. The concept of cultural relativity was per-
haps Boas’s most controversial argument against attempts
to rank races. Human customs may differ, but one should
not ordinarily claim that some are better than others.
While Okrent devotes a number of pages to Boas’s op-
position to legislation restricting immigration, his focus is
on the nativist ideologies and pseudoscientific claims about
race, ethnicity, and eugenics that influenced the adoption
of such policies. In contrast to King, Okrent says little about
how changes in the discipline of anthropology have af-
fected contemporary intellectual thought. His book is rele-
vant to our field primarily in demonstrating the intellectual
hegemony of the so-called racial science that Boas fought
against. Okrent provides vivid, sometimes startling portray-
als of the lives and views of prominent individuals appalled
by new immigrants to the United States. Policy makers in
the United States and members of the emerging Nazi move-
ment in Germany read books such as The Passing of the
Great Race by Madison Grant (1916) and The Rising Tide of
Color Against White World-Supremacy by Lothrop Stoddard
(1920). Scientific rationales for nativism were put forth by
Henry Fairfield Osborn, president of the American Museum
of Natural History; Charles Davenport, founder of the pres-
tigious Station for Experimental Evolution; and advocates
of newly developed techniques for testing intelligence. Per-
haps the most astonishing passages of Okrent’s book show
the extent to which scientists, authors, and activists usually
regarded as progressives held nativist views. These intellec-
tual and political leaders included the author Willa Cather,
the labor organizer Samuel Gompers, the socialist Norman
Thomas, the editor Maxwell Perkins, and the birth control
advocate Margaret Sanger.
Although Okrent and King summarize well the most
important ideas of the Boasians and their opponents, their
304
books in places lack the nuance of more scholarly stud-
ies. Shortcomings in the Boasians’ views are either com-
pletely ignored or mentioned only superficially; nonracist
arguments that were made for anti-immigration measures
are given—in some cases deservedly—little emphasis. Why,
then, have these books that cover such well-traveled ground
been able to reach such a broad audience?
One obvious reason is the books’ relevance to contem-
porary debates about immigration policies in the United
States and Europe. As in the 1920s, many policy makers to-
day advocate measures designed to limit the flow of new-
comers. Justifications for these measures, as they were a
century ago, are often based implicitly or explicitly on fears
by some members of dominant groups that the ethnic
makeup of the country will change in ways they do not like.
The rhetoric of anti-immigrant politicians in both the past
and the present can be unambiguously racist:
The immigration of people of those races which con-
tributed to the settlement and development of the
United States … is declining in comparison with that
of races far removed in thought and speech and blood
from the men who have made the country what it is.
(Henry Cabot Lodge 1891, quoted in Okrent, 52)
President Trump grew frustrated with lawmakers
Thursday in the Oval Office when they discussed pro-
tecting immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador, and African
countries as part of a bipartisan immigration deals …
“Why are we having all these people from shithole
countries come here,” Trump said, referring to coun-
tries mentioned by the lawmakers. Trump then sug-
gested that the United States should instead bring in
more people from countries such as Norway. (Dawsey
2018)
Excerpts from reviews of King’s and Okrent’s books
show how these similarities draw in readers:
The concerns of the heroes in Gods of the Upper Air
have much in keeping with sociopolitical topics that
have driven American discourse since 2016: immigra-
tion, nationalism, race relations, and how facts are ap-
plied. (Clemons 2019)
It is impossible to read [Gods of the Upper Air] … with-
out wondering why the same battles are being fought
today. (Gilmore 2019)
The Guarded Gate is a must-read for anyone seeking a
deeper understanding of the history of immigration of
the United States—and how the past might be relevant
to policy makers and citizens today. (Hopkinson 2019)
Okrent recognizes limitations in the extent to which
parallels can be made. In a 2019 interview in the New Yorker,

he was asked to compare and contrast the current era of im-
migration restrictions and anti-immigrant rhetoric with the
era he wrote about. He responded by saying:
I think there are two primary differences. The first is
that, one hundred years ago, the invocation of science
was the key element in making the American public be-
lieve these newcomers were inferior, whereas today it’s
more an economic argument and an argument about
crime. … [Another] difference is that today it’s Muslims
and Latin Americans and back then it was Jews and Ital-
ians. (Chotiner 2019)
Both authors’ stylish prose is often mentioned in re-
views: “King’s elegant and kaleidoscopic book … a beau-
tifully written portrait of Boas” (Szalai 2019); “King … is a
terrific writer and storyteller” (Appiah 2020); “King makes
the case for anthropology in a thoughtful, deeply intelligent,
and immensely readable and entertaining way” (Gopnik
2019); Okrent’s “detailed compulsively readable account”
(Hopkinson 2019); “writing with restraint and grace and
occasional irony that are Okrent trademarks” (Kammer
2019, from the blog of an organization favoring restricted
immigration).
Although reviewers in the 1930s and 1940s often made
such comments about the prose of Mead and Benedict, I
cannot remember such effusive praise for the writing in any
recent book by a professional anthropologist.
Academics frequently criticize their peers who have
success writing for the public. Reviews of Mead’s and Bene-
dict’s publications in professional journals could be harsh;
more recently, Jared Diamond’s books have been sharply
criticized by geographers, historians, archaeologists, and
sociocultural anthropologists. Most of these critiques stress
ways in which popular writers oversimplify complex issues.
Simplification per se, of course, is not always bad; we do it
all the time in introductory courses and textbooks in order
to make important concepts readily comprehensible to stu-
dents unfamiliar with anthropology. Problems arise, how-
ever, when simplifications are wrong in fundamental ways.
The avoidance of certain complications by Okrent and King
does not in my view detract from the central messages of
their books. Nonetheless, I did notice three ways in which
their treatment of important topics might be criticized by
some academic anthropologists.
Head shapes
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, scientists inter-
ested in race were obsessed with measuring the size and
shape of people’s heads (Gould 1996, 105–41). One such
measurement was the cephalic index, the ratio of the width
of a skull to its length. Different races—including European
groups such as Nordics, Alpines, and Mediterraneans—
were reported to have different average cephalic indexes,
with some being characterized as longheaded and others as
Ethnography at its edges  American Ethnologist
roundheaded. Head shape was regarded as an immutable
racial trait passed down from generation to generation.
Boas famously challenged these ideas in a study in New
York City in which he compared the cephalic indexes of
US-born children of seven immigrant groups with those
of their parents. He noted sizable variations in the index
within each group and considerable overlap in head forms
among groups. He placed the most emphasis on his find-
ing that in four groups—Hebrews, Sicilians, Central Italians,
and Bohemians—the average head shape of children dif-
fered significantly from that of their parents. These differ-
ences were not in the same direction for all groups; some
became more longheaded and others more roundheaded.
Because the environment had considerable effects on head
forms, Boas regarded the plasticity of the cephalic index
over generations as evidence that so-called racial types were
not fixed.
At the beginning of this century, two groups of schol-
ars reanalyzed the data on head forms using statistical tech-
niques and computer programs unavailable to Boas. The
analysts reached different conclusions. Corey Sparks and
Richard Jantz (2002) questioned Boas’s claims about the
small degree of heritability of the cephalic index; Clarence
Gravlee, H. Russell Bernard, and William Leonard (2003) ar-
gued that Boas’s arguments about cranial plasticity were
mostly correct. In an assessment of these restudies, the bio-
logical anthropologist John Relethford (2004) struck a mid-
dle ground. Although craniometric traits show some degree
of developmental plasticity, they are also to a certain extent
influenced by genetic heritability.
Boas never specified how the environments of New
York City and Europe might have led to differences in mean
cephalic indexes of immigrants and their US-born children.
The reanalyses by Gravlee et al. and Relethford also did
not attempt to speculate about reasons for these changes.
The most direct attempt to explain the differences in av-
erage cephalic indexes appears in an article coauthored
by someone formerly critical of Boas’s studies. Richard
Jantz (the onetime critic) and Michael Logan (2010) ac-
cepted Boas’s conclusions about changes after immigration
in the mean cephalic indexes of Hebrews and Sicilians. US-
born Hebrews were more longheaded on average than their
European-born parents; the reverse was the case for Sicil-
ians. Jantz and Logan attributed the increased longheaded-
ness of Hebrews to the abandonment of infant cradling (an
argument explicitly rejected by Boas). The increased round-
headedness of Sicilians after immigration, they said, was
the result of poorer nutrition in New York City.
I have long been puzzled by the attention that has
been given to these head form studies. Because of the pre-
vious emphasis on the alleged relationship between head
shape and race, I can see why Boas might have wanted
to show that even this characteristic is variable. But head
form, like height and many other physical characteristics,
305
American Ethnologist  Volume 47 Number 3 August 2020
is influenced by both genetics and environments. Even
if head shape were completely heritable, this would be
no more relevant to current thinking about race than the
heritability of traits such as eye color and hair color. Racial
classification schemes are now regarded by most anthro-
pologists as social constructions in which physical features
are only sometimes important.
Okrent and King mostly ignore these complexities,
choosing to present Boas’s cranial studies in the context of
his time. Both say that Boas’s research on head forms was an
important contribution to anti-racist and anti-immigration
arguments. Okrent does parenthetically mention that nutri-
tion may have “negated the presumed domination of inher-
itance” (155) and includes a short footnote saying—without
much elaboration—that Boas’s findings have recently been
seriously challenged. Although King presents no criticism of
Boas’s research on head forms in the text, a lengthy footnote
discusses the reanalyses of his data. King’s principal con-
clusion, however, is that “any variation at all [in the average
cephalic index of particular human groups over time] falsi-
fied the central claim of scientific racists” (359). While the
scientific racists were wrong about just about everything,
I am less sure than King is about the pertinence of Boas’s
head shape studies.
Race, ethnicity, and immigrants
In his provocative 2019 book, From Boas to Black Power,
Mark Anderson says that the Boasians failed to fully appre-
ciate the fact that nonwhite groups and descendants of Eu-
ropean immigrants differed in their chances of being ac-
cepted into mainstream society in the United States. He
observes that the Boasians generally preferred to use the
word race to refer to large divisions of humanity—typically
Mongoloid, Caucasian, and Negroid—and regarded it as er-
roneous to employ this term to describe nationalities and
religion-based groups. Anderson concedes that Boas saw
fundamental differences in the ability of European immi-
grants and nonwhite groups to assimilate into the United
States: “The European immigrant could, in principle, as-
similate by abandoning outward markers of difference,
changing his or her dress, habits, and name. For individuals
understood as non-white, their physical difference made a
social difference; they could never be white and thus could
not share a nationality with whites” (2019, 79).
According to Anderson, Boas nevertheless analogized
the situation of nonwhite natives in certain ways to Euro-
pean immigrants, whose children could assimilate via in-
termarriage with members of dominant groups. Boas sug-
gested that “Negroes” could enter mainstream society over
time via intermarriage that would lead to more uniform skin
color in the United States. Anderson argues that such analo-
gies show a fundamental misunderstanding of racism in the
United States.
306
Anderson is obviously correct in saying that the path
to at least partial assimilation into the US mainstream has
been easier for descendants of European immigrants than
for nonwhite groups, particularly African Americans. While
scholars have written books called How the Irish Became
White (Ignatiev 1995) and How Jews Became White Folks and
What That Says About Race in America (Brodkin 1998), no
one is about to claim that African Americans are becoming
white. However, Anderson’s sharp white-nonwhite distinc-
tions ignore both differences among groups regarded by
themselves or others as being nonwhite and definitional
problems with the concept of being nonwhite. The extent
and types of passage into the mainstream, as well as the ex-
tent of intermarriage, differ considerably among, for exam-
ple, Japanese Americans, African Americans, and American
Indians. The category of Hispanic or Latinx demonstrates
the complications associated with attempts to make
sharply delineated white-nonwhite distinctions. Should
Hispanics, a group that includes people of widely different
ancestries, be placed in a nonwhite category along with
African Americans or in an ethnic category along with, say,
Italian Americans? (The categories employed by the 2020
US census concerning Hispanics show how confusing this
is. People can choose to be categorized as either white His-
panic or nonwhite Hispanic.) All this is further complicated
by intermarriage among members of different groups that
results in growing numbers of people who self-identify—
and to a certain extent are identified by others—as either
multiracial or as members of two or more ethnic or racial
categories.
Boas may well have been muddled in his comparisons
of the experiences of the descendants of European immi-
grants such as Jews and Italians and those of longtime non-
white residents of the United States such as African Amer-
icans and American Indians. And some of his comments
about “Negroes” would not be acceptable today. But these
problems should not obscure how revolutionary his views
about race were in the early 20th century. Boas worked
with leading African American intellectuals such as W. E. B.
DuBois and Carter Woodson in their efforts to further the
study of their group’s history and culture and was active
in struggles against antiblack racism (Appiah 2020; Baker
1998; Lewis 2001). As Jack Glazier (2020) notes in his review
in this journal of From Boas to Black Power, Anderson’s per-
spective is distinctly presentist, criticizing Boas’s ideas in
terms of current views about race.
Okrent largely ignores the problems with Boas’s ar-
guments that are the focus of Anderson’s book. Because
Okrent’s book is explicitly about European immigration,
he has little to say about African Americans and American
Indians. Although he briefly discusses restrictions on and
rhetoric about Chinese immigrants, he could have done
more to contrast their situation with that of people coming
to the United States from Europe.

King does criticize some of Boas’s ideas about African
Americans, but his emphasis differs from that of Anderson.
King points out that in The Mind of Primitive Man Boas
wrote that “there is nothing to prove that licentiousness,
shiftless laziness, lack of initiative are fundamental char-
acteristics of the race … Everything points out that these
qualities are the results of social conditions rather than
hereditary traits” (1922, 271). King observes that Boas
and some others in his circle never seem to have ques-
tioned whether these qualities actually described African
Americans.
In a telling passage cited by King, one of Boas’s most
respected students made remarks that nowadays would be
regarded as racist. In a textbook, Alfred Kroeber wrote that
“the consistent failure of the Negro race to accept the whole
or even the main substance of the fairly near-by Mediter-
ranean civilization, or to work out any notable subcen-
ters of cultural productivity, would appear to be one of the
strongest arguments that can be advanced for the inferior-
ity of cultural potentiality on their part” (1923, 505). King
partly absolves Boas of such views, saying that “in 1906 he
assured his listeners at Atlanta University that Negroes were
as fully capable as people who called themselves white, it is
just that their innate talents had yet to be fully recognized”
(204). Nonetheless, as Anderson would doubtless observe,
these are not the kinds of comments that Boas made about
European immigrants.
The originality of Boas’s ideas
The extent to which individuals influence history is a clas-
sic problem in the social sciences. The nearly simultaneous
creation of calculus by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leib-
niz and evolutionary theory by Charles Darwin and Alfred
Wallace suggests, for example, that these scientific break-
throughs were inevitable occurrences not dependent on the
people whose names they are associated with. One might
similarly question how important Boas was to the devel-
opment of new ideas about cultural relativity and race and
how central he was to the ultimately unsuccessful struggle
against immigration restrictions.
Two reviewers of King’s book cast doubt on Boas’s orig-
inality. In the Wall Street Journal, the eminent anthropol-
ogist Adam Kuper (2019) says that Boas did not invent a
whole new theory of race and culture. According to Kuper,
Boas had been trained in the Berlin school of anthropol-
ogy and passed on the ideas he learned there to his stu-
dents at Columbia. Kuper is right about the influence of the
Berlin school on some of Boas’s ideas (Appiah 2020). Nev-
ertheless, Boas’s extensive publications on race had a much
more lasting impact in the United States and Europe than
anything written by members of the Berlin school. In the
Boston Review, the historian Gili Kliger states that “to sug-
gest that the Boas circle singlehandedly inspired the later
Ethnography at its edges  American Ethnologist
overhaul of universal truths under the banner of relativism
may be to overstate their influence, as wide ranging as it
was” (2019). Although Kliger has a point here, her com-
ments about other relativists are unconvincing. The peo-
ple she cites—Friedrich Nietzsche, Jacques Derrida, and
Michel Foucault—held views very different from those of
the Boasians.
King and Okrent know that Boas was not the only anti-
racist opponent of immigration restrictions in the first part
of the 20th century. King carefully explores ideas about race
held by Mead, Benedict, Hurston, and Deloria and men-
tions in passing the views of other Boasians such as Melville
Herskovits. Okrent shows the complexity and variability of
the views of the men and women who argued against the
new immigration laws. Some opponents of these restrictive
policies were clergymen such as Samuel Smith and Thomas
Higginson, who shared Boas’s ideas about race; others were
business leaders such as Andrew Carnegie, who wanted
more immigrants because they were a source of low-cost la-
bor. Individuals sometimes agreed with Boas about certain
matters and disagreed with him about others. Theodore
Roosevelt liked the idea of the melting pot but worried that
immigrants were having more children than those in his so-
cial circle. Harvard University president Charles Eliot was
a eugenicist who opposed immigration restrictions. Peo-
ple’s views, moreover, were not immutable. The journalist
Walter Lippmann at first favored anti-immigration legisla-
tion but later changed his mind after being horrified by the
racist rhetoric of the laws’ proponents. Eleanor Roosevelt
made anti-Semitic remarks in diaries written when she was
a young woman.
Anthropologists, like other scholars, take pride in
the care with which they make arguments, assess evi-
dence, and describe past and present events. Peer reviews
of manuscripts submitted for publication often mention
shortcomings that would be of little concern to nonspecial-
ists. It is therefore no surprise that academics can be scorn-
ful of popular books about topics that fall into their areas of
expertise. Too often popularizers oversimplify, make factual
errors, and mischaracterize intellectual disputes. Nonethe-
less, when popular books are done well, they provide an
important service in bringing complex ideas and important
historical events to the attention of the general public. The
most common critiques of popular writing do not apply
to Gods of the Upper Air and The Guarded Gate. I noticed
few obvious errors and appreciated the lively descriptions
of people and events. The authors’ simplifications are un-
objectionable, given their goal of reaching a wide audience.
Anthropologists and other academics in the United
States nowadays are not as willing to be public intellectuals
as they once were. Perhaps scholars are reluctant to write
popular books today because such publications do not
advance their careers. Committees determining salary,
promotion, and tenure place little value on writing for the
307
American Ethnologist  Volume 47 Number 3 August 2020
general public. Nonetheless, I wish that more anthropolo-
gists secure in their positions would write books as readable
as Gods of the Upper Air and The Guarded Gate.
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MICHAEL CHIBNIK
University of Iowa