October 2025

Contents

About the Book

I’m reading this book chapter by chapter with CJS.The topic is the emergence of cultural anthropology via the work of Franz Boas and his students, who included Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Ella Deloria, and Zora Nealel Hurdson. The work described here laid the foundation for the belief that all humans are fundamentally equal in their abilities, and that much of what had been thought to be innate was culturally constructed.

The Book

C1: Away

This chapter is really a preface. It begins with a vignette of Margaret Mead arriving in Samoa, but then segues to the general aim of the book.

A little over a century ago, any educated person knew that the world worked in certain obvious ways. Humans were individuals, but each was also representative of a specific type, itself the summation of a distinct set of racial, national, and sexual characteristics.

Each type was fated to be more or less intelligent, idle, rule-bound, or warlike. Politics properly belonged to men, while women, when they were admitted to public life, were thought to be most productive in charitable organizations, missionary work, and the instruction of children. Immigrants tended to dilute a country’s natural vigor and breed political extremism. Animals deserved kindness, and backward peoples, a few rungs above animals, were owed our help but not our respect. Criminals were born to a life beyond the law but might be reformed. Sapphists and sodomites chose their depravities but were probably irredeemable. It was an age of improvement: an era that had moved beyond justifying slavery, that had begun to shake off the strictures of class, and that might eventually do away with empires.

—ibid., p 4

The claim of the book is that the work of Boas and his students was critical to overturning these understandings. Boas and his students invented (and named) cultural anthropology and developed the theory of cultural relativity. Their work challenged heretofore accepted ideas that people fell into natural categories that differed in their abilities and predilections. It did this via a scientific examination of cultures…

“Courtesy, modesty, good manners, [and] conformity to definite ethical standards are universal,” Boas once wrote, “but what constitutes courtesy, modesty, good manners, and ethical standards is not universal.”
—ibid., p 12

C2: Baffin Island

Born in 1858 in Prussia, Boas lived in the afterglow of the enlightenment: Schiller and Gothe had died only a few decades earlier, and Alexander von Humboldt was alive if not well. The chapter covers the adolescence andof Boas and his education in Germany.. At the time, the institutions he attended were pursuing a phenomenological of civilization and trying to understand all experience as a system. After his education, Boas put together a plan for an expedition to study the inhabitants of Baffin Island, and convinced his father to fund most of it.

He had planned to conduct a study of the interaction of the landscape, weather and a hunting economy on Baffin Island — however, this didn’t work out very well. He came to realize that he was totally dependent on others… However, he rolled with the punches, so to speak, and began to reflect on his own failures and shortcomings and realized that education was relative… He began to internalize the notion of herzenbildung, the training of one’s heart to see the humanity of others.

He spent 15 months on Baffin Island, and afterwards sailed to the US. During his time traveling he had gotten engaged to Marie, though her family must have given permission reluctantly as they were higher status than Boaz. Boaz also sought work in the US — which at that time had formed the largest and most richly funded scientific institutions directed at geology and ethnology — but failed to obtain anything except the agreement of John Wesley Powell to publish some of his Baffin Island studies. It is possible that Boaz’ poor command of English was part of the difficulty — he had to have a secretary deliver one of his papers because he could not be understood, and he was unable to follow discussion. He returned to Europe, very depressed.

… reading break …

C3: All Is Individuality”

This chapter continues the narrative of Boaz’ early days,

Boaz returns to Europe, discouraged, unable to get a job in the US. But meanwhile anthropology is taking off in the US, and about a year later — after publishing a book in German on his Baffin Island work that gets him the advanced doctorate – he will to the US and to New York in `1886.
In the meantime, in March 1886, John Wesley Powell electrified the American Anthropolgical Association with a speech in which he enshrined Lewis Henry Morgan‘s notion of a steady evolution of all human cultures from savagery to barbarism to civilization. In this view, anthropological artifacts are primarily important for showing the stage at which a group of people is at, and the artifacts of different bands, tribes and so on are presented intermixed, only serving as indices of progress, a view to which Boaz will come to contest.
1886 – Boaz, on returning to the US, finds a large and thriving German community that includes a network of professionals which he works for contacts and funding. By the autumn of 1886 he is off the Pacific Northwest to study the coastal indians. He is impressed with the quality of their art, and struck by the diversity of their artifacts and systems of governing and conducting themselves. He records conversations and myths and becomes a minor local celebrity. He returns to New York with hundreds of pages of notes
On his return from the Northwest, he manages to land a position as an assistant editor at the new magazine, Science, and is able, with this stability, to marry. He also uses it as a position to publish his own thoughts about anthropology, and to critique the establishment — Powell and Morgan — but with little success.

C4: Science and Circuses..

In a train ride to a conference, Boaz gets to know Granville Stanley Hall, one of the first and most charismatic practitioners of experimental psychology. Just as his tenure at Science is coming to an end, Boaz receives an invitation from Hall to join the newly established Clark University. He did so in the fall of 1889, and continued there for a year or so, despite rather shaky conditions.
In 1892/93, Boaz was offered a job as a sort of curator/engineer/supervisor of “Department M” at the Chicago World’s Fair. This job, like his others, came through a contact he had cultivated: Frederick Ward Putnam, an archeologist. The job was a chance to assemble artifacts, etc., and present them in the way he felt suited the material. He managed this, but with — as far as the public was concerned — with indifferent success. As this ended, and after the transfer of artifacts to what would become the Chicago Field Museum, Boaz was laid off.
1896. Putnam was invited to join the moribund but reviving Museum of Natural History in New York, and hired Boaz to assist. This allowed him access to resources and he was able to people to gather more artifacts from the Pacific Northwest. This lead to numerous reports and publications.
In 1897 Boaz obtained a position at Columbia, part time, through the surreptitious influence of his uncle Jacob. He threw himself into academic work and continued publishing and also took on more graduate students (he had had one, I think, at Clark University).
In 1902, with the death of john Wesley Powell, Boaz helped revive an older association and renamed it the American Anthropological Association. During this period he codified something that he had been inclined towards for a long time: that were many different cultures — rather than a single unitary conception — and that the job of anthropology was to study them as individual entities.

That plural made all the difference. Over the next decade, Boas would come to argue the exact opposite of what he had claimed in the American Anthropologist, namely, that each person is an expression of one of the unchanging biological types into which humanity is naturally divided. On the contrary, he would argue, the preponderance of the evidence confirms the plural, fluid, and endlessly adaptable nature of both human bodies and the societies they make. It was one of the great shifts of opinion in the history of science, and it derived largely from Boas’s basic method: to reason inductively and follow the data.

–ibid., 77-78

… reading break …

C5: Headhunters……..

Much of this chapter is a recap of the history of ideas about race and ethnicity, and the debate about whether these categories reflect immutable absolutes (i.e. genetic) or whether they are mutable and a product of history and happenstance.
The belief in immutable absolutes was one of the drivers behind eugenics and various laws intended to prevent the reproduction of ‘undesirables,’ which were astonishingly widespread and popularly accepted. Similarly, laws trying to limit the immigration of ethnicities and races deemed to be undesirable were propagated for similar reasons.
In 1908 Boaz was commissioned to provide data for a Congressional investigation of the effects of immigration. Boas presented data and arguments consistent with the position that immigrants and their descendants would adapt to the new situations and conditions in which they found themselves. This commission, the Dillingham condition, later ignored the results that did not confirm their prior beliefs.
Circa 1910 Boas published The Mind of Primitive Man, in which he elaborated on his conclusions about the palsticity of human traits, and laid out his approach to studying cultures.

C6: American Empire …

In the middle of the 19-teens, WWI broke out, and Boas found himself part of the unpopular German-American minority. It did not help that he argued against the US’s involvement in the War, and made sympathetic statements about Germany.
After the war, various laws were passed to limit the immigration of various groups. Also, universities began putting caps on the admission of particular groups, including Columbia, Boas’ employer. Columbia had essentially eliminated Boas’ funding and salary because of his radical views, but he was supported by donations from a few wealthy patrons.
At about this time, however, Boas got work teaching women at Barnard College (he had been working for more than a decade to bring more women into the graduate program at Columbia).
Ruth Benedict was one of these students, and after a while Boas tapped her as an assistant. After a while Boas commented to a colleague: “I have had a curious experience in graduate work during the last few years. All my best students are women.”
Benedict came from a troubled home. After marriage, she began taking classes at the Free School in NYC, and began to study with Elsie Clewes Parson, a Barnard graduate who had become an authority on Native Americans in the Southwest. Parson and others she knew (in particular, Kroeber, who she worked with for a summer on the Zuni reservation) encouraged her to pursue graduate studies at Barnard, which is how she came to work with Boas, and to continue her fieldwork.
The Zuni culture was matriarchial, and also had a well-established tradition of gender-crossing. She was beginning to develop an idea that ritual, story and personality might form some kind of system. She also was coming the view that abnormality was on so relative to particular cultures.

… reading break …

C7: “A Girl as Frail as Margaret”

Here we are introduced to the origin story of Margaret Mead who comes across as a flapper. She was small in stature and often in ill-health with neuritis in her arms, and Scarlet Fever on year. 905She was an indifferent student until she began taking upper level courses in anthropology. Her work improved to the extent that she was excused from taking that final by Boas.
One of the principle debates in anthropolgy had to do with the differentiation of cultural forms. One school of thought was that culture followed an evolutionary model with a root culture producing ‘descendents’ that gradually developed more efficient solutions to various cultural ‘problems’; Boas had a different idea he referred to as diffiusion: it held that cultural forms and practices were often borrowed from other groups (some often far afield) and that the factors that contributed to the shape of a culture were circumstantial, historical and sometimes due to chance.
Mead did her doctoral dissertation (no fieldwork; just analysis of the work of others) on diffusion in Polynesia, reasoning that is she finding evidence of diffusion in an area where there were formidable barriers of distance and difficulty to travel would be a strong result.
Mead had a complicated life at this time. She was in a failing marriage, infatuated with Ruth Benedict, and in love with Edward Sapir, the linguist (who was a member of the older generation of students that Boas had trained, along with Kroeger). She convinced her father to fund an expedition to the South Seas (and the National Research Council to provide some support) so she could finally do fieldwork (and perhaps escape the romantic complications of her life. Sapir tried to sabotage the trip by writing Boas about Mead’s ‘frailty,’ but did not succeed.
The first stage of the trip was travel to the southwest by train with Benedict, during which time (if not before) her infatuation materialized into a love affair). The next stages were by sea, during which Mead was often ill.
Somewhere in this period Malinowski had come out with his famous study, Arognauts of the South Seas, in the Trobriand Islands. In this study, he had not examined native people from a distance, but instead lived and worked with them for months. In this work he laid out the logic and foundations for the participant-observation methodology.
Mead was concerned with distinguishing her work from his, and her plan was to look at women — a population previously igniored by anthropologists — and to study how girls ‘came of age’ in the Samoan culture.
She decided to conduct her study on Tu’a, a small island in Samoa that had not been subjected to much western influence (or missionaries). She lived with an American family, and set up shop on the veranda, where she was visited by local women and children. Then, after a few months, a typhoon came through and caused extensive damage, destroying most the houses. She was worried this would ruin everything, eliminating cermonies and rituals that would be normally practiced. But, as she worked with people to clean up and rebuild after the storm, she came to realized that working with people in their everyday life, and experiencing informal moments, was a valuable approach that allowed her to see the informal and improvisational side of culture. She called this the “ethnology of activity.”
Over the next few months she collected data, and began writing up her ideas. Then she began the trip back to the US.

C8: Coming of Age …..

On the return home, to see her husband Cresswell, her lover Sapir, and Benedict, Mead meet Reo Fortune, and fell in love with him. Her aim seemed to be pursue multiple relationships (well, at least Fortune and Benedict).
Mead had a job waiting for her — Boas had recommended her for an assistant curator position at his old institution, The American Museum of Natural History. This would allow her time to write up her results, as well, of couse, as giving her a salary. She ended up working their for fifty years.
Coming of Age in Samoa appeared the following fall (circa 1930). It contrasted “Native Theory” — how people made sense of their own society — in Samoa, with what occurred in Western societies. It provided a startling contrast between the stresses on adolescents in the west, and Samoan’s coming of age. It was endorsed by many popular figures, and became a best seller, at least for an academic book.
After this, Mead, in collaboratoin with Reo Fortune, set off on a expedition to study the culture on Mannu, an island of New Guinea.

… reading break …

C9: Masses and Mountaintops (Zora Neale Hurston)

King notes that Boas has been an energetic behind the scenes player, assisting his students in getting jobs in key universities and museums. Harvard (under Putnam, Boas’ early mentor) is also aggressively pursuing building up anthropology…

Zora Neale Hurston

ZNL grew up in the nation’s first incorporated all-black town, Eatonville, north of Orlando FL.
Lovely bit of description of the part of Florida where ZNL grew up:

The area around the town was pitted with sky-blue lakes, giving it the feel of a spider’s web of dry land stretched over an inland sea. Spanish moss drooped from the trees. Ospreys and turkey vultures circled over the minor ripples in the landscape that passed for hills. It was a place where sinkholes could open up and swallow a cow or where an entire lake could simply disappear, sucked down a natural drainpipe formed in the porous limestone. The region’s gritty, ash-gray topsoil, whipped up by a tropical storm or a passing buggy, dusted Sunday clothes and seeped through window frames, as if Floridians had established themselves on top of some older, burned-over civilization and were now paying the price.

–ibid., `189

There were shocking in-passing descriptions of totalitarian local governments that routinely harassed, persecuted and murdered black people.
African Americans were required to sit in (distant) segregated seating at the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial.
ZNL attended Howard University, a historically black college, and it is there that she “first felt the ladder under her feet.” This is where she began to write stories, essays and poetry. However, she was a middling student and did not finish her degree.
In January 1925 ZNL left Howard and went to NYC where she hoped to make it as a writer. Winning second place in an essay contest sponsored by Opportunity, a magazine that served as a vehicle for black writers brought her to the attention of Annie Mason Meyer, founding benefactor of Barnard. Meyer arranged a portion and financial support for ZNL at Barnard. ZNL became a big name at Barnard, “Barnard’s sacred black cow,” she called herself.
ZNL became a central figure in the swirl of writers and artists that were the Harlem renaissance, and 19 1925 had her work included in The New Negro, book foregrounding new black writers being out out by Alain Locke. But ZNL didn’t like the idea that black expression needed to prove itself worthy, or work to fit into the larger intellectual culture. She became the Harlem Renaissance’s biggest internal critic, not inconsistent with what she called herself earlier: “a child that questions the gods of the pigeon-holes.“
At Barnard her advisor suggested she broaden her studies beyond English, and so she signed up for a course from Reichard, one of Boas’ students. From her she came to Boas’ attention, and eventually began doing work for him, first in Harlem, and then in a new field site in Florida, her old stomping grounds.

Hurston was gradually giving a scientific gloss to a gut feeling-something that had always bothered her about the way the older generation of black intellectuals regarded people like her. What if all the stories and the stomping, the porch banter and the ax-swinging work songs, were placed alongside Samoan tattooing or Kwakiutl wood carving as activities that constituted their own system of rules, rituals, and routines? A fully formed yet unappreciated recipe for living as a human being seemed to be lurking in the dense pine lands and lakeshores…

–ibid., 201

After a time Hurston found a patron in Charlotte Mason Osgood, a wealthy eccentric who was interested in, among many other things, folk tales. Osgood insisted on being called “Godmother.”
At this time the field of Folklore was very influential. Ruth Benedict wrote that “More than any other body of material, Folklore makes vivid the recency and the precariousness of chose rationalistic attitudes of the modern urban educated groups which are often identified with human nature.”
ZNL’s relationship with “Godmother” soured, abetted by the stock market crash, and she found herself on her own. She had written a novel, Jonah’s Gourd, which was published in 1934, and had modest success and considerable critical notice; other work eluded her, and in 1935 she enrolled as a doctoral student at Columbia with Boas as her advisor.
This gave her the time and support to analyze her notes and turn them into a book, Mules and Men, for which Boas wrote the forward.

Mules and Men she had tried to show, in plangent prose and revved-up storytelling, that there was a distinct there to be studied in the swampy southeastern landscape she knew from childhood—not a holdover from Africa, or a social blight to be eliminated, or a corrupted version of whiteness in need of correction, but something vibrantly, chaotically, brilliantly alive.

—ibid., 214

C10: Indian Country (Ella Deloria)

Boas, as he approaches 70, is becoming lauded as one of the greats of anthropology. Boas, in his sixties, experienced the deaths of two children and his wife.
The blindness to the mistreatment of anthropological subjects and informants. Ishii. The sham burial.

… discussion break …

The unreliability and variability of ‘data’ collected by outsiders. “Two Crows denies.” Deloria’s repeated failure to confirm much of what Walker reported.
The shift, over just a few decades, from the view of indians as savages (vis a vis the Indian Wars of the 1870’s), and the view of Indian’s as romanticized icons of the past, of humans in tune with nature. Indian Guides. Various societies. Order of the Arrow.
Deloria’s methods of collecting data: patience; gifts; time.
Boaz’ close work with Deloria on a Dakota grammar.
Deloria: rather than trying to ‘rescue’ shards of what an (imagined) ancient culture might have been like, look at how it is now.

… reading break: next discussion on 12/8 …

C11: Living Theory

Boas: “People don’t use anything they haven’t got.” Anthropology should be a conversational science, a dialog between your way of seeing things and someone else’s. Boas was anti-theory, but his students all seemingly wished to theorize.
Distinction between sociology and anthropology: The first looks for general laws; the second focuses on particular systems.
“Countries tended to build their theories of human nature on the alleged savages closest to hand.” —ibid. 250
Mead and Fortune’s marriage begins to unravel… as Mead become involved with Gregory Bateson.
In a “gin-fueled malarial fog” Mead and Bateson develop the idea of squares, classifying people as being of one of four temperments, each mediating how they fit into their cultures.

“Malarial hallucinations, biting mosquitos, the click-click of a typewriter, the lazy spin of a wind-up record player, the dark forest and the black lake, the dank tribal lodges with their terrifying carved masks, the ecstasy of discovery, and always the remoteness, upriver from nowhere, a deep sense of being profoundly alone-the three anthropologists had descended into a mad spiral of shouts and absences, then reunions and a chilling peace, all of it adding up to an invented vision quest that they believed represented a new kind of sci-ence. “There was a large amount of religion in all our hearts,” Mead wrote to Benedict, “and everything seemed ”

–ibid. 259-260

“going over it all with the excessive forensics common to disintegrating marriages.”
—ibid., 262

Ruth Benedict had not been in the field for over a decade, but she had been immersed in the ongoing field work of many of Boas’s students, and in Patterns of Culture published in 1934, formulated her own contribution to theory:

“…all societies are in fact just snippets of a “great arc” of possible ways of behaving. Which particular snippets a society develops depends on a whole host of accidental factors, from “hints” provided by geography, environment, or basic human needs to more or less random borrowings from neighboring societies. These choices might be reasonably durable… But they are never glued in place. All societies change. [… but] cultures are not random assortments of traits… They make sense to themselves; they have coherence, a sense of integration, that allows for individuals inside that society to find their way from childhood to adulthood. Being a well-adjusted member of a-society means understanding its essential patterns of life— its basic “cultural configurations,” or Gestalt…”

—ibid. 264

Benedict distinguished between Apollonian [order; rules; community; control; boundaries] and Dionysiam [disruption; freedom; individualism; expression; limitlessness] cultures.
Benedict was concerned with the patterns that characterize particular cultures; Mead with how societies restrict and channel individual temperments.
Margaret Mead was concerned with how societies restrict and channel individual temperments. But I wonder what Mead said about how societies restrict and channel individual temperaments. Did she take temperament seriously as a real construct? Was she interested in means of control, in the way that Focault was? What did she mean by restriction and channeling? [[Wikipedia: Foucault’s theories primarily addressed the relationships between power versus knowledge and liberty, and he analyzed how they are used as a form of social control through multiple institutions.]]

Summary of Mead’s ideas based on AI:

Mead distinguished between temperament, an innate biological condition, and character, which is acquired through interaction. Mead was concerned with how cultural patterns shape the personality and disposition of the individual from a young age.

Mead identified key socialization mechanisms that work holistically to shape the new generation:

• Childrearing Practices: This includes how infants are held, fed, responded to, and weaned. The intensity of parental care (or lack thereof) directs the child’s emotional development…

• Rewards and Punishments: The kinds of behaviors that are actively praised and encouraged, versus those that are ignored, criticized, or punished, train the child to express only the approved temperament.

• The Content of Social Life: This includes the cultural norms embedded in games the children play, the songs people sing, the structure of political organization, and the religious observance. Every institution of the society subtly or explicitly reinforces the dominant temperament.

• Traditional Depictions: The stories, myths, and art that depict heroes, heroines, villains, and supernatural beings provide models for ideal and undesirable behavior, showing what a culturally “good” or “bad” person is.

… reading break: next discussion on 12/31?…

C12: Spirit Realms

Zora Neale Hurston took Alan Lomax, as a young college student, on her collecting trips in the south.
Culture as “a set of chains that individuals drag around with them after the prison wardens more or less fled the scene.“
Background on Herskovitz, and his tendency to try to find the traces of African culture, rather than consider Haitian culture as it is…
“[Magical systems] are ways of summoning the unlikely and the invisitble in order to control the tangible world.” [ibid., 289] They are reflections of the “predicaments” in which a people finds themselves.

People who “play the zig-zag lightning of power over the world, with the grumbling thunder in your wake,” Hurston later wrote, never had to think about such things. But people who walked in the dust did. If your society commanded the oceans and could make people bow down before you, it is likely that your gods could, too. If you were beholden to the whims of fate, torn from one place and plopped down, dazed, into another, tossed this way and that for reasons that seemed incomprehensible, then your gods behaved in the same way —capriciously, with their darker and lighter personas struggling for dominance and, from time to time, requiring feeding and appeasement.

Hurston writes “Their Eyes were Watching God,” her most famous novel during her time in Haiti. “Ships at a distance have every man’s wishes on board.“
Circa 1935: Mead and Bateson resume/continue their affair in secret, and concoct a plan to make it seem that, after her divorce from Fortune is finalized, they fall in love and will get married. This involves them doing fieldwork together, and they spend a couple of years in Bali, and a little time in New Guinea. They are researching the cultural determinates of mental health, and also interested in trances in Balinese religious practices.
In 1938 Hurston publishes her Haitian fieldwork, but it meets with mixed but kind reviews. She spends the next few years in a sort of nomadic hand-to-mouth life, doing fieldwork and also just jobs to pay the bills. She was developing a group of ‘anti-followers,’ all male, among the black elite who wrote tepid or negative reviews of her work.
1940: Hurston teams up with Mead (and Jane Belo) to do fieldwork on religious practices in South Carolina and Georgia. She and Belo do fieldwork together.

… reading break: next discussion on 1/5?…

C13: War and Nonsense

Boas retires in 1936; Bennet is in a position to take over his role as chair, but the president of the University has other ideas (and a dislike of Bennet) and appoints an anthropologist name Linton. Linton and Bennet are enemies.
Boas watches the rise of intolerance and authoritarianism in Germany; he tries to provide positions for Jewish colleagues.
Nazi theorists drew on the USA’s implementations of segregation and Jim Crow, and on the USA’s (bad) science around eugenics and race. “The Germans spent the 1930s not so much inventing a race-obsessed State as catching up with one.” Hitler praised the US approach to race in Mein Kamph.
Boas dies on December 21st while talking with a colleague at the Columbia Faculty Club. His last words were: “We should never stop repeating that racism is a monstrous error and impudent lie.”
Bateson, Mead and Bennet all join various government programs aimed at understanding the enemy — Germany in the case of the first two, and Japan in the case of Benedict.
Benedict got access to reports on Japan, and worked with experts, including a Japanese-American academic/interment camp prisoner released to work with her. Her worked informed US policy towards Japan; after the war ended, she drew upon it to produce The Chrysanthemum and the Sword in 1943. It went through 8 editions in 5 years, and sold millions of copies.

C14: Home…

This chapter wraps up the book; it ends with more of a whimper than a bang. It feels as though the circle dissolved, and various players went their own ways.

Benedict became famous as a result of her book. She was promoted to full professor, invited to lecture, received multiple grants, and was elected president of the American Anthropological Association. But she was aging, and suffered a fatal heart attack in September of 1948.
Hurston appeared to stay in contact with Benedict, but after Benedict’s death contact stopped. Hurston spent her last two decades itinerant and in poverty. It was only Alice Walker, who wrote an essay about her in the 60’s, that sparked the rediscovery of her work and provided her with posthumous fame.
Bateson and Mead were married for a while, had a child, Mary Catherine Bateson, but slowly drifted apart and were divorced by 1950.
Mead continued at her old position in the Museum of Natural History; she sometimes acted as an adjunct or visiting professor, but was never an official member of her old department. She continued to be productive, producing books, articles, and more popular writing, and became the face of anthropology in America. She died of Pancreatic cancer in November, 1978.
Deloria, never really quite part of the circle, last corresponded with Mead at the time of Benedict’s death. Deloria continued working, and running a school (and living in poverty) until her death in 1971. At that time most of her work was unpublished; fame tarried until her children and relatives began to become known.

The book ends by talking a little about subsequent developments in anthropology, but gives this pretty short shrift. In my opinion a better ending would have been to traced the descendants of Boas and his circle, and to try to assess the impact that had on anthropology.

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