American Popular Social Science: the Boasian Legacy

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American Popular Social Science: The Boasian Legacy

Susan Hegeman

ABSTRACT

This essay considers the Boasian legacy in relation to popular social scientific writing. Franz Boas is widely remembered as a founder of academic anthropology in the United States. Yet his wider historical impact rests with his lifelong battle against scientific racism, which he waged both in his more specialized academic work and in publications directed to a readership of nonspecialists. Many of his students followed Boas in writing for, and reaching, a broad reading public. Indeed, some of the best-known figures in American anthropology—Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Elsie Clews Parsons, and Zora Neale Hurston—achieved their fame through their popularly accessible writing. I argue that popular social science is its own genre, with a distinctive aesthetic appeal that rests with presenting “interesting” and sometimes useful information. Through an analysis of some notable Boasian examples of this popular social science genre, including Hurston’s Mules and Men, I identify a distinctively modernist version of this aesthetic, which I call the aesthetics of cultural relativism.

Franz Boas had a long and multi-faceted career. Yet when he is remembered as a founder of American anthropology—indeed, when he is remembered as a significant historical figure—it is for one specific thing: his lifelong battle against scientific racism. His crusade has become an ethos for the entire field of anthropology in the American context. It also serves as a poignant narrative focus for Boas’s own life story: a German-Jewish immigrant who brought an Enlighten- ment humanist focus to a field of study that, until then, had been largely subservi- ent to the causes of justifying white supremacy and the conquest of indigenous peoples (see Pierpont). In an era of craniometry and eugenics, and the rise of the KKK and the Nazis, Boas projected to the end of his life a consistent message about the shared intellectual and physical capacities of humans across racial and cultural divides. And indeed, by the late 1930s, when a photo of the elderly Boas graced the cover of TIME magazine, he was widely recognized as a central social- scientific opponent of racist and eugenic theories. It is an oddly fitting homage to his lasting legacy that, in the ugly circles of the racist far-right, he remains notorious as the founder of a “Jewish conspiracy” to destroy scientific racism (cf. Baker 156-219; Jackson). The intellectual history of Boas’s various battles against scientific racism is documented in a series of well-known episodes, including his challenge to evolu- tionary biases in displaying ethnological artifacts, his deployment of the tools of craniometry against scientific racism to demonstrate the impact of environmental factors on the skull shapes of immigrants, and his use of linguistics to prove that so-called primitive languages were systematic and capable of supporting complex abstractions (cf. Patterson 44-65). But there is perhaps less focus on the means 442 Susan Hegeman by which these fairly specialized studies reached a wider audience and made Boas such a prominent figure in broader social debates about race. It is generally understood that his contributions to the development of the culture concept— memorably described by Michel-Rolph Trouillot as “race repellant” (100)—had something to do with the popular dissemination of the anthropological critique of racism, but here as well the connections are somewhat obscure. Rather, we would do well to look at Boas’s actual contributions to popular discourse on race as a source for his legacy. Scholars generally point to his popular book, The Mind of Primitive Man (1911) as the text in which he fully developed his antiracist critique and, specifically, tied it to a discussion of African American social advancement (cf. Baker 137; Stocking 161-94). But it is also with this book, along with his public rebuttals of popular racist tracts like Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy (1920) and Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race (1916), that Boas developed his lasting reputation as a key voice in debates on racial equality.1 When, in the late 1930s, the New Republic ran a series of articles on nonfiction books that had a significant impact on modern thought, The Mind of Primitive Man was counted along with works by Sigmund Freud, Oswald Spengler, Vladimir Lenin, John Dewey, and Thorstein Veblen (cf. Whitfield 431). Boas’s need to “explode periodically in print” to express his position on a wide range of political and social concerns was imitated by a significant number of his students (Boas, qtd. in Patterson 45), many of whom regularly appeared in publication venues outside of academic journals, wrote with popular audiences in mind, and achieved widespread success. Just focusing on the pre-World War II period, it is possible to develop an impressive list of books by Boas and his students that were written for nonspecialists, or that reached a broad audience. In addition to The Mind of Primitive Man, we can also count Boas’s Anthropology and Modern Life (1928). Elsie Clews Parsons was already a well-known writer of popular social science (The Old-Fashioned Woman, 1913; Fear and Convention- ality, 1914; Social Freedom, 1915; and Social Rule, 1916), when she began working closely with Boas in the mid-1910s. The prolific Margaret Mead—still the most famous American anthropologist—wrote numerous widely read books, including Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), Growing up in New Guinea (1930), Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935), and And Keep Your Powder Dry: An Anthropologist Looks at America (1942). Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture (1934) and The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946) were both best- sellers. Benedict, the author of Race: Science and Politics (1940), co-wrote (with Gene Weltfish) the widely distributed antiracist pamphlet The Races of Mankind (1943), which was subsequently adapted into an animated cartoon and an illus- trated book (cf. Mickenberg and Nel 267-73). Zora Neale Hurston’s collections of

1 See Boas, “Rising” and Boas, “This Nordic Nonsense.” Outside of white supremacist circles, these books are mostly remembered as a footnote to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), when the stupid and snobbish Tom Buchanan references them in a portmanteau: “‘Civilization’s going to pieces,’ broke out Tom violently. ‘I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read ‘The Rise of the Coloured Empires’ by this man Goddard?’” (14). American Popular Social Science 443 folklore and ethnography Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse (1938) were both written and marketed with an eye toward attracting popular readers.2 Other notable examples of Boasian anthropology written for a wider reading public are Edward Sapir’s Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech (1921) and the collection American Indian Life (1922), with contributions by Parsons, Sapir, Paul Radin, Robert H. Lowie, and Alfred L. Kroeber.3 By emphasizing the achievement of Boasian anthropology in relation to the genre of popular social science writing, I hope to address several issues. First, it offers an occasion to consider some of the formal aspects of the Boasian written tradition. Specifically, I will give an account of the aesthetic appeal of some genres of social scientific writing and consider the possibility that popular Boas ian anthropology possessed its own distinctive aesthetics.4 But I also hope to provide some context to an important issue in the history of Boasian anthropology, namely, the fact that some of the most lastingly famous of Boas’s students, including Mead, Benedict, Parsons, and Hurston, did not achieve conventional academic success commensurate with their historic and subsequent public reputa- tions. Though one cannot discount the role played here by prejudice against them as women, and in Hurston’s case, as an African American woman, the reasons for this relative lack of academic prestige are complex and different for each case. Hurston never earned her doctorate, in part due to insufficient financial support. But she was also an active writer of literary fiction, plays, essays, and journalism who at least at one point expressed a lack of interest in teaching, and thus in an academic career (cf. Hernández 153). Parsons, on the other hand, did not pursue a traditional professional path in part because she was born and married into a wealthy and politically powerful family (her husband Herbert Parsons served in the U.S. Congress for three terms). Mead’s predominant institutional home was the American Museum of Natural History, and both she and Benedict devoted substantial service to government agencies. Quite a bit has been written about how Benedict was overlooked for the chair of Columbia’s anthropology depart- ment after Boas’s retirement (cf. Caffrey 259-81; Young 39-51). Despite these differences in their professional histories, all these writers’ work has served as a kind of proxy for the problem of professional marginality (see Gor- don). Indeed, at various moments, Mead, Benedict, Parsons, and Hurston all re- ceived significant criticism by academic anthropologists. Perhaps most notorious is the Australian anthropologist Derek Freeman’s aggressive and highly public posthumous attack on Mead—and through her, on American cultural anthropology as a whole (see Hempenstall; Murray and Darnell). One strategy to recuper- ate some of these figures for professional anthropology has been to reconceive of their writing as formative of the discipline as it should currently be practiced.

2 Both Mules and Men and Tell My Horse were published by Lippincott, which marketed them to a popular audience, often deploying racist stereotypes and sensationalism in their ad- vertising materials. See West (76-90; 127-45). 3 Darnell offers an excellent account of this volume’s significance to the Boasian tradition of life writing, itself a popular form of ethnography practiced by, among others, the Federal Writ- ers’ Project (cf. 207-30). 4 See Silvy Chakkalakal’s contribution to this special issue. 444 Susan Hegeman

Thus, Mead becomes an early pioneer in “problem-oriented participant observation” and Parsons and Hurston become exemplars of more “dialogical” forms of ethnographic writing (Lamphere 127). This is all well and good as an exercise in picking one’s preferred professional ancestors. But it avoids one potentially dis- comfiting possibility: that, as writers, they actually understood and even to some extent accepted their academic marginality, and that one response to this marginality was to address their work, in whole or in part, to non-academic audiences. In this case, academic criticisms of their work do not exactly evaporate, but they are better contextualized—as, indeed, are some of the more innovative features of their writing, which may well have arisen as solutions to the problem of addressing a diverse readership. Their work can be productively compared not just with other contributions to academic anthropology but with works of popular social science that were produced in their moment, which I believe can be understood as a genre of its own, with its own canon, goals, audiences, and aesthetic attributes. In the pages that follow, I will develop an account of some generic features of popular social science, with special attention to questions of evaluation and its specific aesthetic appeals. I will then turn to the early twentieth century, to show how Boasian anthropologists, especially Parsons, Mead, Benedict, and Boas himself, not only participated in this genre but developed specific forms of popular social science that partook of what I call the aesthetics of cultural relativism. I conclude with a brief discussion of Hurston’s Mules and Men to show how, in this complex and even vexing text, this aesthetic project is performed.

1 The Aesthetics of Popular Social Science

“Popular social science” is an admittedly capacious category, spanning a wide and changing set of disciplines. It is the product of academic social scientists at- tempting to communicate their research to a general public and of journalists, literary essayists, and others outside of academia using the tools and research of the social sciences to address topics of general interest. As a category, it also carries a heavy evaluative freight, largely contained within the word “popular.” While some works of popular social science have been widely admired by scholarly ex- perts (for example, the eminent psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s 2011 bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow), many more come in for widespread criticism, especially by academics.5 It would be tempting, but ungenerous, to say that popularity itself is disparaged, that academic social scientists are simply elitist, and therefore predisposed to deride popular forms of communication, or that they resent the public attention and money that a popular book can generate. Rather, I would

5 To take but a few prominent examples, Malcolm Gladwell, an extremely successful pop- ularizer of sociology, psychology, economics, and criminology, among other fields, has been widely critiqued by academic social scientists (see Fitts), as has the “freakonomics” duo of academic economist Steven Levitt and journalist Stephen J. Dubner (see Gelman and Fung). Susan Dominus offers a fascinating account of how the academic social psychologist Amy Cuddy was perhaps disproportionately affected by the reproducibility crisis in the social sciences in part because of her role as the star of a popular TED Talk. American Popular Social Science 445 argue that when academic social scientists critique these works, they are actually doing what their training demands of them: enforcing their professional canons of rigor, proof, or judiciousness. That is to say, they are applying the standards of an altogether different genre of writing—academic writing—to the genre of popular social science. Each genre, moreover, has its own audience with its own interests. An academic in an experimental social science will, for example, care a lot more about reproducibility or sample size or a host of other issues than the average reader of popular social science would. In turn, a writer of popular social science is reaching an audience with different interests and needs than that of an academic community, including a desire for readily comprehensible, entertaining, and useful information. The popular social science genre communicates in ways that, for better or worse, avoid the institutional and professional barriers of academic communication. Despite its broad range of subject matter, the genre of popular social science is relatively easy to characterize. Contemporary popular social science almost always promises usable information, and therefore often contains intimations of autodidacticism and self-help: You can control your own body language to make yourself more self-confident, impressive, and likeable (see Cuddy); some practices of traditional societies can be incorporated into your own lifestyle (cf. Dia- mond 24). It also favors the enunciation and exploration of sometimes startlingly counterintuitive hypotheses, such as the proposition that drunk walking is more dangerous than drunk driving (cf. Levitt and Dubner 3-4); or that disabilities like dyslexia can boost a person’s prospects for professional success (cf. Gladwell 99- 124). It is heavily reliant on the narrative form of the anecdote and on the deployment and juxtaposition of surprising bits of information. Steven Pinker (an academic cognitive psychologist whose own attempts at popular social science have come in for both praise and criticism) sums up the anecdotal feel of Malcolm Gladwell’s work as follows: “Have you ever wondered why there are so many kinds of mustard but only one kind of ketchup? Or what Cézanne did before painting his first significant works in his 50s? Have you hungered for the story behind the Veg- O-Matic, star of the frenetic late-night TV ads? Or wanted to know where Led Zeppelin got the riff in ‘Whole Lotta Love’?” As to the overall effect of all of these questions, Pinker is certain that Gladwell’s “nose for the untold back story will have readers repeatedly muttering, ‘Gee, that’s interesting!’.” Pinker’s comment here is clearly condescending: Gladwell’s anecdotes are merely interesting; more “gee-whiz!” than actually enlightening. But if we move past this evaluative tone, the exclamation “Gee, that’s interesting!” can actually indicate something about the aesthetics of the genre of popular social science. First, the exclamation acknowledges that a new thought, idea, or bit of information has induced an affective response. This is precisely the way Sianne Ngai describes the “interesting” as an aesthetic category: as binding together “a calm, if not necessarily weak, affective intensity” with cognition and understanding; as occupying the tension between “wonder and reason” (113; 129). Further, she describes the process of judging something to be “interesting” as “ascribing value to that which seems to differ, in a yet-to-be-conceptualized way, from a general expectation or norm whose exact concept may itself be missing at the moment of 446 Susan Hegeman judgment” (112). In popular social science, this is evident in its emphasis on the surprising fact, the counterintuitive proposition, the engaging anecdote. Further, in mediating between affective judgment and knowledge, the “interesting” “binds heterogeneous agencies together and enables movement across disciplinary do- mains” (116). We see this in the popular social scientific text’s propensity for the somewhat violent juxtaposition of ideas, facts, and indeed whole fields of inquiry (for example, economics or statistics with psychology). Ngai has identified the “interesting” (along with the “zany” and the “cute”) as a key aesthetic category of late capitalist postmodernism, where capital’s en- croachments on all facets of human existence have, among other things, eroded our understanding of any clear separation between labor and play (13). Thus, the specific valorization of the “interesting” in contemporary popular social science is also related to our increasingly commingled desires for useful knowledge and en- tertainment. Nevertheless, I believe the aesthetic category of the “interesting” is also relevant as we turn back to examine popular social science as it was practiced in the early part of the twentieth century, at the high point of Boasian anthropology, when popular social science had an arguably more ethnographic cast. In order to better understand the Boasian contribution to the genre, a quick survey of the popular social science literature of the early twentieth century is in order.

2 Boasian Popular Social Science

During this period, several important popular books were published that shared the central subject of American anthropology, namely the indigenous cul- tures of North America. These included Osage writer John Joseph Matthews’s Wah’kon-Tah: The Osage and the White Man’s Road (a 1932 Book-of-the-Month Club selection), Black Elk Speaks (1932; as told through John G. Neihardt), Rob- ert Redfield’s Tepoztlan, A Mexican Village (1930), and Richard Chase’s Mexico: A Study of Two Americas (1931). But a number of other topics also emerged in nonfiction literature of this period that touched on sociological-anthropological issues and partook of methods associated with anthropology, including participant observation and the collection of folkloric materials. In particular, we see the proliferation of popular books addressing African American life and prospects, conditions in Soviet Russia, American national character, and regional development and underdevelopment in the United States. Notable popular contributions to studies of African American culture include W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903); James Weldon Johnson’s Black Manhattan (1930); Alain Locke’s The Negro in America (1930); Charles S. Johnson’s Shadow of the Planta- tion (1934); and Richard Wright’s Twelve Million Black Voices (1941). Journalist Dorothy Thompson (The New Russia, 1928), novelist Theodore Dreiser (Dreiser Looks at Russia, 1928), and literary essayist Edmund Wilson (Travels in Two De- mocracies, 1931) all contributed widely read participant-observer travelogues of their experiences in the new Russia. Finally, notable popular books on American character and regions include Robert S. and Helen Merrell Lynd’s Middletown (1929), Sherwood Anderson’s Puzzled America (1935), the Federal Writers’ Proj- American Popular Social Science 447 ect’s These are Our Lives (1939), W. J. Cash’s The Mind of the South (1941), and Constance Rourke’s The Roots of American Culture (1942). It is not coincidental that many of these books were written in the 1930s, a high point of the “documentary book,” and a moment when the U.S. government, under the aegis of the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP), the Farm Securities Administration (FSA), and other agencies set artists and writers of diverse professional backgrounds to the task of surveying and documenting American life in words and images. The famous landscape photographer Ansel Adams once dismissed the pho- tographers of the FSA (who included such notable artists as Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans) as “a bunch of sociologists with cameras” (qtd. in Fleischauer and Brannan 25). In doing so, he placed into opposition the role of the photographer as artist with that of the documenter of rural conditions. But since then, scholars have substantially reappraised the documentary moment of the 1930s United States to show that it presented a very decisive aesthetic form and drive—one that can be understood as fundamentally “interesting,” insofar as it represents a conjunction of affect and information. But its more specific form of the “interesting” is in fact explicitly modernist, in that the documentary book partakes of an aesthetics of disjunction and disruption of realist representation (see Allred). In the photo documentary book, this disruption happens precisely within the gap created by the “sociological” content (or the caption) and the form of the photo, which ultimately exceeds the narrow representational frame. In the case of FSA photography in particular, I would suggest this disjunction also happens in the gap between the contemporaneity of the photographic medium itself and the images of rural poverty and “backwardness.” This point about the modernist aesthetics of the photo documentary book may be applicable to the aesthetics of early twentieth-century popular social science as a whole. Just as the documentary book disrupted visual realism through “sociological” cues, popular social science as a discourse explicitly sought to disrupt customary common sense through its violent juxtaposition with social scientific fact. Nowhere is this clearer than in the popular social science writing of Elsie Clews Parsons, an expert in the sociology of the family, and in the anthropology and folklore of indigenous peoples of the American Southwest. At the time of her death in 1941, she was President of the American Anthropological Association (see Spier and Kroeber). But “Mrs. Parsons,” as she was known among the Co- lumbia anthropologists, was also a philanthropist (one major charitable enterprise was supporting women students’ ethnographic fieldwork) and a well-known public intellectual. According to one biographer, she was “one of the best-known anthropologists in the United States” to the reading public of the 1910s (Deacon 232). A bohemian and a feminist, Parsons supported birth control, “trial marriage,” and pacifism (cf. McKenna and Pratt 109). Her fame as a public intellectual was largely derived from a series of popular books that used the tools of comparative ethnology to hold American social customs—particularly those of her own class and race—up to critical scrutiny. For example, in The Old-Fashioned Woman, Parsons advanced the proposition that modern American customs and ideas of propriety were no less irrational and superstitious than their comparable rituals and beliefs in more exotic settings. With the goal of wresting women and girls 448 Susan Hegeman from the “primitive” traditions of modern society, Parsons began her book as follows: “Primitive ideas are always grave and always troublesome—until recognized. Then they become on the one hand powerless to create situations, and on the other, enlivening” (v). She then amassed a trove of intercultural examples of attitudes and customs related to women and girls, in the service of both subtly denaturalizing conventional assumptions and advancing arguments for women’s suffrage, trial marriage, birth control, and a host of other controversial feminist issues. Parsons compared the exchange of wedding and engagement gifts to bride- price, debutante balls to the profligate potlatches of the tribal Northwest coast, and the sex-segregated world of upper-class New York women to that of religious cloisters and Turkish seraglios (cf. Parsons 22-23; 27; 37). Of this and others of her books, one admiring contemporary reviewer wrote, “[T]he inexpert reader can hardly help wanting to communicate his joy over the illumination which she throws on our own contemporary society by pointing out the similarities between Polynesia and New York” (Toksvig 18). We see here the specter of the genre error that would confuse Parsons’s more popular expressions with work intended for a narrowly academic audience. But the reviewer also very clearly marks how Parsons’s wittily estranging intercultural comparisons participate in the aesthetic category of the “interesting” characteristic of popular science writing as a whole. In her case, information about alien customs and the lightly counterintuitive proposition of similarity to our own provokes a slightly subver- sive surprise; what the reviewer describes as “joy” conjoined with “illumination.” Indeed, Parsons’s books are such clear examples of the aesthetic category of the “interesting” that we might be tempted to see her work, with its violent juxtapositions of ideas and facts, jarring inversions of common sense, and profligate use of anecdotes as strongly anticipating that of contemporary writers like Gladwell and Levitt and Dubner. Yet I would argue that Parsons’s juxtapositions are of a specifically modernist kind, in their engagement with, and comparison of, cultural practices from different places and times. Parsons, in other words, is working within a specific subset of the aesthetics of the interesting: the aesthetics of cultural relativism. The distinction between this aesthetics and that of more contemporary examples of popular social science can be best illuminated through a consideration of how each understands how “interesting” information is supposed to be used. At no time does Parsons ever suggest, as Jared Diamond has recently done, that certain practices of some other culture present positive models that could be ad- opted by her readers. Indeed, though Parsons embraces the problematic word “primitive,” she nevertheless departs from the modernist primitivism of her time, which portrayed the “primitive” as an exotic state of being that, because of its lack of social development, was closer to the essence of human thought, expression, emotion, and so forth. If anything, Parsons subverts this meaning, using the word to refer to what she considers to be the outmoded customs of her own social milieu. In this respect, she joined Benedict and Mead especially in emphasizing not so much the appropriation of the culturally alien, but the estrangement of the customarily familiar. Their objective was not to embrace or valorize another culture, but to deploy intercultural comparisons to critique modern society and American Popular Social Science 449 free the individual from the social constraints imposed on them through the com- bined effects of ignorance, fear, and maintenance of social power. For example, Mead’s conclusion in Coming of Age in Samoa is that American girls suffer at adolescence because they are subjects of a morally and culturally complex society in which they are confronted with difficult choices and divergent expectations. Her recommendation is not that they (or their parents) act more like Samoans, but that girls be educated to better prepare them for the challenges and choices inherent to living in a complex society. Similarly, one of Benedict’s central themes in Patterns of Culture is the cultural contingency of what constitutes normative behavior. Explicitly rejecting “the romantic Utopianism that reaches out toward the simpler primitive,” her proposal is not to emulate the cultural practices of the Zuni (or, god forbid, those of the “lawless and treacherous” Dobuans), but to find a way to make “tradition” less “neurotic”—that is, less out of step with modern life (Benedict 20; 131; 273). Their shared interest in education for modern life owed a great deal to the ideas of the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey, Boas’s near-contemporary and colleague at Columbia University. But we also see similar ideas expressed in Boas’s own popular works. His The Mind of Primitive Man is a methodical rebuttal of one argument after another that had been used to buttress the idea that people from “civilized” societies possess superior intellects to those from “primitive” ones. As such, it is relatively affectively flat. But at one point, he breaks rather dramatically with this fairly dry narrative to state, The activities of the human mind exhibit an infinite variety of form among the peoples of the world. In order to understand these clearly, the student must endeavor to divest himself entirely of opinions and emotions based upon the peculiar social environment into which he is born. He must adapt his own mind, so far as feasible, to that of the people whom he is studying. The more successful he is in freeing himself from the bias based on the group of ideas that constitute the civilization in which he lives, the more successful he will be in interpreting the beliefs and actions of man. He must follow lines of thought that are new to him. He must participate in new emotions, and understand how, under unwonted conditions, both lead to actions. (98) Here we see that Boas, too, understands the liberatory potential of the intercultural comparison to free the subject from “the bias based on the group of ideas that constitute the civilization in which he lives,” and thus allow them greater freedom to act and to change in the face of an unpredictable modernity. But it is also noteworthy how much Boas here emphasizes an affective dimension to his project. Freedom from bias and custom promises access to “new emotions” along with new thoughts. I would argue that this somewhat heightened affective charge, the promise that the suspension of one’s cultural biases will allow one to both learn new things and feel new feelings, is central to the fundamentally modernist aesthetics of cultural relativism as practiced in the popular social science of the early twentieth century. We see Boas’s charge to see and feel things anew across the popular social science of his period. The documentary book These Are Our Lives presents the value of reading the life histories of working-class Southerners as follows: “Here, then, are real, living people. Here are their own stories, their origins, their most important 450 Susan Hegeman experiences, their most significant thoughts and feelings, told by themselves and their own point of view” (xiv). We see it, as well, in a series of urgent questions Stuart Chase asks in Mexico: A Study of Two Americas, as he visits the ancient Mexican village of Tepoztlán: “What do these people want? Only to be left alone? What has a roving American, watching a soaring zopilote, to learn from them; aye, what has America itself to learn from them, and what has it to give them? And why, in the face of this timeless pyramid, should we arrogate to ourselves the name ‘America’ at all?” (7; emphasis in orig.). Indeed, it is central to the famous opening of W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk: “Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. […] How does it feel to be a problem?” (363).

3 Zora Neale Hurston and the Aesthetics of Cultural Relativism

To conclude, I would like to explore the aesthetics of cultural relativism as it is exemplified in Zora Neale Hurston’s challenging work of popular folklore and ethnography, Mules and Men. Hurston is both an obvious and an odd figure through which to think about the aesthetics of popular social science. Obvious, because she explicitly wrote for both a popular and an academic readership. Odd, because her work may seem less invested in the qualities of interestingness that are so central to this genre as a whole than in rigorously exploring the complexities of her own various positions as a writer and ethnographer. And yet, despite this complexity, we can also see her as instantiating the aesthetics of cultural relativism, with its appeal to cultural estrangement and the achievement of new thoughts and feelings. This not only reflects her similarity to her Boasian peers and teach- ers but also connects her to the larger Boasian project of popular intervention into the racial politics of the early twentieth century. The first thing one notices about Mules and Men is its copious use of paratext. In the original edition, these consist of a preface written by Boas, a glossary of idi- omatic terms, and a four-part appendix, all of which signal and certify the book’s status as a work of social science. But, apparently in an effort to appeal to a more popular readership, Hurston also inserted another framing device, a first-person narrative of her travels as a collector of folklore in Central Florida and an ethnographer of hoodoo practices in Louisiana (cf. West 76). Together, these multiple frames announce the text’s modernism in terms very similar to the documentary book, where different sources of authority, in tension, challenge the representa- tionalism of the text. It is also through this last device of the first-person narrative frame that Hurston brings the reader along on the promise of achieving the aesthetic satisfactions that Boas and others described, even as she plays with the difficulty of its achievement. The introduction to the book begins, famously, with a passage that foregrounds the complex problem of Hurston’s authorial position as a folklore collector in her natal community, the African American town of Eatonville, Florida. She writes about the liberatory experience she had of going away to college in New York, American Popular Social Science 451 where she finally felt free to shed the “tight chemise” of “negroism” of her south- ern African American cultural heritage: “It was only when I was off in college, away from my native surroundings, that I could see myself like somebody else and stand off and look at my garment. Then I had to have the spy-glass of Anthropol- ogy to look through at that” (1). This passage has offered a rich field for commentators interested in the way in which Hurston others herself as a female member of a rural African American folk community through a complex play of multiple gazes: that of white people, men, the metropolitan black middle class, and finally that of objective and au- thoritative social science. Hurston performs a figurative disrobing in this passage, only to then become the object of her own gaze (cf. Johnson 285; Jacobs 111-12). But there is also some question here about how Hurston feels about her chosen tool for self-examination, the “spy-glass of Anthropology.” The capitalization is reminiscent of her various pejorative usages of “Sociology” as a shorthand for the way in which African Americans’ full complexity and humanity were reduced in the service of representing depersonalized social issues (cf. Hurston, “What” 170). Finally, she leaves some doubt as to whether she actually ever succeeds in possess- ing this “spy-glass,” which she “had to have.” Taken as a whole, the passage announces Hurston’s awareness of her own vulnerability in undertaking her project, even as it subtly criticizes the pretenses of objectivity and distance implicit in the methodology of participant-observer ethnography (cf. Farooq 117-19). Yet even while introducing these doubts about ethnography and the authority of social science, this passage also echoes statements of the kind that Boas offered in The Mind of Primitive Man about freeing oneself of cultural bias to experience new thoughts and new emotions. Hurston suggests that she is doing precisely this by going away to college and throwing off the “tight chemise” of “negroism.” Fur- ther, by inserting herself into the framing narrative, she is also promising the reader an opportunity to reap some of these rewards. And then again, just as she hints at the impossibility, maybe even undesirability, of removing one’s “bias,” she also immediately puts into doubt whether she (or the reader) will even encounter this new knowledge or feeling. She informs us first, that the best folklore informants are also “the shyest” (2), and then that African Americans are particularly reluc- tant to divulge their secrets to others: “the Negro offers a feather-bed resistance. That is, we let the probe enter, but it never comes out. It gets smothered under a lot of pleasantries” (Mules 2-3). The whole book, then, becomes structured as a play in which Hurston, the narrator—but also part of the “we” who withhold their secrets through “feather-bed resistance”—takes the reader on a journey to seek out the kinds of aesthetic satisfactions that the text both promises and threatens to withhold. This sense of frustrated expectations seems confirmed upon Hurston’s return to Eatonville. The very first folktale told by an Eatonville informant, about John and the frog, is interrupted halfway through, never to be completed (9-10). Simi- larly, the frame narrative of Hurston’s participant observation, her exploration of the community’s popular amusements, seems to promise more than it ultimately provides. Though Hurston is greeted at the outset as a native, she also encounters customs that are apparently alien to her. She needs to ask what a “toe-party” is, 452 Susan Hegeman and then to ask the meaning of “coon-dick” (9; 15). The answers to both questions—a “toe-party” is a game where men choose their women dance partners by only seeing their feet, and “coon-dick” is a kind of moonshine liquor—are slightly titillating, but they hardly offer the reader any transformatively new experiences of thought or feeling. Moreover, as Hurston participates in the toe-party and sam- ples coon-dick, the reader is once again reminded of the impossibility of the kind of detachment that the ethnographic gaze seems to demand. Hurston’s repeated frustration of the reader’s desire for unproblematic, “interesting” ethnographic knowledge, her troubling playfulness with the ethnographic gaze, is what makes her writing so attractive to more contemporary readers attuned to the questions raised by reflexive anthropology. Yet we can also see Hurston working in a much more conventionally Boasian vein. This is already evident in the introduction, which concludes with Hurston recalling a folktale from her own memory as she is driving south. In fact, this is the first folktale of the collection, typographically set apart from the frame narrative, just like most of the others that will follow it. This folktale relates to the dispersal of souls to all the peoples of the world. In the story, God made one soul that was so powerful that humans (the “white man,” “Indian,” and “Negro”) could not approach it. Then one day, the “Jew,” in the role of a culture hero or trickster, steals the soul, but it is so powerful that he cannot keep hold of it, and it breaks into pieces. “So God mixed it up wid feelings” and gave pieces of the souls to all the others (Mules 3-4). Though one cannot but note its deployment of anti-Semitic stereotypes, the tale in general simply allegorizes familiar Boasian themes, such as the idea of common humanity spread across divisions of race and nation. Indeed, it echoes the epigraph from Benedict’s Patterns of Culture, attributed to the “Digger Indians”:6 “In the beginning God gave to every people a cup of clay, and from this cup they drank their life” (v). But even more importantly for the framing of the volume that will follow, Hurston here announces the centrality of her plan to elucidate not just the social scientific data of the folktales, but (echoing Du Bois) the “soul” of the African American folk, which is to be found in its unique cultural expressions. She thus prepares the reader to understand that the folktales embedded in her narrative of discovery are central to properly understanding the aesthetic value of the text as a whole. This is not the last time that Hurston mixes her own perspective and voice with the folktales she is ostensibly collecting—nor, for that matter, the last time she recounts a creation myth. As she transitions to the Louisiana section of her text, she incorporates a folktale directly into the frame narrative to give an origin story of the syncretic folk religious and magical practices of hoodoo. There, she mixes her authorial voice with dialect into a composite “we”: “The way we tell it, hoodoo started way back there before everything.” This complex tale is also a retelling of the biblical creation story: “six days of magic spells and mighty words and the world with its elements above and below was made” (Mules 183). God, in other

6 “Digger Indians” is a derogatory term, dating to the California Gold Rush. It refers to members of various central California Indian nations. See Lönnberg. American Popular Social Science 453 words, is presented here as a hoodoo conjure doctor, as are the biblical figures of Moses and Jethro, Solomon and Sheba. Through this tale, Hurston demonstrates the syncretism of Christian and West African beliefs in the tradition she has set out to describe. But she also formally brings together the frame narrative and the folktale in a way that seems to resolve some of the tensions she established ear- lier in the text between herself and her object of study, the ethnographer and her informant. What is now opened up is a relatively unproblematized statement of mystery, secrecy, and knowledge to be gained: Nobody can say where [hoodoo] begins or ends. Mouths don’t empty themselves unless ears are sympathetic and knowing. That is why these voodoo ritualistic orgies of Broad- way and popular fiction are so laughable. The profound silence of the initiated remains what it is. Hoodoo is not drum beating and dancing. There are no moon-worshippers among the Negroes in America. (185) Here it becomes apparent that the estrangement that Hurston offers is not so much through comparison between black folkways and the customs of white ur- ban society, but between black folkways and beliefs and the primitivist stereotypes that saturated both the elite and popular culture of early twentieth-century America.7 Once the ostensible reader’s stereotypes are estranged, she promises to put them in touch with something more real than the primitivist fantasies of early twentieth-century popular culture, and indeed to connect the reader to something like the unified soul of humankind. Only accessible when “ears are sympathetic and knowing,” the secrets of the soul (or culture) of the African American folk rest within these unspoken and largely oral traditions. And they, in turn, are con- nected to the larger mysteries of existence.

***

When Ngai posited the cute, the zany, and the interesting as “our aesthetic categories,” she explicitly keyed them to our social moment, which she charac- terized as the “hypercommodified, information-saturated, performance-driven conditions of late capitalism” (1). It seems important to make a similar histori- cizing gesture in relation to the aesthetic category of cultural relativism, which emerged and gained its significance in the U.S. context of mass immigration and the internal Great Migration of rural African Americans, and then in the global context of postcolonial and antisystemic movements of the 1950s and 60s. It is part and parcel of the aesthetics of modernism as a whole, which famously valued violent juxtapositions and other “shocks” to ways of seeing and representing the world. Cultural relativism similarly held out the promise of disrupting conventional thought and feeling, but it also promised the possibility of empathy and

7 In “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” Hurston criticized the widespread appropriation and misuse of African American cultural forms in mainstream American culture, in popular dances like the Charleston and the Black Bottom, the music of George Gershwin, popular blackface entertainers like Al Jolson, and the bawdy persona of Mae West (90-92). Hurston may have had plays like Eugene O’Neill’s Emperor Jones (1920) in mind when she wrote about the “voodoo ritualistic orgies of Broadway.” 454 Susan Hegeman intellectual connection with the cultural other. It was an aesthetics that would be deployed widely, in a body of popular social scientific literature that promised to its readers just such experiences of encounter. In the hands of Boas and his students, it also served their central, historic goal to advance an important and lasting critique of scientific, and other forms of, racism.

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