obsessed commentators back home. How had they produced teenagers without the typically American angst?
Or had they really? “And oh how sick I am of talking sex, sex, sex,” she wrote to her closest friend, Ruth Benedict, a few months into her stay. She had filled entire notebooks, written out index cards, and typed up reams of field reports, sending them by canoe through the breakers and over the reef to the mail boat. She watched with her stomach in knots, afraid that the outrigger would capsize and destroy the only reason she had for being on the far side of the world—or for that matter, the only evidence she had of something that could vaguely be called a career. “I’ve got lots of nice significant facts,” she wrote, the sarcasm wafting off the page, but she doubted that they added up to much. “I’m feeling perfectly pathological about my time, my thoughts….I’m going to get a job giving change in the subway when I get home.”
She could not have known it at the time, but there among the welcoming feasts and the reef fishing, on humid afternoons and in the lashing winds of a tropical storm, Mead was in the middle of a revolution. It had begun with a set of vexing questions at the heart of philosophy, religion, and the human sciences: What are the natural divisions of human society? Is morality universal? How should we treat people whose beliefs and habits are different from our own? It would end with a root-and-branch reconsideration of what it means to be social animals and the surrender of an easy confidence in the superiority of our own civilization. At stake were the consequences of an astonishing discovery: that our distant ancestors, at some point in their evolution, invented a thing we call culture.
* * *
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THIS BOOK IS ABOUT women and men who found themselves on the front lines of the greatest moral battle of our time: the struggle to prove that—despite differences of skin color, gender, ability, or custom—humanity is one undivided thing. It tells the story of globalists in an era of nationalism and social division and the origins of an outlook that we now label modern and open-minded. It is a prehistory of the seismic social changes of the last hundred years, from women’s suffrage and the civil rights movement to the sexual revolution and marriage equality, as well as of the forces that push in the opposite direction, toward chauvinism and bigotry.
But this is not a book about politics, ethics, or theology. It is not a lesson in tolerance. It is instead a story about science and scientists.
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. But the reminders of humanity’s defects—individuals referred to as the blind, the deaf and dumb, cripples, idiots, morons, the insane, and mongoloids—were best left to lead quiet lives behind a wall.
Experience confirmed these natural truths. No sovereign country permitted women both to vote and to hold national office. In the United States, censuses divided society into clear and exclusive racial types, including white, Negro, Chinese, and American Indian. The 1890 census added the terms mulatto, quadroon, and octoroon to distinguish different shades of the colored. Your proper category was so obvious that it was not what you said it was but what someone else, the census enumerator—usually a white man—said it was.
If you walked into any major library, from Paris to London to Washington, D.C., you could pull down learned volumes that agreed on all