If innate biological differences don’t account for the observed variety of roles and practices among human groups, then something else must be at work. Boas thought there were several factors, and one was culture.

Using the term required some redefinition. In the nineteenth century, “culture” was generally regarded as an attainment; it was something societies acquired as they advanced, marking a stage in the growth of a civilization. Boas is one of the people responsible for the sense we have in mind when we use the phrase “culture in the anthropological sense”—that is, the sense of culture as standing for a way of life. One of his major contributions was to show that pre-modern societies—“primitive” was the accepted term—have cultures in exactly the same way that modern societies have them, and that the minds of people who live in those societies are no different from the minds of everyone else.

Boas did his first field work with the Inuit living on Baffin Island, in northern Canada. He had intended to study hunting patterns and the like, but the more time he spent with the Inuit the more he realized that their particular way of doing things reflected a particular way of seeing the world. The Inuit way was not the European way, but it wasn’t inferior. In some respects, he thought, it might be better. The Inuit seemed, for example, to be more hospitable than Europeans. Immersion in Inuit life made him see his own culture from the outside. He learned, as he put it, “the relativity of all education.”

Boas eventually concluded that there is not one human culture but many, and he started referring to “cultures,” in the plural. He was engaged in ethnography, and he believed that the job of the ethnographer was to disappear, in effect, into the culture of the people being studied, to understand from the inside what it means to be male or female, to give or receive a gift, to bury one’s dead. The ethnographer needed to get the society’s jokes. This meant leaving one’s ethnocentrism at home. “Get nowhere unless prejudices first forgotten,” Ella Deloria wrote in her notes on one of Boas’s lectures. “Cultures are many; man is one.”

“All my best students are women,” Boas told an anthropologist friend in 1920. Columbia College did not admit women—it was the last of the Ivies to go coed, in 1983—but the graduate school and Teachers College did. And Boas also taught at Barnard, which is right across the street.

Ella Deloria came to Boas by way of Teachers College. She was born on a South Dakota reservation, and belonged to an eminent Sioux family. Her father was an Episcopal priest; her mother was the daughter of a high-ranking U.S. Army officer. She went to Oberlin, then transferred to Teachers College, where she received a bachelor’s degree in 1915. In her final year, she received a summons from Boas, who enlisted her in a lifelong project of his, recording Native American languages.

Deloria was never officially a Boas student. But she worked as his assistant and attended some of his lectures, and he employed her to fact-check the work of early ethnologists and linguists who had studied the Plains Indians. Boas was not surprised to learn that a lot of their findings were worthless. In 1941, the year before Boas died, he and Deloria published “Dakota Grammar.” King says it is one of the few works in his career that Boas agreed to co-author.

Of the women King writes about, Ruth Benedict was professionally the closest to Boas. She had a bachelor’s degree from Vassar and got interested in anthropology when she took courses at the New School. She entered the graduate program at Columbia in 1921, and, after getting her degree, became what King calls Boas’s “lieutenant” in the department. Boas struggled to get her a regular faculty position; she was finally made an assistant professor in 1931.

When Boas retired, Benedict was the most famous member of the Columbia department. Her book “Patterns of Culture,” a study of three groups—the Zuñi (of the American Southwest), the Kwakiutl (of British Columbia), and the Dobu (of Papua New Guinea)—was published in 1934 and became one of the best-selling works of academic anthropology ever written. The university, it is almost unnecessary to say, decided to go with a man as the new chair. He was Ralph Linton, a critic of Benedict’s work. They did not get along.

In 1946, Benedict published a second fantastically popular book, “The Chrysanthemum and the Sword,” a study of the culture of Japan. Linton left Columbia that year and Benedict was finally promoted to full professor in 1948. Two months later, she had a heart attack and died. She was sixty-one.

It was Benedict who recruited Margaret Mead to anthropology. Mead entered Barnard as a sophomore in 1920. She was an English major, then a double English and psychology major, but she took an introduction-to-anthropology class with Boas in her senior year, and Benedict was her T.A. Benedict persuaded Mead to enroll in the graduate program. They also fell in love.

Benedict was fourteen years older than Mead, and Mead was married. So was Benedict. Their intimacy lasted for the rest of Benedict’s life, and through two more marriages for Mead. (That relationship is the subject of a book, by Lois Banner, called “Intertwined Lives.”) Mead’s choice to do her field work in Samoa, studying adolescence, was encouraged by Boas, who wrote a foreword to the book that resulted and that launched her career.

Zora Neale Hurston entered Barnard in 1925, when she was thirty-four. (No one knew her age; Hurston always lied about it.) After graduating, she spent two years in the doctoral program before dropping out, but by then Boas had got her started collecting African-American folklore in central Florida, where she had grown up. She published her findings in 1935, as “Mules and Men,” with a preface by Boas, but the real importance of the work she did was that it provided material for the astonishing representation of African-American speech in her singular novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God.” That book was published in 1937 and slowly sank from view—Richard Wright accused Hurston of minstrelsy—but it was “rediscovered” in the nineteen-seventies, and is now a staple text in English-literature courses.

The anthropology these people practiced had two motives that might seem, from an orthodox scholarly perspective, extracurricular—except that knowledge is always pursued for a reason. One motive was to record ways of life that were rapidly disappearing. Even in the nineteen-twenties, it was almost impossible to find groups of humans untouched by Western practices. The island that Mead’s research subjects lived on was an American possession. It had an Anglo-American legal system, and the Samoans were all Christians.

Mead did her best to minimize these circumstances, because she wanted to capture behavior and mores that were remote from American Christian moral and legal conceptions—in particular, Samoan attitudes toward premarital sex, which is the part of the book that got all the attention. So she centered her account on what she took to be the distinctively “Samoan” aspects of her subjects’ lives.

Early-twentieth-century anthropologists were highly self-conscious about this recovery mission. They worried that the world was losing its cultural diversity. “Western civilization, because of fortuitous historical circumstances, has spread itself more widely than any other local group that has so far been known,” Benedict wrote. “This world-wide cultural diffusion has protected us as man had never been protected before from having to take seriously the civilizations of other peoples.” The French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who did his field work among indigenous groups in west-central Brazil in the nineteen-thirties, once suggested that the word “anthropology” should be changed to “entropology”—the study of the homogenization of human life across the planet. Cultural anthropology was the West’s way of memorializing its victims.

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The other motive—and this is what accounts for the popularity of Mead’s and Benedict’s books, and of Hurston’s novel—was to hold up a mirror. What is of interest to the anthropologist is difference, but all difference is difference from something, and the “something” in these books is the anthropologist’s own culture.