A new book throws light on the cultural blind spots of science

Capturing Kahanamoku explores how a scientist’s fixation on a Hawaiian surfer set off a series of events that changed how we think about race, culture, science, and humanity.

By Sarah Steimer

When the loudest voices are focused on one target, it’s easy to miss the stories growing at the periphery. In Capturing Kahanamoku, Michael Rossi explores such a case from the 1920s, when anthropologists’ eyes were so trained on indigenous Hawaiian people — their attention held by a eugenicist obsession of how to square masculine perfection with a supposedly flailing population — that they completely missed a momentous historic moment: the birth of surf culture.

Capturing Kahanamoku is the second book from Rossi, an Associate Professor of the History of Medicine. He follows how leading anthropologists became fixated on Duke Kahanamoku, an indigenous Hawaiian surfer they determined had a “perfect” form that seemed to clash with his being from an “uncivilized” race.

“There's a question of, what can we see with science and what viewpoints are obscured?” Rossi says. “Part of the major fulcrum of the book is that these guys [Hawaiians ‘beach boys’] are popularizing surfing, but they're also talented musicians, and they're hustlers. … Even as they’re carving out a space in a really new world, trying to cope with the bustling economy of Hawaii in the 1920s, the scientists who are supposedly studying them in their entirety can only see them as ‘primitive’ people. And as a result, they missed the biggest breakthrough from the Kahanamoku brothers: the invention of surf culture.”

Rossi stumbled upon anthropologists’ obsession with Duke and his brother David while working on a project about the blue whale model in the Museum of Natural History in New York. In going through the museum’s exhibitions archives — largely a process of flipping through people’s mail — he came across a note about sending a copy of the cast of David Kahanamoku to a museum at Yale University. It was relatively unusual for individual people to be referred to in anthropological records of the time, Rossi says, which caught his attention. He learned that David was the brother of the famous surfer Duke Kahanamoku — but why would anthropologists want David’s cast?

Years after finding the note, Rossi returned to the archives to piece a history together. The note came from an era when Henry Fairfield Osborn was the president of the American Museum of Natural History. In searching the museum’s archives, Rossi found a letter that briefly mentioned that Osborn received a surfing lesson from Duke Kahanamoku. Osborn was a eugenics advocate, who — after a visit to Hawaii — made an impromptu speech in San Francisco about how indigenous Hawaiians were dying at alarming rates because they held little resistance to white diseases (in this case, the 1918 influenza). He told his audience to prepare for the extinction of indigenous Hawaiians. But Osborn seemed captivated by Duke, whose physical power seemed to gesture at the past greatness of the human form, and (perhaps) the future perfection of “civilized” humans.

In verifying the connections between the men, Rossi determined that Osborn’s time in Hawaii aligned with Duke’s schedule, using dates in Osborn’s notebook and Hawaiian newspaper reports about Duke’s appearances (Kahanamoku was a local celebrity). After his visit, Osborn asked a young physical anthropologist, Louis R. Sullivan, to conduct research on Hawaiians. Sullivan, a subordinate, sent back extremely meticulous, detailed reports, which Rossi was able to mine. Similarly, he pieced together much about Duke’s life via the Hawaii State Archives, which holds the surfer’s answers to fan mail and newspaper reports that mention him.

Rossi opens the book with a reference to the note about David’s cast, which sparked Rossi’s research. In verifying the connection between David and Sullivan, Rossi found a telegram from neoclassical sculptor Malvina Hoffman to Osborn. The note said Hoffman encountered David Kahanamoku, who told her a harrowing story about his time making the cast. Rossi reviewed Hoffman’s journals from another archive, finding the artist wrote about a visit to Hawaii to sculpt locals. She recorded coming across David, who told her that, while encased in plaster by an anthropologist, he was afraid he was going to die because there was hardly enough room for his chest to expand as the cast hardened. 

Spending as much time as he did with his subject’s letters — seeing their personalities and understanding how the characters were immersed in their own worlds — informed how Rossi told the story, infusing the information with humanity, rather than writing it as an institutional history. 

“It's about self-certainty and about the damage that can be done by people who broke no dissent, who are incurious and disinterested in criticism,” Rossi says. “It’s unfortunately timely, but we see similar attitudes by powerful people then as now. I wanted readers to really feel what it was like to be in that moment, rather than just give a more abstract analysis.”

Capturing Kahanamoku shows the almost willful blindness of the anthropologists — or, really, eugenicists — to real life and newly developing cultures. Rossi maintains that while science is a wonderful way of knowing the world, it can also be deceptively seductive.

“I think it can make people's more generous sense of self sleepy,” he says. “Sometimes, you see neuroscientific studies: ‘We put these people in an fMRI machine, and we found the part of the brain that deals with beauty.’ I don't know — is that really what beauty is?”

The story of Osborn and the Kahanamoku brothers is a parable, Rossi says, “about how giving too much to a mode of inquiry — in this case, science — can attenuate our sense of the greater moral world around us.”

The eugenicists were using a simple lens to explain, order, and manage a complicated world, Rossi explains. But the story shows the possibilities that open up by embracing the complexity and uncertainty of complicated societies that hold rich experiences — “it's not a matter to be decided exclusively by scientists.”

The book comes around, in a sense, with Harry Lionel Shapiro. The scientist took over Sullivan’s work after Sullivan died in 1925. After all his measurements and studies, Shapiro eventually came to a conclusion outside of eugenics: He instead embraced the idea of multiculturalism. As Rossi writes in his book, “His work at the American Museum showed him the way not to greater understanding of ‘pure’ races or cultural hierarchies, but to the conviction that the very notion of racial purity was a myth.”

This pushed against eugenicists’ belief that some cultures are more advanced and that everyone is building up to white civilization. It suggested, instead, that there’s any number of ways to be people in the world. 

“The idea of surf culture or brewery culture, for example, wouldn't have made a lot of sense in the 1920s,” Rossi says. “At the time, culture was seen as a ladder, and most authorities assumed that you can't have multiple different kinds of cultures. The research program that started with Kahanamoku ends up producing the notion of culture that can accommodate different ways of being people.”