Boas and his students understood that in every society of which he have knowledge, people have a tendency to take their own ways of categorizing and mapping the world, and seeing those as natural, as timeless and commonsensical. A really scientific mindset - or for Boas and his students, an anthropological mindset - was for a moment to cast yourself out of that sense of naturalness from your own society, and begin to see the world from on-high, from the position of the Gods of the Upper Air, as Zora Neale Hurston said, and begin then to understand your own condition as only one of a number of ways of seeing the world.