Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century (2020)
2020 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award WinnerFinalist for the National Book Critics Circle AwardFrom an award-winning historian comes a dazzling history of the birth of cultural anthropology and the adventurous scientists who pioneered it—a sweeping chronicle of discovery and the fascinating origin story of our multicultural world.A century ago, everyone knew that people were fated by their race, sex, and nationality to be more or less intelligent, nurturing, or warlike. But Columbia University professor Franz Boas looked at the data and decided everyone was wrong. Racial categories, he insisted, were biological fictions. Cultures did not come in neat packages labeled "primitive" or "advanced." What counted as a family, a good meal, or even common sense was a product of history and circumstance, not of nature. In Gods of the Upper Air, a masterful narrative history of radical ideas and passionate lives, Charles King shows how these intuitions led to a fundamental reimagining of human diversity. Boas's students were some of the century's most colorful figures and unsung visionaries: Margaret Mead, the outspoken field researcher whose Coming of Age in Samoa is among the most widely read works of social science of all time; Ruth Benedict, the great love of Mead's life, whose research shaped post-Second World War Japan; Ella Deloria, the Dakota Sioux activist who preserved the traditions of Native Americans on the Great Plains; and Zora Neale Hurston, whose studies under Boas fed directly into her now classic novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. Together, they mapped civilizations from the American South to the South Pacific and from Caribbean islands to Manhattan's city streets, and unearthed an essential fact buried by centuries of prejudice: that humanity is an undivided whole. Their revolutionary findings would go on to inspire the fluid conceptions of identity we know today. Rich in drama, conflict, friendship, and love, Gods of the Upper Air is a brilliant and groundbreaking history of American progress and the opening of the modern mind.
...MoreReview Nicholas Barron (2021) Review of "From Boas to Black Power: Racism, Liberalism, and American Anthropology". History of the Human Sciences (pp. 362-373).
Review Daniela S. Barberis (2020) Review of "Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century". Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences (pp. 136-138).
Similar Citations
Book
Frederic W. Gleach;
Regna Darnell;
(2016)
Local Knowledge, Global Stage
(/isis/citation/CBB713344644/)
Book
Mark Anderson;
(2019)
From Boas to Black Power: Racism, Liberalism, and American Anthropology
(/isis/citation/CBB544344509/)
Book
Williams, Vernon J.;
(2006)
The Social Sciences and Theories of Race
(/isis/citation/CBB000772607/)
Article
Morris-Reich, Amos;
(2006)
Race, Ideas, and Ideals: A Comparison of Franz Boas and Hans F. K. Gunther
(/isis/citation/CBB000760667/)
Book
Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt;
(2019)
Franz Boas: The Emergence of the Anthropologist
(/isis/citation/CBB468285066/)
Article
Morris-Reich, Amos;
(2010)
Argumentative Patterns and Epistemic Considerations: Responses to Anti-Semitism in the Conceptual History of Social Science
(/isis/citation/CBB001032514/)
Article
Lafferton, Emese;
(2007)
The Magyar Moustache: The Faces of Hungarian State Formation, 1867--1918
(/isis/citation/CBB000831415/)
Article
Graulund, Rune;
(2009)
From (B)edouin to (A)borigine: The Myth of the Desert Noble Savage
(/isis/citation/CBB000953748/)
Article
Verdon, Michel;
(2006)
Boas and Holism: A Textual Analysis
(/isis/citation/CBB000660433/)
Article
Shankman, Paul;
(2006)
Virginity and Veracity: Rereading Historical Sources in the Mead-Freeman Controversy
(/isis/citation/CBB000660233/)
Book
Cole, Sally Cooper;
(2003)
Ruth Landes: A Life in Anthropology
(/isis/citation/CBB000470721/)
Book
Fardon, Richard;
(1999)
Mary Douglas: An Intellectual Biography
(/isis/citation/CBB000650746/)
Article
Paolo Pecere;
(2023)
Il tarantismo e i paralleli etnologici: note su La Terra del rimorso e la ricerca sulla possessione rituale oggi
(/isis/citation/CBB445322525/)
Book
Alessandra Cerea;
(2021)
Natura, psiche e cultura. Dal “ragazzo selvaggio” all’etnopsicoanalisi
(/isis/citation/CBB136760743/)
Book
Mills, David;
(2008)
Difficult Folk? A Political History of Social Anthropology
(/isis/citation/CBB000774892/)
Article
McDougall, Russell;
Croft, Julian;
(2005)
Henry Ling Roth's and George Kingsley Roth's Pacific Anthropology
(/isis/citation/CBB000660211/)
Article
Nurse, Andrew;
(2007)
The Ambiguities of Disciplinary Professionalization: The State and Cultural Dynamics of Canadian Inter-war Anthropology
(/isis/citation/CBB000930289/)
Article
Geismar, Haidy;
(2006)
Malakula: A Photographic Collection
(/isis/citation/CBB000660422/)
Article
Savoskul, S. S.;
(2006)
A Few Notes on the History and Current Progress of Homeland Ethnology and Anthropology (Concerning the Publication of the Book “The Outstanding Homeland Ethnologists and Anthropologists of the XXth Century”)
(/isis/citation/CBB000660078/)
Thesis
Pinkoski, Marc;
(2007)
Julian Steward and American Anthropology: The Science of Colonialism
(/isis/citation/CBB001561518/)
Be the first to comment!