Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century
- ISBN-10
- 0525432329
- ISBN-13
- 9780525432326
- Category
- Social Science
- Pages
- 480
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2020-07-14
- Publisher
- Anchor
- Author
- Charles King
Description
2020 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award Winner Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award From 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.
Get the book
Other editions
Similar books
-
Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams
By Charles KingDrawing on a wealth of original sources and offering the first detailed account of the destruction of the city's Jewish community during the Second World War, Charles King's Odessa is both history and elegy—a vivid chronicle of a ...
-
Midnight at the Pera Palace: The Birth of Modern Istanbul
By Charles KingThe inspiration for the Netflix series premiering March 3rd "Hugely enjoyable, magnificently researched, and deeply absorbing." —Jason Goodwin, New York Times Book Review At midnight, December 31, 1925, citizens of the newly proclaimed ...
-
White Bound: Nationalists, Antiracists, and the Shared Meanings of Race
By Matthew HugheyOn the whole, this book puts abstract beliefs and theoretical projection about the supposed fracturing of whiteness into relief against the realities of two groups never before directly compared with this much breadth and depth.
-
Anthropology and Egalitarianism: Ethnographic Encounters from Monticello to Guinea-Bissau
By Eric GableAnthropology and Egalitarianism is an artful and accessible introduction to key themes in cultural anthropology.
-
The Reinvention of Humanity: A Story of Race, Sex, Gender and the Discovery of Culture
By Charles King"The Reinvention of Humanity tells the story of a small circle of renegade scientist-explorers who changed something profound: what it means to be normal.
-
Anthropology and Modern Life
By Franz BoasThis early work by Franz Boas was originally published in 1928 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography. 'Anthropology and Modern Life' is a work on the study of humans and their lives in various societies.
-
Extreme Politics: Nationalism, Violence, and the End of Eastern Europe
By Charles KingThis wide-ranging work examines the conceptual intersection of nationalist ideology, social violence, and the political transformation of Europe and Eurasia over the last two decades.
-
Savage Kin: Indigenous Informants and American Anthropologists
By Margaret M. Bruchac... New Jersey, in 1910; and The Song of the Wildwood Flute with Mary Pickford and Mack Sennett, filmed near Fishkill, New York, in 1910. For the full filmography, see IMDB, “Dark Cloud,” filmography of Elijah Tahamont, accessed May 20, ...
-
The Ghost of Freedom: A History of the Caucasus
By Charles King" ... The first general history of the modern Caucasus, stretching from the beginning of Russian imperial expansion up to rise of new countries after the Soviet Union's collapse."--Cover.
-
Why the World Needs Anthropologists
By Dan Podjed, Meta Gorup, Pavel BoreckýWhy does the world need anthropology and anthropologists? This collection of essays written by prominent academic, practising and applied anthropologists aims to answer this provocative question.