Gods of the upper air : how a circle of renegade anthropologists reinvented race, sex, and gender in the twentieth century /
Material type: TextPublisher: New York : Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, [2019]Copyright date: �2019Edition: First editionDescription: xii, 431 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 25 cmContent type:- text
- unmediated
- volume
- 9780385542197
- 0385542194
- Boas, Franz, 1858-1942 -- Influence
- Mead, Margaret, 1901-1978
- Benedict, Ruth, 1887-1948
- Deloria, Ella Cara
- Hurston, Zora Neale
- Ethnology -- Study and teaching -- United States -- History -- 20th century
- Culture -- Study and teaching -- United States -- History -- 20th century
- Anthropologists -- United States -- Biography
- Women anthropologists -- Biography
- Anthropologists -- Research
- 306 23
- GN308.3.U6 K55 2019
Item type | Current library | Home library | Collection | Call number | Copy number | Status | Date due | Barcode | Item holds | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Standard Loan | Coeur d'Alene Library Adult Nonfiction | Coeur d'Alene Library | Book | 301.092 KING (Browse shelf(Opens below)) | 1 | Available | 50610022462498 |
Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:
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.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Away -- Baffin Island -- "All is individuality" -- Science and circuses -- Headhunters -- American empire -- "A girl as frail as Margaret" -- Coming of age -- Masses and mountaintops -- Indian country -- Living theory -- Spirit realms -- War and nonsense -- Home.
"At the end of the 19th century, everyone knew that people were defined by their race and sex and were fated by birth and biology to be more or less intelligent, able, nurturing, or warlike. But one rogue researcher looked at the data and decided everyone was wrong. Franz Boas was the very image of a mad scientist: a wild-haired immigrant with a thick German accent. By the 1920s he was also the foundational thinker and public face of a new school of thought at Columbia University called cultural anthropology. He proposed that cultures did not exist on a continuum from primitive to advanced. Instead, every society solves the same basic problems -- from childrearing to how to live well -- with its own set of rules, beliefs, and taboos. Boas's students were some of the century's intellectual stars: Margaret Mead, the outspoken field researcher whose Coming of Age in Samoa is one of 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 of 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 vanishing civilizations from the Arctic to the South Pacific and overturned the relationship between biology and behavior. Their work reshaped how we think of women and men, normalcy and deviance, and re-created our place in a world of many cultures and value systems. Gods of the Upper Air is a page-turning narrative of radical ideas and adventurous lives, a history rich in scandal, romance, and rivalry, and a genesis story of the fluid conceptions of identity that define our present moment"--
Table of contents provided by Syndetics
- Chapter 1 Away (p. 1)
- Chapter 2 Baffin Island (p. 14)
- Chapter 3 "All Is Individuality" (p. 38)
- Chapter 4 Science and Circuses (p. 58)
- Chapter 5 Headhunters (p. 79)
- Chapter 6 American Empire (p. 105)
- Chapter 7 "A Girl as Frail as Margaret" (p. 127)
- Chapter 8 Coming of Age (p. 158)
- Chapter 9 Masses and Mountaintops (p. 187)
- Chapter 10 Indian Country (p. 215)
- Chapter 11 Living Theory (p. 245)
- Chapter 12 Spirit Realms (p. 275)
- Chapter 13 War and Nonsense (p. 302)
- Chapter 14 Home (p. 332)
- Acknowledgments (p. 347)
- Notes (p. 351)
- Bibliography (p. 387)
- Index (p. 407)
Excerpt provided by Syndetics
Reviews provided by Syndetics
Library Journal Review
Even though anthropology is considered to be related to psychology, King (international affairs & government, Georgetown Univ.; Midnight at the Pera Palace) demonstrates how the field's history makes it unique by taking readers through each leading character who influenced a developmental phase of anthropological thought and practice. In its development, anthropology had to undergo a transformation that started with the questioning of early 20th-century Western cultural ideals, such as race, religion, and sexual expression. Detailed, storylike chapter biographies trace the lives of scholars, writers, and anthropologists such as Franz Boas, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ella Cara Deloria. Using this method, King calls upon future anthropologists to understand how their scholarly predecessors used their distant view from the "upper air" as a means of observation and what that means for ethical methods of study moving forward. VERDICT This group portrait of pioneering leaders in the field is recommended reading for undergraduate and graduate students, professional academics, and individuals with an interest in anthropology, cultural anthropology, and history.--Monique Martinez, Univ. of North Georgia Lib., DahlonegaPublishers Weekly Review
Georgetown University professor King (Midnight at the Pera Palace) serves up a tasty group biography of trailblazing American women and depicts how the field of cultural anthropology emerged to challenge popular Eurocentric beliefs about human development. Early chapters chronicle how, at the turn of the 20th century, the process of field work turned pioneering anthropologist Franz Boas away from dominant theories of cultural and racial hierarchy, toward a more broad-minded, inductively reasoned approach that took seriously the "many different ways of being human." The second half of the book follows the adventures and achievements of four notable women Boas trained at Columbia University. Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, both well-known theorists who helped to popularize anthropological insights at midcentury, had an intellectually productive, emotionally supportive lifelong partnership; Zora Neale Hurston and Ella Cara Deloria each applied their anthropological skills outside of traditional academic settings to study and depict their own cultures (African-American and Native American, respectively). King chronicles both the women's struggles to achieve professional recognition and institutional support in a male-dominated field and the challenges of debunking white supremacy in a period of xenophobia, scientific racism, and imperialist ideologies. King's prose is energetic, enlivened with delicious quotations, juicy personal details, and witty turns of phrase ("Fieldwork was the destroyer of worlds. Marriages failed. Youthful ambitions came to look quaint."). This complex, delightful book will get readers thinking and keep them turning the pages. (Aug.)Booklist Review
King (Midnight at the Pera Palace, 2014) takes a sweeping look at the rise of cultural anthropology under Franz Boas (1858-1942), paying particular attention to the extraordinary women who studied under Boas and made further key advancements in the field. A native of Germany who began his own research on Baffin Island with the Inuit people, Boas came to New York to teach anthropology at Columbia University. Boas made waves by rejecting the idea of any innate superiority or inferiority in terms of intelligence or physical ability between people of different backgrounds. His research went against the notions his contemporaries were preaching in attempts to assert the supposed superiority of Anglo-Europeans. When the president of Columbia made a concerted effort to keep undergraduates from studying under Boas, the anthropologist found a new pool of eager young minds at Columbia's sister school for women, Barnard. Among his more famous students were Margaret Mead, whose study of young Samoan women, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), became a bestseller; and Zora Neale Hurston, whose research brought her back home to Florida to document the cultural traditions of African Americans living in the region. King's engrossing look at these extraordinary trailblazers deftly illustrates how crucial their research and work remains today.--Kristine Huntley Copyright 2019 BooklistKirkus Book Review
The story of cultural anthropologist Franz Boas (1858-1942) and "a small band of contrarian researchers" who shaped the open-minded way we think now.In this deeply engaging group biography, King (Government and International Affairs; Georgetown Univ.; Midnight at the Pera Palace: The Birth of Modern Istanbul, 2014, etc.) recounts the lives and work of a handful of American scholars and intellectuals who studied other cultures in the 1920s and '30s, fighting the "great moral evils: scientific racism, the subjugation of women, genocidal fascism, the treatment of gay people as willfully deranged." Led by "Papa" Franz, who taught for four decades in Columbia University's first anthropology department, the group of "misfits and dissenters" (as a university president called them) included Margaret Mead, whose expeditions to Polynesia produced Coming of Age in Samoa (1928); Ruth Benedict, Boas' assistant, Mead's lover, and author of Patterns of Culture (1934); Zora Neale Hurston, the Harlem Renaissance writer whose ethnographic studies led to her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937); and Ella Cara Deloria, a Native American scholar and ethnographer. King offers captivating, exquisitely detailed portraits of these remarkable individualsthe first cultural relativistswho helped demonstrate that humanity is "one undivided thing," that race is "a social reality, not a biological one," and that things had to be "proven" before they could shape law, government, and public policy. "When there was no evidence for a theory," Boas argued, "you had to let it goespecially if that thing just happened to place people like you at the center of the universe." King's smoothly readable story of the stubborn, impatient Boas and his acolytes emphasizes how their pioneering exploration of disparate cultures contradicts the notion that "our ways are the only commonsensical, moral ones." Rich in ideas, the book also abounds in absorbing accounts of friendships, animosities, and rivalries among these early anthropologists.This superb narrative of debunking scientists provides timely reading for our "great-again" era. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.Author notes provided by Syndetics
CHARLES KING is the author of seven books, including Midnight at the Pera Palace and Odessa , winner of a National Jewish Book Award. His essays and articles have appeared in the The New York Times, The Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, and The New Republic. He is a professor of international affairs and government at Georgetown University.There are no comments on this title.