Gods of the Upper Air by Charles KingCall Number: GN308.3 .U6 K55 2019
ISBN: 9780525432326
Publication Date: 2020-07-14
Charles King chronicles the history of cultural anthropology and the scientists who pioneered it, constructing a fascinating origin story of our multicultural world. Columbia University professor Franz Boas studied data related to race and cultures, but many things didn’t add up. Racial categories, he insisted, were biological fictions. Cultures did not come in neat, labelled packages. 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 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, Ruth Benedict, Ella Deloria, and Zora Neale Hurston. 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