Gods of the Upper Air Gods of the Upper Air

Gods of the Upper Air

How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century

    • 4.2 • 15 Ratings
    • $14.99

Publisher Description

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

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.

GENRE
Nonfiction
RELEASED
2019
August 6
LANGUAGE
EN
English
LENGTH
448
Pages
PUBLISHER
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
SELLER
Penguin Random House LLC
SIZE
34
MB
America the Philosophical America the Philosophical
2012
The Women Are Up to Something The Women Are Up to Something
2021
Skull Wars Skull Wars
2001
The Metaphysical Club The Metaphysical Club
2002
The Lucifer Principle The Lucifer Principle
2013
Regeneration Through Violence Regeneration Through Violence
2024
25 Classic Westerns 25 Classic Westerns
2011
Midnight at the Pera Palace: The Birth of Modern Istanbul Midnight at the Pera Palace: The Birth of Modern Istanbul
2014
A Daughter of the Sioux A Daughter of the Sioux
1933
Every Valley Every Valley
2024
An Apache Princess An Apache Princess
1933
Found in the Philippines Found in the Philippines
1933
Guests of the Sheik Guests of the Sheik
1995
How to Think Like an Anthropologist How to Think Like an Anthropologist
2018
The Rediscovery of America The Rediscovery of America
2023
The Sum of Us The Sum of Us
2021
The Tyranny of Merit The Tyranny of Merit
2020
Democracy Awakening Democracy Awakening
2023