Ezra's Bookshelf

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

by Charles King · 481 pages · ~8.5 hrs

HistoryScience & Technology

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Franz Boas and his students revolutionized how we think about human difference, and historian Charles King tells their story as an intellectual adventure that reshaped the twentieth century. Boas, a German Jewish immigrant who became the father of American anthropology, argued that cultures should be understood on their own terms rather than ranked on a scale from primitive to civilized. His students, including Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Ella Deloria, and Zora Neale Hurston, carried this insight into studies of sexuality, gender, race, and personality that challenged received wisdom and still provoke controversy. King, a professor at Georgetown, writes intellectual history as narrative, following Boas from his German education through his fieldwork with the Inuit and his transformation of Columbia's anthropology department. He traces how Mead's work on adolescence in Samoa, Benedict's studies of cultural patterns, Deloria's documentation of Lakota culture, and Hurston's celebration of Black Southern folkways all extended Boas's challenge to biological determinism. The book examines the limits of their achievement as well as its scope, noting blind spots and later critiques. Readers interested in how ideas change, how scientific paradigms shift, and how a handful of determined scholars can reshape common sense will find this group biography compelling.

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