![]() Just as with race, more differences occur within categories than between them maleness and femaleness are socially constructed categories, not biological binaries. King shows how the combination of Mead's own beliefs, her training and her fieldwork led her to rethink how gender is understood. Benedict was the love of her life, even as she had multiple relationships (and marriages) with men, some characterized by emotional turbulence. From young adulthood on, she was inclined toward polyamory, feeling cosseted and constrained by her culture's ideal of monogamy. Mead stands out, especially for the links between her personal and professional lives. King writes too about Ruth Benedict, whose book about postwar Japan, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, became a bestseller, and of Ella Cara Deloria, who as an ethnographer of the Dakota Sioux taught Boas a great deal about language and culture on the Great Plains. Hurston's novel Their Eyes Were Watching God is a beloved piece of writing still, and it's fascinating to picture her doing as King describes, early on, standing on a corner in Harlem and asking to measure people's heads in service of Boas' research. At the time, almost no one else thought it a valuable topic of study. Zora Neale Hurston did groundbreaking fieldwork on folklore among African Americans in towns across Florida and elsewhere in the American South. Margaret Mead, through her fieldwork in Samoa and New Guinea, her long association with the American Museum of Natural History in New York and her popularization of anthropology in the pages of Redbook magazine and on TV talk shows, became a familiar and recognized figure. King's comprehensive archival research illuminates intellectual giants in the circle who are remembered, read and celebrated today. The best thing any of us can do to expand our circle of moral compassion, they urged, is to try "as hard as possible to divest yourself of the opinions common to the environment in which you were born" when considering the lives of others. They showed too that European customs and beliefs make up just one way to be there's nothing either more evolved or inevitable about them. Through fieldwork around the globe, these scholars showed the "plural, fluid, and endlessly adaptable nature of both human bodies and the societies they make." to establish anthropology as a discipline and confronted the falsities of scientific racism. What utterly radical notions these proved to be! From the 1880s through the 1940s, Boas and his "circle of renegade anthropologists" - as noted in King's subtitle - helped in the U.S. ![]() Children adapted to their new diets and new environments in all kinds of ways, even in the very shape of their heads.īy 1911, Boas knew, in King's words, "there was no reason to believe that a person of one racial or national category was more of a drain on society, more prone to criminality, or more difficult to assimilate than another." More variation occurs within so-called "races" than between them. ![]() kids than they did with people from their ancestral groups. ![]() The results showed that U.S.-born children of immigrants had more in common with other U.S. He and his students interviewed people living in New York City and made physical measurements of them. Having already carried out anthropological research in Arctic Canada, Boas was appointed to a professorship at Columbia University in 1897. This race science purported to show that white Europeans were genetically destined to be the best and the brightest other races were profoundly inferior by comparison.Īs Charles King writes in his captivating Gods of the Upper Air, "The deep inequality of potential and achievement across the races was taken for granted." An "invasion of inferiors" through immigration into the United States had to be avoided at all costs.īoas knew this racial science was wrong because he had evidence to prove it wrong. In the United States around the turn of the 20th century, anthropologist and German immigrant Franz Boas challenged the accepted view, at the time, that all human beings could be grouped into fixed races.Īccording to this erroneous view, where you were born and what complement of genes you received from your ancestors determined both your physical form and your character. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Gods of the Upper Air Subtitle How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century Author Charles King ![]()
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