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

by Charles King

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 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 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.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Anthropology, Biography, Science, Sociology, Race

480 pages, Paperback

First published August 6, 2019

About the author

Charles King is a New York Times-bestselling author and a professor at Georgetown University. His books include EVERY VALLEY (2024), on the making of Handel's Messiah, which was a New York Times Notable Book; GODS OF THE UPPER AIR (2019), on the reinvention of race and gender in the early twentieth century, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of the Francis Parkman Prize and the Anisfield-Wolf Award; MIDNIGHT AT THE PERA PALACE (2014), on the birth of modern Istanbul, which was the inspiration for a Netflix series of the same name; and ODESSA (2011), winner of a National Jewish Book Award.

Reviews

[Paul Bryant · Rating 4 out of 5]

Anthropology pretty much gives me the creeps. People, mostly white middle class types, go to exotic lands, like Papua New Guinea or the Trobriand Islands and cosy up to the natives and learn their language and write furiously about their culture then leave and write a scholarly book and get a professorship. I don’t see many people from Papua New Guinea coming to study the anthropologists and then writing a bestseller. It's kind of a one way traffic.

For all his public attacks on racial scientists and eugenicists, even Boas tended to see faraway peoples as laboratories

And as you know some people thought of some other people as entertainment. Shortly after the Chicago Fair of 1893

The American Museum of Natural History briefly played host to Ota Benga, a Congolese pygmy man who would later be placed on public view, alongside apes, at the Bronx Zoo

And much later, in the 1920s, Margaret Mead adopted a common love ‘em and leave ‘em approach to her field work in Samoa. Two years after she left, her essential Samoan partner in all the information gathering wrote :

Where are you now? We haven’t received a single letter from you. Why haven’t you written to us? I wish you would write to us. We love you so much and we still remember you.

But the motives of the anthropologists are pure. They want to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony. At least, the ones in this book did. They fought the good fight against racism and eugenics. They went as far as to say that the whole notion of “race” was fictional. They even tippytoed around the concept of gender fluidity (in one society they found “a woman could have a penis; a man could wear a wedding dress” – p124.)

The globe-hopping vastness of these anthropological dreams and schemes, plus the way Charles King tells the story, which is to start with Franz Boas and then tell the stories of three of his main students, including the famous Margaret Mead, in all their sprawling interconnectedness and rambunctious romantic interfacings, is like being dragged on to one whirling carousel after another by happy drunken friends. After a while you wanna get off.

I admire Charles King’s work ethic, to cram this amount of STUFF into 450 pages.

THE MOST HAIR RAISING SECTION OF THIS BOOK

Is not the part where Zora Neale Hurston meets a zombie or Margaret talks to a cannibal but when the anthropologists denounce the rise of the Nazis and have to point out the profound similarities between the Nuremburg laws and American racial laws

The Germans had spent the 1930s not so much inventing a race-obsessed state as catching up with one. Most of the United States, not just the Confederate South, had some form of mandatory segregation by race in schools, public offices, theatres, swimming pools, cemeteries and public transportation. Most had prohibitions on marriage between racial categories or treated mixed-race couples as having committed a crime. Most used forced sterilization as a tool of eugenic betterment or as a form of punishment for the incarcerated.

The American “system” was praised in Mein Kampf – Hitler liked the country’s commitment to its racial improvement.

3.5 STARS ROUNDED UP TO 4

This is because CK’s big argument is that these anthropologists fearlessly challenged the idea of rigid identifiable races and gender stereotyping which had great progressive implication for all future thought about race and gender, and this seems to be quite true, but he just doesn’t spend enough time explaining their arguments. Many pages about Margaret’s travels and Franz Boas’ academic career but hardly any on WHY they thought race was a wrongheaded notion, and how they grappled with a world in which it is so stubbornly entrenched. Also, that title is not good! Gods of the Upper Air? What’s that supposed to mean?

AND FINALLY

You have to say that sometimes these anthropologists seem a bit naïve. CK writes that they had an idea that

Just as the cure for a fatal disease might lie in an undiscovered plant in some remote jungle, so too the solution to social problems might be found in how other people in other places have worked out humanity’s common challenges

That’s wack.

[Peter Tillman · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a really good history of the founding and early years of cultural anthropology. The publishers introduction (above) is unusually good. Then, move on to the NYT review, linked below. Finally, here are a few comments from my notes:

The most horrifying part, for me, was the realization (or confirmation) that American society and its systemic racism, was really, really bad, at least up to WW2. And the Nazis admired the American system. Hitler even mentioned it in "Mein Kampf"! The eugenics stuff was right down there, too. The US Supreme Court had ruled that forced sterilization (for cause) was legal. By the 1930s, 28 states had forced-sterilization laws. We're far from perfect now, but things have gotten better.

Franz Boaz was a man of his time, too. But he taught his students to avoid preconceptions. And to always, always be skeptical. Don't try to force another culture into the shape of your own! A good rule for now, too.

Author King follows up on some of stumbles & contradictions in the work of Boas & his students. And, well, social science is not an exact science.

I'm undecided between 4 and 5 stars here. Call it 4.5, rounded up. Highly recommended. Marked for a re-read, a few years down the line.

Excellent Jennifer Szalai review of the book: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/30/bo...
Excerpts: "During the 1930s, the New York-based anthropologist Franz Boas grew increasingly worried about events in his native Germany. He was in his 70s, and close to retiring from Columbia University, where he taught his students to reject the junk science underpinning the country’s restrictive immigration laws, colonial expansion and Jim Crow. Born into a Jewish burgher family, Boas was horrified to see how the Nazis took inspiration from Americans’ pathbreaking work in eugenics and state-sanctioned bigotry. He started to put the word “race” in scare quotes, calling it a “dangerous fiction.”

"Boas is at the center of Charles King’s “Gods of the Upper Air,” a group portrait of the anthropologist and his circle, who collectively attempted to chip away at entrenched notions of “us” and “them.” “This book is about women and men who found themselves on the front lines of the greatest moral battle of our time,” King writes, “the struggle to prove that — despite differences of skin color, gender, ability or custom — humanity is one undivided thing.”

[Caroline · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this as part of my anthropology class, where the general consensus was that it was good, but a bit too long - we stopped reading it a couple of chapters before the end.  The book is about the founders of modern anthropology in America.

At first it was assumed that race, genetics and cultural superiority (the idea that people moved from barbarian cultures up to the lofty heights of civilized modernity) were the foundation of how the world worked.    There was a degree of measuring - noting that one race might have different ratios of facial combinations and so forth, and it was thought that this could help the research. 

Henry H. Goddard, Director of Research at the New Jersey Home for the Education and Care of Feeble-minded Children, was a core believer in the idea that criminal activities were genetic, and he wrote a book that influenced public policy.  In the last two decades of the nineteenth century there was a wave for forced sterilization laws, and this continued through to the 1930s and later.   Twenty eight out of forty eight US states had laws authorising eugenic sterilization of people deemed in the eyes of the authorities to be "morons, idiots, imbeciles or insane".   Not surprisingly, Hitler was interested in this work - and it was mentioned in Mein Kampf.    Some criminals were punished with castration or tubal ligation. 

Against this tide of trying to measure, label and contain people, came the work of a German Jewish anthropologist called Franz Boas.   Alongside him were his students - people like Margaret Meade, Ruth Benedict and Zora Neale Hurston.   They argued that cultures needed to be understood on their own terms, without any sense of superiority on the part of the anthropologists.  

They broadened out the idea of what constituted a culture, for instance arguing that African-American populations in the States weren't just watered-down versions of the African cultures they originally came from, but cultures in their own right.  

They also raised the point that the concept of race was largely a construct - there is often more difference between individual members of a race, than there is between different races.  Over and over again they stressed the importance of looking at communities on their own terms.

Whilst I felt I learnt a lot from reading the book, I nevertheless found a bit meandering. I felt it could have benefited from further editing.

[The Conspiracy is Capitalism · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cultural Anthropology 101:

Preamble:
--Style: this book takes full advantage of character-driven story-telling, bringing the topic to life in an engaging manner which textbooks fail at. How I wish more talented writers would tackle the crucial structural topics siloed in academia in a similar manner…
…Of course, there are challenges with this approach, as the fantastic novelist Amitav Ghosh considers (focusing on the topic of climate crisis: The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable; also see: Our Shared Storm: A Novel of Five Climate Futures).
--Substance: so, let’s map out the structures…

The Good:

1) Context: Nationalism and Racism:
--I was impressed how well the historical context (of Cultural Anthropology’s emergence) was communicated:
i) European Enlightenment:
--There was a brief summary of the 3 trends (Kant vs. Descartes vs. Locke/Hume).
--Given this book’s topic and thesis, it’s a shame there was no section on the Indigenous Critique, the theory that Indigenous critiques of European settlers’ social hierarchies, when brought back to Europe via Jesuit accounts (the European intellectuals of the time), helped stir the European Enlightenment. This was recently popularized in Graeber/Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (see later).
ii) European Colonialism and Science:
--Europe’s 1848 revolutionary outbreaks (the context of Marx/Engels’ The Communist Manifesto) were suppressed, leading to increasing nationalist autocracy.
--We can add: the high-point of Europe’s “Age of Imperialism” was the “Scramble for Africa” (1833-1914), followed by WWI; see Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism and Du Bois’ "The African Roots of War" connecting imperialist expansion to WWI.
--WWI escalated vulgar nationalism and xenophobia/racism.
iii) US Settler Colonialism and Anthropology:
--Meanwhile, the 1840s in the US saw the rise of theories on a secret “ancient American civilization”, with the infamous example of Mormons. However, Lewis Henry Morgan focused on the ancestors of the existing American Aboriginals, with particular interest in the former Iroquois Confederacy. Morgan’s connection with the past and framing of “stages” of social evolution influenced Darwin/Marx/Engels in Europe, with Marx/Engels considering “primitive communism” before the rise of hierarchy in the form of property rights/patriarchy.
--Morgan also influenced John Wesley Powell, who popularized “ethnology” (“science of Culture”) in the US under the “Bureau of Ethnology”. The US settler colonial context: the Indian Appropriation Act of 1871 was a further shift away from collective nations treaties and towards individual “wards” of the state.
…Thus, social evolution became a progressive direction of culture, from savagery (stone/kinship) to barbarism (clay/tribes) to civilization (iron/state). Powell separated culture from biology, while Social Darwinists tried to apply Spencer’s “survival of the fittest” Darwinian biology into a prescription for what society/culture should be.
--Tying US to Europe, “scientific racism” became mainstream in science/culture. The author mentions the popularization of “color”/“Caucasian” in science/politics. In the US, the Reconstruction Era was suppressed, giving way to Jim Crow segregation in the 1870s. 1890s-1910 saw a spike in migration to the US. US anthropologist Madison Grant published The Passing of the Great Race: Or, The Racial Basis of European History in 1916, which was later praised by Hitler back in Europe (Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law), setting up the rise of fascism and WWII.
…To further tie colonialism to fascism (colonial practices returning home), see: Discourse on Colonialism

2) Challenge: Cultural Anthropology:
--We already saw hints of contradictions and challenges from the very origins of the European Enlightenment (“Indigenous Critique”?). Slavery was (eventually) abolished. There was the Reconstruction Era in the US. Morgan’s interest in the Iroquois (ex. matrilineal clan as human family origins) influenced Darwin/Marx/Engels. Further contradictions opened more space for resistance, which always exists.
--To narrate how Cultural Anthropology in the US challenged the above context, the author focuses on the following characters:
i) Franz Boas:
--Challenging the “scientific racism” of the aforementioned fellow US anthropologist Grant (The Passing of the Great Race), Boas and his students wanted to correct for the prejudice of the scientific researcher (where “culture” is the social construct of common sense):

After the war [WWI] ended, Boas’s professional problems only got worse. Science was a siren call, he felt. Improperly used, it would always draw policy makers into dangerous waters. He published an essay in The Nation calling out, although not naming, scholars he alleged had conducted espionage abroad under the guise of fieldwork and denouncing the use of anthropological research for any governmental purposes at all.

ii) Margaret Mead:
--The most well-known of Boas’ students given Mead’s role as a public scientist, Mead challenged patriarchal assumptions by focusing on the cultural construction of sex roles (gender). Mead’s fieldwork involved participant observations, focusing on women/girls and their social education; Mead found flexibility, and theorized sex roles (from cultural borrowing/compromise/change/chance) led to sex temperaments (rather than the reserves).
--Curiously, Mead was at one point a partner of US anthropologist Gregory Bateson, who during WWII worked (apparently begrudgingly) for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, which after WWII became the CIA). The author doesn’t mention Bateson popularized the concept of schismogenesis, the creation (i.e. of identities) through differences, which apparently Bateson helped use during WWII to sow division in opponents. This is also popularized in The Dawn of Everything.
iii) Ruth Benedict:
--Another Boas student and instructor/lover of Mead, Benedict is more known in academia (esp. 1934’s Patterns of Culture), popularizing “cultural relativity” in focusing on the vast range of “potential human purposes and motivations” (rather than inevitable) and the need for the observer to have distance in order to review their own observational prejudices/assumptions (refer back to Boas).
iv) Zora Neale Hurston:
--African American female anthropologist challenging the lack of autonomous identity for African Americans especially women, with an interesting tension vs. African American social realism/proletarian male literature of Langston Hughes/Richard Wright/Ralph Ellison.
--In fieldwork on voodoo, “magic” is framed as setting patterns for a desired event (I immediately think of the stereotypical voodoo doll; the author also connects this to today’s gambling/stock market, as well as private property, i.e. expanding the self onto objects).
v) Ella Deloria:
--Native American researching Sioux society, challenging appropriation of “savage culture” (ex. connecting “physical fitness” with “racial fitness”, stereotypes used from the Boy Scouts to sports teams, etc.).

…The author frames this group of US cultural anthropologists as leading the revolution in cultural questions towards philosophy/religion/human sciences:
i) Natural divisions of human society? Challenging the “scientific racism” focused on inheritance/innate ability (where eugenics became mainstream and “progressive”), instead focusing on cultural learning/socialization.
ii) Universal morality? And how should we treat others with different beliefs/habits?

There might well be such a thing as a universal moral code, Boas taught, but no society—not even our own—has a lock on what it might contain. A given culture typically preens itself into believing that its foodways, family structure, religion, aesthetics, and political system are the truly logical ones. If there is any moral progress at all, it lies in our ability to break that habit: to develop an ever more capacious view of humanity itself—a widening web of beings who deserve our ethical conduct, whatever we deem ethical conduct to be.

…see comments below for rest of the review (“The Bad/Missing”)…

[Brian Griffith · Rating 4 out of 5]

King does a very sensitive job exploring the lives of several founders of modern anthropology. But he also conveys the enormous change this science has made in our whole context for relating to each other across cultures and languages around the planet. He follows the practical steps that led Franz Boas, Margaret Meade, Ruth Benedict and others to their Copernicus-like insights, which have increasingly freed us from assuming that the universe of human evolution revolves around our own people. King also shows the momentous conflict over the whole aim of science in studying human beings. Was it about determining which people were superior, which must inherit the earth, and whose standards must be made universal, or was it about learning how to understand each other better? King follows this titanic ideological battle as it ranged through the decades surrounding World Wars I and II. For example, he shows how Ruth Benedict’s work with Japanese American Robert Seido Hashima, published as "The Chrysanthemum and the Sword," helped to transform American public opinion toward Japan from hatred to respect. King also highlights the crucial role of people who bridged the gap between scientist and object of study, such as Native Lakota linguist and researcher Ella Deloria, or the great Zora Neale Hurston, with her zingers like “Gods always behave like the people who made them.” God I love that woman.

[Mehrsa · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really fascinating history of Margaret Mead, Boaz, Hurston and others who challenged and upended (at least for a little while) some crazy backwards thinking on the essentiality of race. Cultural relativism has been attacked by the right for a while, but it's amazing to go back and remember that before it, the scientific thinking was so....well, so...primitive.

[Marks54 · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a collective biography of one of the principal groups behind the rise of cultural anthropology and the idea of cultural relativism. The key individuals of this group include Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead. There are other members of the group, of course, but Boas, Benedict, and Mead are the key actors. This group has proven extraordinarily influential and even well read and open minded readers may not appreciate their influence. That influence has been unavoidable in recent years with the increasing importance of race, sex, and gender issues in academic research, popular punditry, and even governments regulations. While the group’s influence has grown over time, its effects were also pronounced early. For example, Ruth Benedict’s book on Japan strongly influenced US policies towards Japan in the years after the end of WW2.

The book is well written and shows some sharp thinking by the author. The core individuals are very interesting and their personal stories are important, even if one has read their published work. The book is a fascinating case study of how an academic area of inquiry actually develops. This is not just any area either. Cultural anthropology is in many ways the polar opposite of the types of social science that have come to dominate American academic and policy studies. Critics bemoan the story telling aspects of the ethnologists but the reality is that problems are messy and the highly methodological and reductionistic areas have not ended up solving policy problems as promised. For example, just look at the recent policy successes of economists in national debates. Participant observation and qualitative methods will not solve hard problems either, but they will help inform decision makers in ways that other approaches have seldom matched, at least recently.

King has also crafted a good story that helps motivate his other messages. All of the actors are intriguing people with rich life stories. King spends relatively more time on the sexual dynamics among some of the actors as a driving force for his narrative. I did not mind that, although I still believe that the ideas and research results need to be persuasive on their own terms. At a basic level, I do not care if some of the researchers are sleeping with each other or quarreling a lot. Welcome to academia! Tell me something I do not know.

Stories like this need to work on multiple levels. That is hard but this book succeeds. One indication I had of why I liked this was the number of books by these authors that I looked up and wanted to order for further reading. That happened a lot in this book and I will likely be reading more of Ruth Benedict’s work. King has done his readers a service.

[Paperclippe · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is gonna be one of those sweary reviews.

I cannot express to you how important this book is right now.

Look, I know that we, the United States, as a nation, has always been fond of racist, sexist fuckery. That's nothing new and it's never stopped or taken a break.

But the political situation of today is exactly the roller coaster ride that happened to us in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And we're just living it all over again.

Gods of the Upper Air paints this picture profoundly without making any comparisons to the modern day, instead laying out the facts almost without opinion, but the comparison is impossible not to make. An America obsessed with keeping immigrants out, an America bound and determined to define what makes a "real American" (hint: not brown people or Jews), an America that condones the dog-piling upon of people who would dare present facts that fly in the face of popular opinion, especially when the people presenting them are women, or Jews, or black, or "commies." And that's just the tip of the iceberg, completely ignoring America's own eugenics program that inspired the Nazis, our own concentration camps of Japanese Americans, and so much more.

This hurt to read, and was completely unputdownable. It was like watching a car crash, except you're taking part in another crash at the same time but you still can't look away.

I can't stress how much I want every single person to read this book. It's compelling, it's not hard (except emotionally) to get through, and it's desperately important.

[Dave Schoettinger · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the benefits of being an early baby boomer was that new schools were constantly being built. I did not attend a school that was more than ten years old until I was in the tenth grade. (In contrast, my own kids never sat in a classroom that was less than ten years old until they went to college.) As I began the 10th grade in 1964, my all-white suburban neighborhood was transferred from a large, practically new, suburban high school to a much smaller school in a still rural part of the county. This relieved some of the crowding at the suburban school and also insured that the newly-integrating country school would maintain an overwhelming majority of white students.

I therefore found myself browsing in a school library built in the 1920s. Although new books had been added over the previous 40 years, much of the original inventory remained. Over the next three years I read several history and travel books written in the early 20th and late 19th centuries by authors who reflected the ethnic, racial and gender stereotypes that were the common beliefs of that era. Even though I had grown up in the segregated South, much of the racist assumptions presented seemed over the top. So when I read this book I was somewhat familiar with the analysis of skull shapes and sizes that passed for biological science at that time.

The theme of this book is that a group of American anthropologists began teaching in the 1920s that race and sex did not determine intelligence or personality or criminality, as was commonly believed at the time. Although Mr. King credits them with changing the attitude of academia and much of the general population, one only has to listen to the current US president talk about immigration diluting American blood to realize that such efforts are, at best, still a work in progress.

Much of the book concerns the work of Margaret Mead, who I remember reading about and seeing her picture in the newspaper during the 1970s. She seemed like a nice, if somewhat reserved elderly lady. To read about her personal life as presented by KIng, is like finding your grandmother on Jerry Springer.

[Ryan Boissonneault · Rating 4 out of 5]

We should all be thankful that racism and eugenics are no longer part of the scientific mainstream, but how many of us are familiar with the story of how this happened? In this gripping intellectual history, Charles King shows how a group of twentieth-century cultural anthropologists battled against the “common-sense” notions of racial superiority and social hierarchies to show that “humanity is one undivided thing,” with variation and complexity that should be celebrated, not feared.

The most important idea this group of anthropologists discovered was this: you cannot judge an individual according to group averages, because there is greater variation in traits within a race than between races. Race, in fact, is probably the worst invention in human history. We’ve spent more time as a species trying to fit ourselves and others into groups based on superficial differences than to expand our circle of empathy and view others as equally human—and ourselves as equally fallible in our cultural knowledge.

That’s what makes this story so timeless. The battle against bigotry and small-mindedness—taken up by Franz Boas more than a century ago—is clearly not over. But the people who did the original work—who conducted the field research and actually conversed with people of different cultures—were the first to discover the biases and fallacies that lead to racist, misogynistic, and homophobic thinking. The overall principle is clear: the most bigoted individuals are the ones who spend the least amount of time with the people they fear, hate, or deem inferior—and the most time with groups that tout their own superiority and limited world-view.

King may be criticised for popularizing a view of cultural relativism, in that all truth is relative and socially constructed and no one culture is any better than any other in any dimension. But I don’t think this is the message. The founders of cultural anthropology—Boas, Benedict, Mead, and others—didn’t embrace extreme relativism; they understood that scientific truths are true independent of cultural beliefs, and that some cultures do engage in practices that result in suffering and harm.

They simply proposed the idea that we should seek to understand other people before we judge them, and that our culture is not automatically superior simply because it’s ours, or because our skin is white. They knew that racial superiority is a ridiculous idea, and that people should be judged based on what they do, not on the basis of their race, gender, or skin color. They also were the first to discover that, because there is so much overlap between races on every physical and mental trait, that to speak in terms of averages is empty and misleading in the real world.

King captures all of these discoveries as they played out in field research, with rich biographical details of these early anthropologists as they worked to establish an entirely new scientific field in the face of scientifically-backed mainstream racism. Even Hitler admired the United States on its stance on race, as he wrote in Mein Kampf in 1925. 100 years later, and we find ourselves in the same battle against a resurgence in white supremacy.

My only complaint is that parts of the book were too heavy on biography—and the details of each person’s love life—and light on science, theory, or actual discoveries from field research. This is obviously a personal preference, but for those with similar preferences, parts of the book will probably drag.

[Paul Ataua · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am a sucker for any book about people like Benedict, Mead, and the whole bunch of anthropologists that had such an influence in the mid-century. The book probably overplays that influence, that big question about how much people change the world or reflect changes in the world, but I kind of loved soaking up the dream. The book is probably at its best when uncovering the mistaken conception of the world in the century following Darwin , a time when ‘people’ science seemed nothing less than a slave to prejudice and power. Have things changed since then or are we still blind to the forces that drive science ?

[Peter A · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a brilliantly told story of the lives of several important individuals; their collective story addressing with data and science issues of race, sex, and gender; the scientific and social context and history within which they worked; and their impact on the then nascent field of cultural anthropology and the impact that it has made on society. The story includes the turbulent lives of the protagonists, the struggle and conflict that new ideas which contradict old idea pose, and impact good science (and bad science – eugenics) can have on society. Moreover, the author writes so well that I consider it a page turner. This is one of the best history-of-science books of the year!

The central figure in this telling is Franz Boas, born in Germany, with a desire to ultimately make a name for himself. He lived with and studied the natives of Baffin Island and later the Pacific Northwest Native Americans. His thinking of primitive versus advanced culture evolved with these direct experiences. His work took place when the research luminaries thought of “peoples” advancing evolutionarily through savagery, barbarianism, to reach the final level of civilized. He also lived in the age of anthropometrics, the study of human body measurement, which at the time were trying to relate race to measurements. His personality gave him the strength to move forward while at the same time alienating other peers. But ultimately, he and his many students where able to use their results to bring about a rethinking of human diversity, and dismiss the old model (not supported by data) of superiority of the “white” race, in fact show the data do not support any ability differences based on race.

The set of his students is almost a whose who of researchers: Margaret Mead, Zora Neale Hurston (“one of the most significant unread authors in America” according to Alice Walker – author of “The Color Purple”), Edward Sapir, Ella Deloria, and Ruth Benedict, who served as Boas effective lieutenant during his years at Columbia University.

Boas and each of these contributed to the growth of the field of anthropology, and the related fields of folklore (Hurston, who worked with Alan Lomax collecting so many folksongs now part of the American Folklife Center, Library of Congress), and sociology. Mead’s work lead to a rethinking of the role of gender in societies. Hurston’s work gave voice to black Americans as people, and Benedict’s “The Chrysanthemum and the Sword” allowed people in the US to see Japanese as people, with a different set of norms, rather than as lesser people.

The author does a wonderful job explaining the impact of the collection of work of these controversial and complex people. He also explains the science and its important very clearly. The author also talks about the interactions between the people who are in Boas’ orbit; scientists are after all people, and their experience does impact how they see the world.

What one also sees in this book is that it often takes a lifetime to transform thinking of a society, often by the sheer weight of evidence, the persistence of articulating the idea, and in some cases the death of those who say otherwise. It also takes a consistency in approach (in Boas’ case – reason inductively and follow the data) to help transform thinking and approach of his students.

There is much that I learned in this book, and much that I take for granted now, however I fear that many other citizens of this planet do not want to grasp. One point that Boas made throughout much of his career, captured in “The Mind of the Primitive Man” is that the “strongest moral schemas rest on the proven truth that humanity is one undivided whole” (p 310). Another, my own poor wording, is that every civilization (culture) is another expression of ways people who live together work together and function together. Thus, you can think of cultures as multiple experiments humanity is conducting (in its own way). And one should not judge another culture with the lens of one’s own culture. But one should try to see it through the eyes of that culture, which means to live it and suspend one’s own beliefs. This is hard and disorienting.

There is also a point in the book that reminds me of the point made by Jonathan Haidt in his book, The Righteous Mind. People reject data that don’t adhere to their view of the world, and spend time defending their own positions and beliefs rather than trying to understand what the data are staying. This leads to issue of racial hierarchies, to protect the power one has.

As a disclaimer, I almost studied folklore as a graduate student. During my undergraduate studies I took several classes in it and was then exposed to the book “Mules and Men”. The current book helps put her work in context.

A great read. One of the best science books of this year!



For those of you who want to know more about the book, I list a couple of places below. I first heard about it in an interview on NPR (a few days before it was published) and knew this was a book for me to read.

https://www.npr.org/2019/08/05/748128...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outloo...

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was an anthropology student in the '70s, and this enlightening, engrossing, beautifully written book reminded me why I was so passionate about it and how studying it fundamentally and forever changed my worldview . . . Want to better understand the reasons why racism, sexism, and bigotry of all kinds are utterly indefensible — and how a group of visionary adventuring scientists came to understand and teach that? Want to grow a deep love for the human story? Want to understand the rationale of the scientific community which Boaz and his circle challenged (and which still rules many a political and social school of thought today)? What could be more important in our times (or any)?

THANK YOU, Charles King, for delivering the gripping story of Boaz and his circle — and for telling it with all the humanity, compassion, and wonder they brought to their own work.

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lovely book about the Columbia University anthropologists led by Franz Boas who developed important ideas about our common humanity. I learned a ton of history from the book. Was great to read after Daniel Okrent’s “The Guarded Gate” which was also a fine book covering the same time period.

Charles King also wrote a very different book that I loved, about Istanbul and its history, called “Midnight at the Pera Palace” — highly recommended.

[Camelia Rose · Rating 4 out of 5]

God of the Upper Air is a group portrait of Franz Boas and his circle of women scientists, who changed the notions of race, gender and sexuality in the first half of 20th century.

Prior to the book, I knew a little about Margaret Mead, but Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, Ella Deloria and Zora Neale Hurston are all new to me. At the height of the eugenics movement that eventually lead to the Holocaust, Franz Boas, with his scientific anti-racism, became the voice of reason and the conscience of American intellectuals. It's a delight to find out that Zora Neale Hurston was a novelist and anthropologist. My admiration for Margaret Mead just grows. It's worth noting that the author does not shy away from the limit of these great scientists and thinkers of their time.

I have so much to say about this book. We are now in the third decade of 21 century, yet, race and gender are still two of the hottest topics in our time.

Franz Boas' cultural relativism, where different groups of people have equally developed cultures and the differences between groups are the result of historical, social, and geographic conditions rather than innate biological differences, has been in the mainstream for decades now. I wonder what Franz Boas would think about the post-modernism today. Has the cultural relativism gone too far? Is there really no absolute truth? Can we still criticize other culture for its human rights violation? Is there no such thing as universal human value? Is it possible to help your neighbor to achieve better equality at the same time avoid the savior complex? In a globalized world highly connected by Internet, is there still a clear distinction between cultures?

Looking from the perspective of cultural relativism, I suddenly understand why so many Western feminists from non-Muslim background support hijab, while activists from Muslim background such as Yasmine Mohammed and Ayann Hirsi Ali want to free women from wearing hijab, and why the latter feel betrayed by their Western counterparts.

[Jeremy Silverman · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an outstanding, lively and, sadly, all too timely book. Charles King gives an engaging account of the lives and intellectual development of Franz Boas (1858-1942) and four of his outstanding students: Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Zorah Neale Hurston, and Ella Deloria. Boas is the father of modern cultural anthropology. The latter four – and several of their colleagues and, at times, lovers – went on to further influence and enlarge the field in important ways. More broadly, they helped shape an understanding of culture and peoples around the world that uprooted the longstanding hierarchical notion that the European/American way of life was the pinnacle of human society. Uprooted, that is, for some. In the United States, for example, the idea that America should be a straight white Christian male dominated society and that other ways of living need to be denigrated and perhaps completely eliminated is not only an embedded worldview for many but currently appears to be in ascendence. Thus, Boas and his students, imperfect as they sometimes might have been, continue to have much to teach. This book is not only a fascinating, well-written, and often exciting story of intellectually courageous and at times truly intrepid pioneers but also provides a useful and necessary reminder about our shared humanity.

[Carlos · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book cemented what my anthropology teachers always said “anthropology research is the best and most active field out there but anthropology books are the most boring out there”, if this field wasn’t one I graduated on I couldn’t see any redeeming quality on reading this book, nonetheless since I am familiar with the topic and all of the characters this books talks about then I was kept enthralled while reading, but even then I also had a bit trouble not falling asleep trying to get through it, this books is less about anthropology and more about famous anthropologists and their own visions of their lives. If you are not an anthropologist enthusiast this is most certainly the book that will spark any interest on it , but if you are interested in it be prepared to take this book in turns.

[Conor Ahern · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the story fo Franz Boas, Margaret Mead, Zora Neale Hurston (and others), and how they upended a largely U.S.-centered notion of white/European cultural and genetic superiority. From inauspicious beginnings and against headwinds of Nazism in his home country (to say nothing of the taxonomic and "meritocratic" tendencies of his adopted home, the fin-de-siècle United States), Boas established anthropology as an academic discipline at Columbia University, and immediately began recruiting some of the most luminous minds to develop under his tutelage, Mead and Hurston included. Mostly their task was to establish cultural relativism, and I think the following summarizes the ethos well:

There can be no real analysis of human societies without the prior assumption that one’s own way of seeing the world isn’t universal, [Ruth] Benedict said. Every society, including our own, suffers from the tyranny of the capital letter: we tend to equate our own behavior with a thing we label Behavior and the ways that seem natural to us with a thing we call Human Nature. But all societies are in fact just snippets of a “great arc” of possible ways of behaving. Which particular snippets a society develops depends on a whole host of accidental factors, from “hints” provided by geography, environment, or basic human needs to more or less random borrowings from neighboring societies. These choices might be reasonably durable, which allows anthropologists to study them in context—to write down, in a given society, how babies are born, how boys are ushered into adulthood, or how girls are married off well and expeditiously. But they are never glued in place. All societies change.

Implicit in that summary but not stated outright is the idea that because all societies change and any given society may (at any given time) value or disdain certain behaviors or attributes, no group of humans is naturally better or worse than any other, just different and possibly better or worse along certain dimensions. We tend to give those dimensions value (e.g., tendency to produce philosophers we know, or buildings we regard as beautiful, or authors we revere), but those values reflect our own biases more than any transcendental truth about human capability or purpose.

In the end, the book dealt with a lot of only minorly interesting personal dynamics between the in-group and their taggers along, and so turned into something of a slog. This was particularly so given that the main thesis, though important, is graspable pretty easily and early on. Still, after giving it an initial middling review I find I have been thinking about it a lot and even recommending it to some people, so perhaps I liked it more than I thought.

[Tiffany Rose · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is nonfiction written in novel form. It is a wonderful read for any fan of anthropology or anyone who wants tho learn about cultures. I highly enjoyed this book recommend it.

I would like to thank netgalley and the publisher for providing me with a copy free of charge. This is my honest and unbiased opinion of it.

[Gayla Bassham · Rating 4 out of 5]

King goes a bit too easy on Margaret Mead and Franz Boas in this book -- their legacy is more mixed than you might believe just from reading this -- but still. This account is intriguing and nearly impossible to put down.

[Mac Hendrickson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Masterpiece. Recommended reading for every American

[Noula · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think this book is well thought out. I didn't know anything of Anthropology and to read this book really educated me on it all. There was some things of Margaret Mead that I wish I didn't read. To see her have multiple lovers during her expeditions really left a bad first impression I had on her. Overall, Charles King wrote beautifully and this book is one I hope to see read in Anthropology classes.

[James Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Once upon a time I was a young pup studying anthropology. The ideas of ethnologists like Franz Boas were the signposts to my thinking. The field research of Bronislaw Malinowski in the Trobriand Islands was a frequent topic of classroom discussion. Margaret Mead was at the peak of her reputation. Her famous field study in Samoa published as Coming of Age in Samoa was required reading, and we were encouraged if not expected to read her other books. Based on the success of scientists such as these, immersion in and analysis of primitive (or more primitive) groups in distant, often isolated, locations became the proven method of research. Gods of the Upper Air tells the story of the birth of this field we now know as cultural anthropology.

Whether or not the story of cultural anthropology's origins can be told exclusively in this way, King chooses to assign Franz Boas as the figurehead of the discipline plowing into the 20th century as he mentors 4 talented disciples who happen to be women. Boas came to America late in the 19th century via field work among the Inuit of Baffin Island. Eventually establishing a department of anthropological studies at Columbia University, he guided the work of Ruth Benedict among Northwestern Indians, Mead in the South Pacific, Zora Neale Hurston in the colorful folklore of the American South and Caribbean, and Ella Cara Deloria's work with Plains and Southwest tribal languages.

King channels the beginnings of cultural anthropology through the lives of these 5 individuals. Because it traces the life of Boas from his European beginnings as well as the lives of the 4 women, ending his book with the death of Mead, it's largely a biographical work. King knows how to tell stories. A few years ago I read Lily King's novel Euphoria fictionalizing Mead's love triangle with Reo Fortune and Gregory Bateson while they worked together in New Guinea. I enormously enjoyed Charles King's nonfictional account of those events. Hurston is equally fascinating. I'd known of her primarily as a novelist. But she did important work for Boas and Columbia gathering folkways in the South and Haiti. The lives can't be told without relating the ideas driving them and the conclusions arrived at through their field work. Boas's own findings over a century ago on the value of immigrants makes me think we've taken a step backward today. Collectively the group made important determinations refuting the physical and psychological differences of race. Though the extended title is a bit sensational and overstated for my taste, we come to see the subjects of King's book as the gods of the upper air, those scientists who wrote cultural relativism, the idea than any given culture reflects the family structure, religion, food habits, aesthetics, sexual mores, and political system most logical to that society. There is not so much a correct behavior as a whole of humanity to which basic, similar principles apply.

[Nadine in California · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I was an undergrad in the late 70's and early 80's, I didn't know what I wanted to major in, but I did know I wanted to look at the world through the eyes of other cultures in order to see the prejudices and blinders of my own. You'd think that would lead me to anthropology, but no. My idea of anthropology was stuck in the pre- Boas, Mead, Benedict, Hurston era, when cultures were seen on a scale from 'savage' to 'advanced'. (I blame high school for that.) Now this book has caught me up in a thoroughly researched, highly readable way, although not all the way. I wish the book could have ended with more of a 'state of the state' picture of anthropology today and what it has built upon and rejected from Boas, Mead, et al. Still, this book ends by pointing to the intellectual north star that all of us should follow:

The most enduring prejudices are the comfortable ones, those hidden up close; seeing the world as it is requires some distance, a view from the upper air. Realizing the limitations of your own culture, even if it claims to be cultureless and global; feeling the power of prayer if you reject someone else's god; understanding the inner logic of bewildering political preferences; sensing the worry and depression, the disquiet and rage, caused in other people by the very outlooks on reality that seem wholly natural to you - these are skills built up over a lifetime. Their promise is that with enough effort, we might come to know humanity in all its complexity, in fits and starts, with dim glimpses of a different world appearing through the mist of custom, changing us, unseating us, in a way destroying us - the baffling, terrifying liberation of home truths falling away.

[Dafna · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's an engaging, thorough, and sometimes surprising story of American cultural anthropology from its beginnings in the late 19th century and up to the mid-20th. The book revolves around Franz Boas and his circle: Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Zora Neale Hurston, and to a lesser degree Ella Cara Deloria, Alfred Kroeber, and Edward Sapir. The book does awesome job contextualizing these people's lives and ideas by showing how these anthropologists were at odds with the mainstream thought of their time while being at the same time the products of this very time and place.

Even though I am an anthropologist by training and have read a lot about my discipline's history, I still learned a lot of surprising and at times deeply saddening facts: e.g., how American scientific racism fuelled Hitler's beliefs. Or how the FBI dispatched interviewers to the department of anthropology at Columbia to "check" on the faculty and students after Benedict was alleged to be a communist by some readers who couldn't stomach that her new book debunked popular racist myths and took a stab at scientific racism.

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have been talking to people - family members, students, colleagues, whoever will listen - about this book since I started it and now, as happy as I am to pass it along to the next reader, I kind of hate to let it go. It's a brilliant book, beautifully researched and written, incredibly humane and even-handed, informative, timely, moving, thought-provoking, and perspective-altering. It moves through time, introducing us to remarkable people, complex and difficult people, but brilliant and brave, too. We begin with Franz Boas, or, really, with Margaret Mead, one of his many incredibly accomplished students, and move through Boas' story and then Mead's and other students' stories, from the late 1800s until the 1970s. Each person is compelling and King treats them with respect, telling their stories clearly and objectively, but with a kind of gentleness. There's something wonderful knowing that each of these people was in the world, transforming it with their ideas and hard work and deep commitment.

But it's the context in which these people were working that makes the book as exciting and infuriating and inspiring as it is. These scholars spent their lives working against simplistic, hateful, reductive narratives; against using self-serving theories rooted in a blinkered, uncritical sense of superiority to reduce others to somehow lesser-than, uncivilized, unacceptable, and, in the worst cases, unworthy of living. Boas and Mead and Hurston and Benedict used evidence and the nascent field of anthropology to demonstrate that people are people, full stop, regardless of the color of their skin, their sexual preferences, their social practices and belief systems, or how they organize themselves. They did this in the face of close-mindedness and judgement and hatefulness and just kept doing it, each of them, until they died. And they taught their students to do this, too. They represented tolerance, acceptance, appreciation, and respect in a world that keeps tending towards self-serving judgment, rejection, fear, and oppression.

I'm going to use this review as notes, so it's going to be long.

p.84: Darwin saw some people as more backwards and others as more advanced, but attributed that to environment and circumstance, not inherent traits.

p.84: "In the United States, the end of the Civil War produced not so much a dismantling of the Old South as a transfer of many of its core traits to the national level. Pardons of former Confederate generals and officeholders allowed many to return to Congress or occupy appointed posts in the federal government. With the formal end of Reconstruction, these leaders launched a new wave of race-oriented legislation. Legally enforcing segregation, prohibitions on interracial marriage, voting restrictions, and other policies introduced in the 1890s forward created a race-based system of politics and social relations - the authoritarian apartheid scheme eventually known as Jim Crow. The U.S. court system similarly developed an expansive body of case law that made whiteness into a clear legal category. Attorneys called on the expertise of historians, ethnologists, and other specialists to confirm the scientific validity of the country's bedrock schema for coding human beings. In 1878 a precedent-setting opinion affirmed that Chinese were not white. Similar decisions determined the nonwhite status of Hawaiians in 1889, Burmese and Japanese in 1894, Native Americans in 1900, Filipinos in 1916, and Koreans in 1921, while judges ruled Mexicans, Armenians, "Asian Indians," and Syrians to be biological "Caucasians" in 1897, 1909, and 1910, respectively.. The consequences of these cases were immediate and practical. They determined one's ability to buy property in a race-restricted neighborhood, give birth in a race-restricted hospital," etc. At a time when Arkansas is using the law to exclude trans people from basic services and opportunities and when Georgia is passing legislation to reduce access to voting as a response to massive Black voter turnout in the last election (predicating its actions on The Big Lie that the election was "stolen" from Trump), it's clear that we haven't gotten better than this.

p.100: Boas pointed out that "historical events appear to have been much more potent in leading races to civilization than their faculty, and it follows that achievements of races do not warrant us in assuming that one race is more highly gifted than the other."

p.100: Boas thought it was nonsense to believe there was some linear pathway to human civilization and saw Europeans, with their thin lips, short legs, and back hair as seeming most ape-like, if it were going to come down to physical traits.

p.102: to understand others, Boas believed "you had to try as hard as possible to divest yourself of the opinions common to the environment in which you were born. You had to struggle to follow new trains of thought and new logic, to grab onto new emotions. ...Otherwise you couldn't claim to understand anything at all. You were simply staring at your own biases, reflected back at you in the mirror of someone else's culture."

p.103: Boas wrote: "It is somewhat difficult for us to recognize the value which we attribute to our own civilization is due to the fact that we participate in this civilization, and that it has been controlling all our actions since the time of our birth; but it is certainly conceivable that there may be other civilizations, based perhaps on different traditions and on a different equilibrium of emotion and reason, which are of no less value than ours, although it may be impossible for us to appreciate their values without having grown up under their influence. The general theory of valuation of human activities, as developed by anthropological research, teaches us a higher tolerance than the one which we now profess."

p.108: on the anti-German sentiments and actions of the US population and government at the outset of WWI: "The public reactions to these shifts in policy and political rhetoric was predictable. Murders, floggings by impromptu 'citizen's committees,' lynchings, tarrings-and-featherings, and widespread vandalism..." Sadly, today's anti-Asian violence, re-ignited by Trump's disgusting racist reference to Covid as "the China flu" and "Kung flu" is rooted in the same tendencies and is made all the less escapable by too many White Americans' persistent perceptions (and treatment) of BIPOC as "other," as less-than-citizens, merely on the basis of their physical features, which are too often conflated with unrelated attributes, identities, and behaviors, including intellect, beliefs, abilities, nationality, "culture," and competitiveness.

p.110: Boas "had come to the United States full of optimism that the nationalist conflicts he had known in Europe would be foreign in this melting pot nation. But in 1898, he had a "rude awakening" and a period of "profound disappointment." America had embarked on its own imperialist expansion in the war with Spain and in its brutal colonial administration of the Philippines."

p.110: Boas wrote: "I have always been of the opinion that we have no right to impose our ideals upon other nations, no matter how strange it may seem to us that they enjoy the kind of life they lead, how slow they may be in utilizing the resources of their countries, or how much opposed their ideals may be to our own." THIS THIS THIS

p.111: in critiquing and criticizing Madison Grant's book The Passing of the Great Race, Boas denied the existence of race as a thing at all. And more: "Racism was at base the belief in the inheritable reality of race itself - an idea trussed up in the language of science and, as such, every bit as much a product of Western culture as, say, a painted mask was the product of the Kwakiutl. When there was no evidence for a theory, Boas had suggested in The Mind of Primitive Man, you had to let it go -- especially if that theory just happened to place people like you at the center of the universe. Otherwise, what you called science was nothing more than nonsense on stilts." King goes on to describe Grant's book as nonetheless resonating with people who appreciated its message and saw it validated in the material wealth of Europeans and Americans. His book, therefore, sold briskly. *sigh*

p.113: on racism and immigration laws as efforts to reinforce the white population

p.114-115: Adolph Hitler called The Passing of the Great Race his bible, and wrote in Mein Kampf that the US was, in King's words, "showing the way to a brighter, more scientific way of building a political community." Hitler wrote: "A state which in this age of racial poisoning dedicates itself to the care of its best racial elements must someday become lord of the earth." Holy cats.

p.115: Boas complained: "Whether that be family life, local patriotism, college spirit, nationalism, religious intolerance - it is always the same. Must one always kick the other fellow just because one likes one's own way of life?" THIS!

p.169: "...the web of possible social connections in any society was a direct product of the way that society wielded basic concepts such as family, power, and order."

p.174: the roots of eugenics

p.176: the USSC does a terrible thing, upholding forced sterilization on the basis of eugenics, with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. opining: "It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind."

p.178: Boas argued, in King's words, that "we should try to hold two things in our heads at once: first, that all people are individuals, with their own talents and tribulations, and second, that we are social beings who cling desperately to the sense of reality in which we are reared." Boas wrote: "We cannot treat the individual as an isolated unit. He must be studied in his social setting, and the question is relevant whether generalization are possible by which a functional relation between generalized social data and the form and expression of individual life can be discovered; in other words, whether any generally valid laws exist that govern the life of society."

p.179: King explains Boas as arguing "When we think we are studying people out there, we are really making claims about people's lives right HERE- about us and our neighbors, about our sense of the normal, the evident, and the standard." Boas wrote: "We classify the variety of forms according to our previous experiences." King goes on to explain:"Every society trains itself to see categories. Whom you love, whom you hate, the kind of person you'd be disgusted to see your daughter marry- none of these problems follow universal rules of attraction or repulsion. They are instead notions fired in the crucible of culture. The mobilization of sham science [THIS THIS THIS!] to justify bigotry might be said to be a deep characteristic of only one culture: that of the developed West." This page is RICH with observations, including about how societies define criminal behavior.

p.184: Mead wrote that all societies are "experiments in what could be done with human nature."

p.197: a telling of the massacre at Ocoee over Black voting rights. Oh, white supremacists, you have created hell again and again.

p.199: lynchings and labor bondage - the shift to Jim Crow

p.204: Boas at times embodied Kendi's distinctions and though he was radical for his time, and courageous in his science and promulgation of it, he was not truly anti-racist. He believed that Black people are as capable and competent as any other, yes, but also that Black Americans' CULTURE was degraded by slavery and maltreatment and therefore left Black Americans underdeveloped. And here and on the next page, it's clear that Alfred Kroeber, whatever good he might have done in his collections of indigenous lore and art and language was actually the pretty horrifying racist who just got canceled at Berkeley (2021). The irony being that this racism coincided with the Harlem Renaissance and W.E.B. DuBois.

p.228: "Understanding the social lives of any [group of people] wasn't about one grand theory or one summer's fieldwork. What you needed was repeated and respectful conversation with the real human beings whose worlds you were straining, as best you could, to comprehend."

p.232: the irony of White Americans dressing up as Native Americans, whom they'd attempted to wipe out and effectively marginalized and relegated to poverty and suffering, for sporting events.

p.265-266: Benedict argued that for the outside observer of ANY group (factory workers or a remote tribe of people), in King's words, "the key was to make oneself what Benedict called 'culture-conscious': fully aware of the ways in which one's own gut-level response to difference - a catch in the throat, exasperation at some other society's stupidity, even visceral disgust - was in fact a clash between two worlds, each with its own unique patterns. No institution, no habit, no way of acting that any given society saw as basic, obvious, and normal was ever inevitable. There were all - even Rotary Club luncheons and High Table dinners - selections from 'the great arc of potential human purposes and motivations.'"

p.266: Benedict wrote: "The recognition of cultural relativity carries with it its own values, which need not be those of the absolutist philosophies. It challenges customary opinions and causes those who have been bred to them acute discomfort. It rouses pessimism because it throws old formulas into confusion, not because it contains anything intrinsically difficult. As soon as the new opinion is embraced as customary belief, it will be another trusted bulwark of the good life. We shall arrive then at a more realistic social faith, accepting as grounds of hope and as new bases for tolerance the coexisting and equally valid patterns of life which mankind has created for itself from the raw materials of existence." THIS IS BEAUTIFUL.

p.267: King explains that the fundamental point of Benedict's book Patterns of Culture was that there's no such thing as a defective human being.

p.274: King writes: "Cultures are cunning tailors. They cut garments from convenience and then work hard to shape individuals to fit them. ...Real liberation wasn't necessarily about making women more manly or allowing men to be effeminate. It was about unleashing human beings' potential from the roles that society had fashioned, seeing each person as a parcel of possibilities that might get expressed in many creative ways. Cultural change came about when enough people began to see that the old clothes simply didn't fit." I LOVE THIS.

I ran out of room, danggit. Will transfer to notes. But read the book. It's brilliant.

[Andy Klein · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sometimes interesting, many times not. I knew very little of Boas, Mead, and Benedict, so it was worth reading if only to be introduced to them. Most interesting to this reader was just how much “scientific” racism flourished in the US. I knew that there were adherents of eugenics in this country but I did not know that it was mainstream. Nor did I know that Hitler praised how those in power treated the races in the US and how immigration policy was tailored to exclude members of certain races, religions, and even countries who were seen to dilute and spoil the “greatness” and “superiority” of Anglo-Saxons in power. The arguments made in favor of that immigration policy sadly echoes similar statements made by our current President and his adherents. Those who don’t learn from history are destined to repeat it.

[Stephanie G. Lewis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Learned a lot. Want to read again.

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

WOW! This is one of the most fascinating books I have ever read. I highly recommend it both for its content and its beautiful writing style.

[Ameya Warde · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this. really interesting look at margaret meade & her circle's intellectual lives & work (including Zora Neale Hurston)