Gods of the Upper Air
How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century
(Sprache: Englisch)
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...
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...
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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER2020 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.
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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.
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Chapter OneAway
On the last day of August 1925, the triple-deck steamship Sonoma, midway through its regular run from San Francisco to Sydney, slipped into a harbor formed by an extinct volcano. The island of Tutuila had been scorched by drought, but the hillsides were still a tangle of avocado trees and blooming ginger. Black cliffs loomed over a white sandy beach. Behind a line of spindly palms lay a cluster of open-sided thatched houses, the local building style on the string of Pacific islands known as American Samoa.
On board the Sonoma was a twenty-three-year-old Pennsylvanian, slight but square-built, unable to swim, given to conjunctivitis, with a broken ankle and a chronic ailment that sometimes rendered her right arm useless. She had left behind a husband in New York and a boyfriend in Chicago, and had spent the transcontinental train ride in the arms of a woman. In her steamer trunk she carried reporters notebooks, a typewriter, evening dresses, and a photograph of an aging, wild-haired man she called Papa Franz, his face sliced by saber cuts and melted from the nerve damage of a botched surgery. He was the reason for Margaret Mead s journey.
Mead had recently written her doctoral dissertation under his direction. She had been one of the first women to complete the demanding course of study in Columbia University s department of anthropology. So far her writing had drawn more from the library stacks than from real life. But Papa Franz as Professor Franz Boas, the department chair, was known to his students had urged her to get out into the field, to find someplace where she could make her mark as an anthropologist. With the right planning and some luck, her research could become the first serious attempt to enter into the mental attitude of a group in a primitive society, he would write to her a few months later. I believe that your success would mark a beginning of a new era of methodological investigation of native tribes.
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Now, as she looked out over the guardrails, her heart sank.
Gray cruisers, destroyers, and support vessels clogged the harbor. The surface of the water was an oily rainbow. American Samoa and its harbor on Tutuila Pago Pago had been controlled by the United States since the 1890s. Only three years before Mead arrived, the navy had shifted most of its seagoing vessels from the Atlantic to the Pacific, a strategic reorientation that took account of America s growing interests in Asia. The islands quickly became a coaling station and repair center for the reorganized fleet which, as it happened, was steaming into Pago Pago on exactly the same day as Mead. It was the largest naval deployment since Theodore Roosevelt had sent the Great White Fleet around the world as a display of American sea power.
Airplanes screamed overhead. Below, a dozen Fords sputtered along a narrow concrete road. In the malae, the open-air common at the center of Pago Pago, Samoans had laid out an impromptu bazaar of wooden bowls, bead necklaces, woven baskets, grass skirts, and toy outrigger canoes. Families were spread around the green, enjoying an early lunch. The band of some ship is constantly playing ragtime, Mead complained. This was no way to study primitive tribes. She vowed to get as far away from Pago Pago as possible.
Her research topic had been suggested by Papa Franz. Was the transition from childhood to adulthood, with young women and men rebelling against their stultifying parents, the product of a purely biological change, the onset of puberty? Or was adolescence a thing simply because a particular society decided to treat it as such? To find out, Mead spent the next several months trekking across mountains, decamping to remote villages, drawing up life histories of local children and teenagers, and quizzing adults about their most intimate exp
Now, as she looked out over the guardrails, her heart sank.
Gray cruisers, destroyers, and support vessels clogged the harbor. The surface of the water was an oily rainbow. American Samoa and its harbor on Tutuila Pago Pago had been controlled by the United States since the 1890s. Only three years before Mead arrived, the navy had shifted most of its seagoing vessels from the Atlantic to the Pacific, a strategic reorientation that took account of America s growing interests in Asia. The islands quickly became a coaling station and repair center for the reorganized fleet which, as it happened, was steaming into Pago Pago on exactly the same day as Mead. It was the largest naval deployment since Theodore Roosevelt had sent the Great White Fleet around the world as a display of American sea power.
Airplanes screamed overhead. Below, a dozen Fords sputtered along a narrow concrete road. In the malae, the open-air common at the center of Pago Pago, Samoans had laid out an impromptu bazaar of wooden bowls, bead necklaces, woven baskets, grass skirts, and toy outrigger canoes. Families were spread around the green, enjoying an early lunch. The band of some ship is constantly playing ragtime, Mead complained. This was no way to study primitive tribes. She vowed to get as far away from Pago Pago as possible.
Her research topic had been suggested by Papa Franz. Was the transition from childhood to adulthood, with young women and men rebelling against their stultifying parents, the product of a purely biological change, the onset of puberty? Or was adolescence a thing simply because a particular society decided to treat it as such? To find out, Mead spent the next several months trekking across mountains, decamping to remote villages, drawing up life histories of local children and teenagers, and quizzing adults about their most intimate exp
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Autoren-Porträt von Charles King
CHARLES KING is the author of seven books, including Midnight at the Pera Palace and Odessa, winner of a National Jewish Book Award. His essays and articles have appeared in the The New York Times, The Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, and The New Republic. He is a professor of international affairs and government at Georgetown University.
Bibliographische Angaben
- Autor: Charles King
- 2020, 480 Seiten, Maße: 13,1 x 20,3 cm, Kartoniert (TB), Englisch
- Verlag: ANCHOR
- ISBN-10: 0525432329
- ISBN-13: 9780525432326
- Erscheinungsdatum: 14.07.2020
Sprache:
Englisch
Pressezitat
Elegant and kaleidoscopic . . . This looks to be the perfect moment for King s resolutely humane book. Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times
Thoughtful, deeply intelligent, and immensely readable.
Alison Gopnik, The Atlantic
King s comprehensive archival research illuminates intellectual giants . . . With a light yet unmistakable touch, King connects the dots from Boas s time to ours. He mentions President Donald Trump s describing of Mexicans as rapists during the kickoff of his presidential campaign, and we get the point: The reduction of human beings to types people stereotyped as inferior and menacing, deserving of being keep out or cast out is a clear and present danger. Reading Gods of the Upper Air, though, provides inspiration. The anthropology of equality tells us that every population is as fully human as any other, and deserving of understanding and compassion.
Barbara J. King, NPR.org
[Gods of the Upper Air] offers a vitally relevant way to frame the ugly spectre of racism as it resurfaces in our politics . . . Now, more than ever, we need to recognise how Boas and others developed an alternative vision of humanity. Understanding this oft-ignored intellectual history is a first step towards defending it.
Gillian Tett, Financial Times
[King] succeeds in bringing Mead and her fellow travelers into sharp focus as they pioneered a new field and documented mankind s many-splendored diversity in a positive, rather than a divisive, light.
David Holahan, USA Today
An intellectual adventure story of the best sort elegantly written, thought-provoking, and full of biographical riches.
Sarah Bakewell, author of How to Live and At the Existentialist Cafe
A masterful history of a group of maverick thinkers in the early 20th century who aimed to dethrone the eugenicists dominating racial thought. With eugenics ascendant
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again, King s story is a vital book for our times.
Ibram X. Kendi, author of Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, winner of the 2016 National Book Award
Deeply thought-provoking and brilliantly written, Gods of the Upper Air is a walk in the shoes of giants. Charles King takes you on an unforgettable journey as daring anthropologists unravel the profound mysteries of culture and mankind, and discover that they, too, were only human.
David Hoffman, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Dead Hand and The Billion Dollar Spy
This exciting even entrancing story traces the birth of a new science in the early twentieth century, championed by a scrappy genius who trained a cadre of bold women for the work. Charles King writes with verve and authority as he follows the nation s first cultural anthropologists to far-flung field sites that suggested antidotes to the racism and xenophobia of American society.
Dava Sobel, author of The Glass Universe and Longitude
In any era, Gods of the Upper Air would be a scholarly masterpiece an elegantly written, wickedly perceptive account of Franz Boas, the father of cultural anthropology, and his impact upon the key moral issues of his time and ours. Mentoring the likes of Margaret Mead and Zora Neale Hurston, Boas employed the skills of scientific observation to argue that all societies are part of a single, undivided humanity guided by circumstance and history, but none superior to another. In today s deeply polarized world, Charles King s stunning new book reminds us of the brilliance of these renegade anthropologists, and the work still to be done.
David Oshinsky, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Polio and Bellevue
Ibram X. Kendi, author of Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, winner of the 2016 National Book Award
Deeply thought-provoking and brilliantly written, Gods of the Upper Air is a walk in the shoes of giants. Charles King takes you on an unforgettable journey as daring anthropologists unravel the profound mysteries of culture and mankind, and discover that they, too, were only human.
David Hoffman, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Dead Hand and The Billion Dollar Spy
This exciting even entrancing story traces the birth of a new science in the early twentieth century, championed by a scrappy genius who trained a cadre of bold women for the work. Charles King writes with verve and authority as he follows the nation s first cultural anthropologists to far-flung field sites that suggested antidotes to the racism and xenophobia of American society.
Dava Sobel, author of The Glass Universe and Longitude
In any era, Gods of the Upper Air would be a scholarly masterpiece an elegantly written, wickedly perceptive account of Franz Boas, the father of cultural anthropology, and his impact upon the key moral issues of his time and ours. Mentoring the likes of Margaret Mead and Zora Neale Hurston, Boas employed the skills of scientific observation to argue that all societies are part of a single, undivided humanity guided by circumstance and history, but none superior to another. In today s deeply polarized world, Charles King s stunning new book reminds us of the brilliance of these renegade anthropologists, and the work still to be done.
David Oshinsky, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Polio and Bellevue
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