Bibliograph

Gods of the upper air, how a circle of renegade anthropologists reinvented race, sex, and gender in the twentieth century, Charles King

Type

Label

Gods of the upper air, how a circle of renegade anthropologists reinvented race, sex, and gender in the twentieth century, Charles King

Language

eng

Bibliography note

Includes bibliographical references (pages 387-406) and index

resource.biographical

collective biography

Illustrations

platesillustrations

Index

index present

Literary Form

non fiction

Main title

Gods of the upper air

Nature of contents

bibliography

Oclc number

1111687035

Responsibility statement

Charles King

Sub title

how a circle of renegade anthropologists reinvented race, sex, and gender in the twentieth century

Summary

"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. 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."--, Amazon.com

Table Of Contents

Away -- Baffin Island -- "All is individuality" -- Science and circuses -- Headhunters -- American empire -- "A girl as frail as Margaret" -- Coming of age -- Masses and mountaintops -- Indian country -- Living theory -- Spirit realms -- War and nonsense -- Home

Classification

Creator