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A review by lauren_shoe
Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century by Charles King
5.0
History books are hit or miss for me, and this is a history of the early days in the field of anthropology. I knew some of the people followed because of their importance to literature (ZNH in particular) but some I knew their name without really knowing why (hello Margaret Mead). Rather than losing interest in the book after the first 100 pages—what I tend to do with 300+ page history books—I found I was more and more invested in the stakes of both anthropology’s findings and methodologies.
King frames the history as an ongoing debate about biology’s use/misuse in studying human cultures. That this debate coincides with US practices of immigration bans, Jim Crow laws, the development of eugenics, and Japanese American citizens’ internment is no accident. As someone who studies race and gender studies, of course I found the “circle of renegade anthropologists” interesting, but ummm...read more Black writers from decades earlier and you’ll notice they developed ideas practically indistinguishable from cultural relativity before the white institution of Columbia U made it mainstream. King mentions DuBois and Douglass, but I’m not all that convinced he’s read them.
This was an engrossing history of especially the women in Franz Boas’ circle, and I guess they are renegades, but only in that they brought ideas to white audiences that had only circulated through segregated Black academic publications (hence they were unaware of). I didn’t mean to critique this so heavily because I did really enjoy it.
King frames the history as an ongoing debate about biology’s use/misuse in studying human cultures. That this debate coincides with US practices of immigration bans, Jim Crow laws, the development of eugenics, and Japanese American citizens’ internment is no accident. As someone who studies race and gender studies, of course I found the “circle of renegade anthropologists” interesting, but ummm...read more Black writers from decades earlier and you’ll notice they developed ideas practically indistinguishable from cultural relativity before the white institution of Columbia U made it mainstream. King mentions DuBois and Douglass, but I’m not all that convinced he’s read them.
This was an engrossing history of especially the women in Franz Boas’ circle, and I guess they are renegades, but only in that they brought ideas to white audiences that had only circulated through segregated Black academic publications (hence they were unaware of). I didn’t mean to critique this so heavily because I did really enjoy it.