Annotation for "Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century" by Charles King (2019)

Charles King's Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century acts as a complex case study of the discipline of Anthropology, beginning with Franz Boas - a German man of Jewish descent - who found both success and failure in the United States during the beginning of the 20th century. King's text is fundamental to a critical understanding of how disciplines might be formed and how they change over time. Gods digs deep into questions concerning scientific methodology and determinism. Readers will find shocking evidence of how racism has been institutionalized and how scholars, not only Boaz, but also Margaret Mead and Zora Neal Hurston, fought to change the dominant ideologies of a hierarchical concept of race, sex and gender that ruled academia at the beginning of the Industrial Age. Through their application of rigorous empiricism (for example, the study and measurement of skulls) and their collection and persistent inquiry into qualitative data (such as the stories of primitive peoples), they broke down theories that served to promote false narratives of a people's inherent goodness, beauty, class, and intelligence. They didn't always succeed. If you're interested in a fine example of how higher education came into fruition and developed in the U.S. at the beginning of the 20th century, this eye-opening nonfiction book is for you.