To Read & To Write

I've never been fond of the discipline of Anthropology. I understood its merits from a distance, but I couldn't bring myself to try to comprehend how someone - a scientist, no less - could remain morally sound by their objectification of a group of people held steadfastly together by a supposedly empirical view of race, ethnicity, culture, and/or gender. That is precisely the reason why I needed to read this book on the development and evolution of Anthropology in the 20th century. Gods of the Upper Air: How A Circle Of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century (2019) helped me understand that the Anthropological mission, as shaped by Franz Boas, Margaret Mead, Zora Neale Hurston and still others was - and is today because of them - a scientific inquiry aimed to breach ideologies of racism and sexism that led to some of the worst disasters humanity has faced. Author Charles King uses a historical approach in this nonfiction text, sh...

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 t...