The lives of Boas and his students make for riveting storytelling, and the author’s imaginative prose enlivens their discoveries, romantic exploits and professional jealousies ... King’s timely history reveals that Boas and his intellectual descendants spent their careers fighting for recognition of the basic humanity of those considered 'other' to the white men who ruled the country.
...thoughtful, deeply intelligent, and immensely readable and entertaining ... The romantic intrigue makes for irresistible reading, but it’s also central to the book’s argument ... The very word culture, and the idea that people in one culture can learn from people in others, is taken for granted now. But King shows how revolutionary those concepts were at a time when scientists classified people as savage, barbarian, or civilized, and three-quarters of American universities offered courses in eugenics.
[An] elegant and kaleidoscopic book ... King includes some of the more vexed aspects of this history, including Boas’s involvement in a sham funeral for an indigenous Greenlander whose cadaver had been secretly harvested in the name of scientific research ... This looks to be the perfect moment for King’s resolutely humane book, even if the United States of the early 20th century isn’t quite the perfect mirror. Boas and his circle confronted a bigotry that was scientifically endorsed at the time, and they dismantled it by showing it wasn’t scientific at all.
Charles King has written a sweeping and dynamic history of Americanist anthropology through its origins, shaky institutionalization, and creation of ideas that upended common wisdom and challenged the dominant power structure. What emerges is a story of a discipline that was, at once, deeply academic, applied, and activist. It was a revolution.
What King does so very well is explain the complex ideas of these brilliant and unconventional women, while situating them within the scholarship (and political debates) of their times and exploring their complicated lives with sympathy. Gods of the Upper Air is gracefully written, and it succeeds beautifully both as intellectual history and group biography ... a magisterial group biography, but also a narrative account of a way of thinking, an approach to living in a world with many cultures ... it is clear and confident in explicating ideas ... it brings us close to the intimate lives of remarkable women who resisted convention while carving out spaces for creativity.
King, a professor of international affairs and government at Georgetown, is a terrific writer and storyteller—and a disciplined one, too, who knows how to dip into the rabbit holes along his path without getting lost in them ... King’s book vividly conjures four brilliant disciples of 'Papa Franz.'
Charles King ’s lively, ambitious book makes a very large claim: that the eminent anthropologist Franz Boas (1858-1942) inspired an 'intellectual revolution' in the first half of the 20th century ... it is a familiar narrative, routinely taught to first-year anthropology students in American universities. But it is much too simple. Boas did not invent a whole new theory of race and culture ... Mr. King tracks Boas’s 'intellectual revolution' through the work of several female acolytes, and provides a particularly fascinating profile of Zora Neale Hurston ... So is Mr. King’s account history or myth? Like the Kwakiutl narratives collected by Boas in British Columbia, it is a bit of both.
What is especially welcome about this effort in the current environment is that it removes the idea of cultural relativism from its status as a punching bag for its enemies. Instead it shows the context from which cultural relativism emerged—a particular moment in the study of humanity, brought about by an age of European exploration, colonialism, and pseudoscientific racism that has more than a few unfortunate points of contact with our own era ... features love triangles and even more ambitious polygons, beginning with the affair between Mead and Benedict. Whether the reader finds this compelling will probably be a matter of taste—I was often waiting for the next judiciously economical summary of a published work—but the relationships do drive the story forward nicely, and they did matter to the work that was done ... It is true that the book has nothing of the didacticism of an after-school special. But its protagonists are its heroes, however flawed, and they repeatedly call for tolerance.
... captivating ... King's comprehensive archival research illuminates intellectual giants in the circle who are remembered, read, and celebrated today ... Occasionally, though, King goes too far. That Mead 'writhed with desire' for one of her lovers borders on casting Mead as oversexed. It's more instructive to learn the degree to which Mead faced intense misogyny, including from anthropologist Edward Sapir who wanted to marry her ... With a light yet unmistakable touch, King connects the dots from Boas's time to ours ... Reading Gods of the Upper Air provides inspiration. The anthropology of equality tells us that every population is as fully human as any other, and deserving of understanding and compassion.
King provides a knowledgeable tour through the history of anthropology ... King does not cite examples later than Bloom, but his passionate final exegesis of cultural relativism’s core beliefs makes it clear that he wants us to see their present-day relevance ... his frank depiction of his subjects’ irregular, often troubled lives doesn’t scant the personal toll it sometimes took. Nonetheless, his absorbing book makes a compelling case that the struggle to see other cultures’ and people’s points of view is worth the effort.
The author, a professor at Georgetown University, 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.
A lot of this story has been told, but King is an intelligent and judicious writer, and he has woven a concise narrative that manages to work in a fair amount of context. His subjects were all unusual characters, and their lives are colorfully related. Obviously, legal and political actors had at least as much to do with the changes in social attitudes that King writes about as anthropologists did. But he makes a good case with the cards he has dealt himself ... King says that cultural anthropology pushes us to expand our notion of the human. That may be so, but it has nothing to do with relativism. King’s anthropologists are prescriptivists. They are constantly telling us to unlearn one way of living in order to learn a way that is better by our own standards.
... takes a sweeping look at the rise of cultural anthropology under Franz Boas ... King’s engrossing look at these extraordinary trailblazers deftly illustrates how crucial their research and work remains today.
This group portrait of pioneering leaders in the field is recommended reading for undergraduate and graduate students, professional academics, and individuals with an interest in anthropology, cultural anthropology, and history.
... stirring and colorful ... King’s book bristles with the warts-and-all personalities of these pioneers, and the whole narrative is built on that quest to gather up traditions and lore and refine the understanding of it all in the same broader context of the anthropologists’ own world ... a terrifically readable chronicle of a hobby’s rebirth as a science. It’s a needed reminder that cultures consist of people, rather than the reverse.
.. deeply engaging ... King offers captivating, exquisitely detailed portraits of these remarkable individuals ... King’s smoothly readable story of the stubborn, impatient Boas and his acolytes emphasizes how their pioneering exploration of disparate cultures contradicts the notion that 'our ways are the only commonsensical, moral ones.' Rich in ideas, the book also abounds in absorbing accounts of friendships, animosities, and rivalries among these early anthropologists ... This superb narrative of debunking scientists provides timely reading for our 'great-again' era.
... a tasty group biography ... King’s prose is energetic, enlivened with delicious quotations, juicy personal details, and witty turns of phrase. This complex, delightful book will get readers thinking and keep them turning the pages.
